your criminal is an amateur or a fool, in which event you will
"land" him without the trouble of disguising. A detective furthermore
should not be a handsome man or a man of striking appearance in any
way; the ideal plain-clothes man is the little insignificant snipe whom
even the ladies will not notice.

Since April tenth I had been settled in notorious House 111, Ancon, a
sort of frontiersman resort or smugglers' retreat--had there been
anything to smuggle--where to have fallen through the veranda screening
would have been to fall into a foreign land. As pay-day approached
there came the duty of standing a half-hour at the station gate before
the departure of each train to watch and discuss with the ponderous,
smiling, dark-skinned chief of Panama's plain-clothes squad, or with a
vigilante the suspicious characters and known crooks of all colors
going out along the line. On the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth the
I. C. C. pay-car, that bank on wheels guarded by a squad of Z. P.,
sprinkled its half-million a day along the Zone. Then plain-clothes
duty was not merely to scan the embarking passengers but to ride out
with each train to one of the busy towns. There scores upon scores of
soil-smeared workmen swarmed over all the landscape with long
paper-wrapped rolls of Panamanian silver in their hands, while flashily
dressed touts and crooks of both sexes drifted out from Panama with
every train to worm their insidious way into wherever the scent of coin
promised another month free from labor. To add to those crowded times
the chief dissipation of the West Indian during the few days following
pay-day that his earnings last is to ride aimlessly and joyously back
and forth on the trains.

There is one advantage, though some policemen call it by quite the
opposite name, in being stationed at Ancon. When crime takes a holiday
and do-nothing threatens tropical dementia, or a man tires of his
native land and people a short stroll down the asphalt takes him into
the city of Panama. Barely across the street where his badge becomes
mere metal, and he must take care not to arrest absent-mindedly the
first violator of Zone laws--whom he is sure to come upon within the
first block--he notes that the English tongue has suddenly almost
disappeared. On every hand, lightly sprinkled with many other dialects,
sounds Spanish, the slovenly Spanish of Panama in which bueno is
"hueno" and calle is "caye." As he swings languidly to the ri