uture, he was Zone correspondent of "El Liberal" of
Madrid and other Spanish cities. In the social life of his
fellow-countrymen on the Isthmus he had taken no part, whatever. He was
too busy. He did not drink. He could not dance; he saw no sense in
squandering time in such frivolities. But ever since his arrival he had
been promising himself to attend one of these wild Saturday-night
debauches in the edge of the jungle that he might use a description of
it in some later work. So he had coaxed his one personal friend, the
boy, to go with him. It was virtually the one thing besides work that
he had ever done on the Zone. They had stayed two hours, and had left
the moment the trouble began. Yet here he was arrested.

I bade him cheer up, to consider the trip to Ancon merely an afternoon
excursion on government pass. He remained downcast.

"But think of the experience!" I cried. "Now you can tell exactly how
it feels to be arrested--first-hand literary material."

But he was not philosopher enough to look at it from that point of
view. To his Spanish mind arrest, even in innocence, was a disgrace for
which no amount of "material" could compensate. It is a common failing.
How many of us set out into the world for experience, yet growl with
rage or sit downcast and silent all the way from Pedro Miguel to Panama
if one such experience gives us a rough half-hour, or robs us of ten
minutes sleep.

At the hospital the Peruvian gurgled and spat, beckoned for paper and
wrote:

"This is the man."

"What man?" I asked.

"The man who came with that man," he scribbled, nodding his heavy face
toward the blue-eyed boy.

"But is this the man that shot you?" I demanded.

"The man who came with that man is the one," he scrawled.

"Well, then this is the man that shot you?" I cried.

But he would not answer definitely to that, but sat a long time glaring
out of his swollen, vindictive countenance propped up in his pillows at
the tall, solemn correspondent. By and by he motioned again for paper.

"I think so. I am not sure," he miswrote.

I did NOT think so, and as the sum total of his descriptions of his
assailant during the past several days amounted to "a tall man, rather
short, with a face and two eyes"--he was very insistent about the eyes,
which is the reason the doll-eyed boy had fallen into the drag-net--I
permitted myself to accept my own opinion as evidence. The Peruvian was
in all likelihood in no condition to reco