l, you'll have to use your own judgment as to that," replied the
Lieutenant, busy pasting stickers over holes in the target.

The test was really very simple. All you had to do was to cling to one
end of a No. 38 horse-pistol, point it at the bull's-eye of a target,
hold it in that position until you had put five bullets into said
bull's-eye, repeat that twice at growing distances, mortally wound ten
times the image of a Martinique negro running back and forth across the
field, and you had a perfect score. Only, simple as it was, none did
it, not even old soldiers with two or three "hitches" in the army. So I
had to be content with creeping in on the second page of a seven-page
list of all the tested force from "the Chief" to the latest negro
recruit.

The next evening I drifted into the police station to find a group of
laborers from the adjoining camps awaiting me on the veranda bench,
because the desk-man "didn't sabe their lingo." They proved upon
examination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their story short, sad,
but by no means unusual. Upon returning from work one of the Italians
had found the lock hinges of his ponderously padlocked tin trunk
hanging limp and screwless, and his pay-day roll of some $30 missing
from the crown of a hat stuffed with a shirt securely packed away in
the deepest corner thereof. The Turk was similarly unable to account
for the absence of his $33 savings safely locked the night before
inside a pasteboard suitcase; unless the fact that, thanks to some sort
of surgical operation, one entire side of the grip now swung open like
a barn-door might prove to have something to do with the case. The $33
had been, for further safety's sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting a
burglar with a wheelbarrow.

The mysterious detective work began at once. Without so much as putting
on a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious crime. It was
the usual Zone type of laborers' barracks. A screened building of one
huge room, it contained two double rows of three-tier "standee" canvas
bunks on gas-pipes. Around the entire room, close under the sheet-iron
roof, ran a wooden platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked
high with the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper
suitcases containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more
workmen around the rough table below.

Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-camp
during working hours. Practically the