long centuries,
eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun with its proud
church and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peruvian viceroys
and "Forty-niners" were wont to pause from their arduous journeyings.
They call it a dam. It is rather a range of hills, a part and portion
of the highlands that, east and west, enclose the valley of the
Chagres, its summit resembling the terminal yards of some great city.
There was one day when I sought a negro brakeman attached to a given
locomotive. I climbed to a yard-master's tower above the Spillway and
the yard-master, taking up his powerful field-glasses, swept the
horizon, or rather the dam, and discovered the engine for me as a
mariner discovers an island at sea.

"Er--would you be kind enough to tell us where we can find this Gatun
dam we've heard so much about?" asked a party of four tourists, half
and half as to sex, who had been wandering about on it for an hour or
so with puzzled expressions of countenance. They addressed themselves
to a busy civil engineer in leather leggings and rolled up shirt
sleeves.

"I'm sorry I haven't time to use the instrument," replied the engineer
over his shoulder, while he wig-wagged his orders to his negro helpers
scattered over the landscape, "but as nearly as I can tell with the
naked eye, you are now standing in the exact center of it."

The result of all this sweating and sight-seeing was that some days
later there was gathered in a young Barbadian who had been living for
months in and about Gatun without any visible source of income
whatever--not even a wife. The Turk and the camp janitor identified him
as the culprit. But the primer lesson the police recruit learns is that
it is one thing to believe a man guilty and quite another to convince a
judge--the most skeptical being known to zoology--of that perfectly
apparent fact. With the suspect behind bars, therefore, I continued my
underground activities, with the result that when at length I took the
train at New Gatun one morning for the court-room in Cristobal I loaded
into a second-class coach six witnesses aggregating five nationalities,
ready to testify among other things to the interesting little point
that the defendant had a long prison record in Barbados.

When the echo of the black policeman's "Oye! Oye!" had died away and
the little white-haired judge had taken his "bench," I made the
discovery that I was present not in one, but in four capacities,--as