tance. A box
billed from New York to Peru had been broken open on Balboa dock
and--one bottle of cognac stolen. Unfortunately the matter was turned
over to me so long after the perpetration of the dastardly crime that
the possible culprits among the dock hands had wholly recovered from
the probable consumption of the evidence. But I succeeded in gathering
material for a splendid typewritten report of all I had not been able
to unearth, to file away among other priceless headquarters' archives.

Not that the Z. P. has not its big jobs. The force to a man distinctly
remembers that absorbing two months between the escape of wild black
Felix Paul and the day they dragged him back into the penitentiary. No
less fresh in memory are the expeditions against Maurice Pelote, or
Francois Barduc, the murderer of Miraflores. All Martinique negroes, be
it noted; and of all things on this earth, including greased pigs, the
hardest to catch is a Martinique criminal. After all, four or five
murders on the Zone in three years is no startling record in such a
swarm of nationalities.

Cases large and small which it would be neither of interest nor politic
to detail poured in during the following weeks. Among them was the
counterfeit case unearthed by some Shylock Holmes on the Panamanian
force, that called for a long perspiring hunt for the "plant" in odd
corners of the Zone. Then there was--, an ex-Z. P. who lost his three
years' savings on the train, for which reason I shadowed a well-known
American--for it is a Z. P. rule that no one is above suspicion--about
Panama afoot and in carriages nearly all night, in true dime-novel
fashion. There was the day that I was given a dangerous convict to
deliver at Culebra Penitentiary. The criminal was about three feet
long, jet black, his worldly possessions comprising two more or less
garments, one reaching as far down as his knees and the other as far up
as the base of his neck. He had long been a familiar sight to "Zoners"
among the swarm of bootblacks that infest the corner near the P. R. R.
station. He claimed to be eleven, and looked it. But having already
served time for burglary and horse-stealing, his conviction for
stealing a gold necklace from a negro washerwoman of San Miguel left
the Chief Justice no choice but to send him to meditate a half-year at
Culebra. There is no reform school on the Zone. The few American minors
who have been found guilty of misdoing have been banished to thei