rymen. Any northerner can say "nigger" as glibly as a
Carolinian, and growl if one of them steps on his shadow. It is not
easy to say just how much effect all this will have when the canal is
done and this handful of amalgamated and humanized Americans is
sprinkled back over all the States as a leaven to the whole. They tell
on the Zone of a man from Maine who sat four high-school years on the
same bench with two negro boys, and returning home after three years on
the Isthmus was so horrified to find one of those boys an alderman that
he packed his traps and moved to Alabama, "where a nigger IS a
nigger"--and if there isn't the "makings" of a story in that I 'll
leave it to the postmaster of Miraflores.

CHAPTER VIII

"There is much in this police business," said "the Captain," with his
slow, deliberate enunciation, "that must lead to a blank wall. Out of
ten cases to investigate it is quite possible nine will result in
nothing. This percentage could not of course be true of a thousand
cases and a man's services still be considered satisfactory. But of ten
it is quite possible. As for knowing HOW to do detective work, all I
bring to the department myself is some ordinary common sense and a
little knowledge of human nature, and with these I try to work things
out as best I can. This peeping-through-the-key-hole police work I know
nothing whatever about, and don't want to. Nor do I expect a man to."

I had been discussing with "the Captain" my dissatisfaction at my
failure to "get results" in an important case. A few weeks on the force
had changed many a preconceived notion of police life. It had gradually
become evident, for instance, that the profession of detective is
adventurous, absorbing, heart-stopping chiefly between the covers of
popular fiction; that real detective work, like almost any other
vocation, is made up largely of the little unimportant every-day
details, with only a rare assignment bulking above the mass. As "the
Captain" said, it was just plain every-day work carried on by the
application of ordinary common sense. Such best-seller artifices as
disguise were absurd. Not only would disguise in all but the rarest
cases be impossible, but useless. The A-B-C of plain-clothes work is to
learn to know a man by his face rather than by his clothing--and at the
outset one will be astonished to find how much he has hitherto been
depending on the latter. It must be the same with criminals, too,
unless