ore orderly
style of horsemanship. Then bit by bit some men--just men without any
qualifying adjective whatever--began to get mixed up in the matter; one
after another army lieutenants were detailed to help the thing along,
until by and by they got the right army lieutenant and the right men
and the Z. P. grew to what it is to-day,--not the love, perhaps, but
the pride of every "Zoner" whose name cannot be found on some old
"blotter."

There are a number of ways of getting on the force. There is the broad
and general high-way of being appointed in Washington and shipped down
like a nice fresh vegetable in the original package and delivered just
as it left the garden without the pollution of alien hands. Then
there's the big, impressive, broad-shouldered fellow with some life and
military service behind him, and the papers to prove it, who turns up
on the Zone and can't help getting on if he takes the trouble to climb
to headquarters. Or there are the special cases, like Marley for
instance. Marley blew in one summer day from some uncharted point of
the compass with nothing but his hat and a winning smile on his brassy
features, and naturally soon drifted up the "Thousand Stairs." But
Marley wasn't exactly of that manly build that takes "the Chief" and
"the Captain" by storm; and there were suggestions on his young-old
face that he had seen perhaps a trifle too much of life. So he wiped
the sweat from his brow several times at the third-story landing only
to find as often that the expected vacancy was not yet. Meanwhile the
tropical days slipped idly by and Marley's "standin" with the owners of
I. C. C. hotel-books began to strain and threaten to break away, and
everything sort of gave up the ghost and died. Everything, that is,
except the winning smile. 'Til one afternoon with only that asset left
Marley met the department head on the grass-bordered path in front of
the Episcopal chapel, just where the long descent ends and a man begins
to regain his tractable mood, and said Marley:

"Say, looka here, Chief. It's a question of eats with me. We can't put
this thing off much longer or--"

Which is why that evening's train carried Marley, with a police badge
and the little flat volume bound in imitation leather in his pocket,
out to some substation commander along the line for the corporal in
charge to break in and hammer down into that finished product, a Zone
Policeman.

Incidentally Marley also illustrated some mon