archives. Which is
exactly what I had to do in the case in question, diving out the door,
notebook in hand, to catch the evening train to Panama.

I was growing accustomed to Ancon and even to Ancon police-mess when I
strolled into headquarters on Saturday, the sixteenth, and the
Inspector flung a casual remark over his shoulder:

"Better get your stuff together. You're transferred to Gatun."

I was already stepping into a cab en route for the evening train when
the Inspector chanced down the hill.

"New Gatun is pretty bad on Saturday nights," he remarked. (All too
well I remembered it.) "The first time a nigger starts anything run him
in, and take all the witnesses in sight along."

"That reminds me; I haven't been issued a gun or handcuffs yet," I
hinted.

"Hell's fire, no?" queried the Inspector. "Tell the station commander
at Gatun to fix you up."

CHAPTER VI

I scribbled myself a ticket and was soon rolling northward, greeting
acquaintances at every station. The Zone is like Egypt; whoever moves
must travel by the same route. At Pedro Miguel and Cascadas armies of
locomotives--the "mules" of the man from Arkansas--stood steaming and
panting in the twilight after their day's labor and the wild race
homeward under hungry engineers. As far as Bas Obispo this busy,
teeming Isthmus seemed a native land; beyond, was like entering into
foreign exile. It is a common Zone experience that only the locality
one lives in during his first weeks ever feels like "home."

The route, too, was a new one. From Gorgona the train returned
crab-wise through Matachin and across the sand dyke that still holds
the Chagres out of the "cut," and halted at Gamboa cabin. Day was dying
as we rumbled on across the iron bridge above the river and away into
the fresh jungle night along the rock-ballasted "relocation." The
stillness of this less inhabited half of the Zone settled down inside
the car and out, the evening air of summer caressing almost roughly
through the open windows. The train continued its steady way almost
uninterruptedly, for though new villages were springing up to take the
place of the old sinking into desuetude and the flood along with the
abandoned line, there were but two where once were eight. We paused at
the new Frijoles and the box-car town of Monte Lirio and, skirting on a
higher level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick jungled and
forested hills what is some day to be Gatun Lake, drew up a