enied them in toto. His
employer had nothing whatever to do with the case. The fault was
entirely his, and no one else was in the remotest degree connected with
the matter.

"Five dollars!" snapped the judge.

The coachman paid, hitched up the rat of a horse, and wabbled away into
Panama.

Police business, taking me down into "the Grove" that night, I found
the driver, clean-shaven and better dressed, waiting for fares before
the principal house of that section.

"What kind of a game--," I began.

"Senor," he cried, and tears again seemed on the point of falling,
"every word I told you was true. But of course I couldn't testify
against the patron. He'd discharge me and blackmail me, and you know I
have a wife and innumerable children to support. Come on over and have
a drink."

This justice business, one soon learns, is of the same infallible stuff
as the rest of life. After all it is only the personal opinion of the
judge between two persons swearing on oath to diametrically opposed
statements; and for all the impressiveness of deep furrowed brows I did
not find that the average judge had any more power of reading human
nature than the average of the rest of us. I well remember the morning
when a meek little Panamanian was testifying in his own behalf, in
Spanish of course, when the judge broke in without even asking for a
translation of the testimony:

"That'll do! Because of your gestures I believe you are trying to bunco
this court. You are lying--tell him that," this to the negro
interpreter; and he therewith sentenced the witness to jail.

As if any Panamanian could talk earnestly of anything without waving
his arms about him.

The telephone-bell rang one afternoon. It was always doing that,
twenty-four hours a day; but this time it sounded especially sharp and
insistent. In the adjoining room, over the "blotter," snapped the brusk
stereotyped nasal reply:

"Ancon! Bingham talking!"

The instrument buzzed a moment and the deskman looked up to say:

"'Andy' and a nigger just fell over into Pedro Miguel locks. They're
sending in his body. The nigger lit on his head and hurt his leg."

His body! How uncanny it sounded! "Andy," that bunch of muscles who had
made such short work of the circus wrestler in Gatun and whom I had
seen not twenty-four hours before bubbling with life was now a "body."
Things happen quickly on the Zone, and he whom the fates have picked to
go generally shows no hesitation in