1,000 and under
10,000 that appear in Zone dreams are snapped up next day in lottery
tickets. Many have systems of figuring out the all-important number
from the figures on engines and cars. More than one Zone housewife has
slipped into the kitchen to find the roast burning and her West Indian
cook hiding hastily behind her ample skirt a long list of the figures
on every freight-car that has passed that morning, from which by some
Antillian miscalculation and the murmuring of certain invocations she
was to find the magic number that would bring her cooking days to an
end.

Yet there is sometimes method in their madness. Did not "Joe" who slept
in the next room to me at Gatun "hit Duque for two pieces"--which is to
say he had $3,000 to sprinkle along with his police salary? Yet
personally the only really appealing "system" was that of Cristobal.
Upon his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he picked out a number
at random, took out a yearly subscription to it, and thought no more
about it than one does of a newspaper delivered at the door each
morning--until one Monday during this month of May, after he had
squandered something over $500, on worthless bits of paper, he strolled
into the lottery office and was handed an inconspicuous little bag
containing $7,500 in yellow gold.

Like all Z. P. "rookies" (recruits) I had been warned early to beware
the "sympathy dodge." But experience is the only real teacher. One
afternoon I bestraddled a crazy, stilt-legged Jamaican horse to go out
into the bush beyond the Panama line to fetch and deliver a citizen of
that sovereign republic who was wanted on the Zone for horse-stealing.
At the town of Sabanas, where those Panamanians who have bagged the
most loot since American occupation have their "summer" homes,--giddy,
brick-painted monstrosities among the great trees, deep green foliage
and brilliant flower-beds (pause a moment and think of brilliant red
houses in the tropics; it will make you better acquainted with the
"Spig") I dropped in at the police station for ice-water and
information. I found it in charge of a negro policeman who knew
nothing, and had forgotten that. When, therefore, it also chanced that
an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
stopped before the gate with a coachman of Panama, it fell upon me to
assume command. The horse was the usual emaciated rat of an animal
indigenous to Panama City. When overhauled, the driver was beatin