by scores trying to carry a ship across the Isthmus, the Spanish
viceroys passed with their rich trains, there on some unknown knoll
Balboa reached four hundred years ago the climax of a career that began
with stowing away in a cask and ended under the headsman's ax--no end
of it, down to the "Forty-niners" going hopefully out and returning
filled with gold or disease, or leaving their bones here in the jungle
before they really were "Forty-niners"; on down to the railroad days
with men wading in swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying down
to die. Then if a bit of the future, too, could for a moment be
unveiled, and one might watch the first ship glide majestically and
silently into the canal and away into the jungle like some amphibious
monster.

It was along in those days that we were looking for a "murderous
assaulter." At a Saturday night dance in a native shack back in
Miraflores bush the usual riot had broken out about midnight and a
revolver had come into play. As a result there was a Peruvian mulatto
up in Ancon hospital who had been shot through the mouth, the bullet
being somewhere in his neck. It became my frequent duty, among other Z.
P.'s, to take suspects up the hill for possible identification.

One morning I strolled into the station and fell to laughing. The early
train had brought in on suspicion a Spanish laborer of twenty or
twenty-two; a pretty, girlish chap with huge blue eyes over which hung
long black lashes like those painted on Nurnberg dolls. No one with a
shadow of faith in human nature left would have believed him capable of
any crime; any one at all acquainted with Spaniards must have known he
could not shoot a hare, would in fact be afraid to fire off a gun.

The fear in his big blue eyes struggled with his ingenuous, girlish
smile as I marched him through the long hall full of white beds and
darker inmates. The Peruvian sat bolstered up in his cot, a stoical,
revengeful glare on his reddish-brown swollen face. He gazed a long
minute at the boy's face, across which flitted the flush of fear and
embarrassment, at the big doll's eyes, then shook a raised forefinger
slowly back and forth before his nose--the negative of Spanish-speaking
peoples. Then he groaned, spat in a tin-can beside him, and called for
paper and pencil. In the note-book I handed him he wrote in atrociously
spelled Spanish:

"The man that came to the dance with this man is the man that shot me
with a bullet."