of water and carried off the empty bucket. The boys hung over the edge
of the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their home-made
drinking-can, no doubt, and went on playing.

By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in the
distance. Now and then as he advanced he sang a snatch of West Indian
ballad. As he espied the "switcheros" a smile broke out on his features
and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-pail. In a working
species of Spanish he made some request of the boys, the while wiping
his ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys protested. Evidently they had
lived on the Zone so long they had developed a color line. The negro
pleaded. The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still shook
their heads. One of them was idly tapping the ground with a
broom-handle that had lain beside him. The negro glanced up and down
the track, snatched up the boys' drinking vessel, of which the wire
hooked over the pail was not after all the handle, and stooped to dip
up a can of water. The little fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing a
useless protest, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the rail in
front of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent the can of water some rods
down the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thin
air above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after trying
a moment in vain to kick the railroad out by the roots, lay still.

By this time the sleuth was examining the broom-handle. From its split
end protruded an inch of telegraph wire, which chanced also to be the
same wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized bucket. Close in
front of the innocent little fellows ran a "third rail!"

Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended. There was thrust
into my hands a typewritten-sheet and I caught the next thing on wheels
out to Corozal for my first investigation. It was one of the most
commonplace cases on the Zone. Two residents of my first dwelling-place
on the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150 in U. S. gold.

Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. Every bachelor
quarters on the Isthmus, completely screened in, is entered by two or
three screen-doors, none of which is or can be locked. In the building
are from twelve to twenty-four wide-open rooms of two or three
occupants each, no three of whom know one another's full names or
anything else, except that they are white Americans and ipso facto (so
runs Zone philoso