“Not on your life,” answered Martin L.
The lawyer, who occupied one of the tents, and who was regularly employed as a timekeeper in one of the nearby offices, gave the doctor some good advice, as follows: “If you pretend that you ever knew Mike and the little shaver in the old war days, you’ll find yourself floating around at high tide in Chiriqui prison, for you know that Mike was a snob, and now that he has this official position, he’ll put it all over us, even though we all fared alike in the corral in Havana.”
“She was always good and nice to me, and when I told her once that I loved her she was real sorry that she was in love with Mike instead of me.”
“So you told her you loved her, did you? Well, I see your finish. Mike will never allow a man to live that once was a suitor for the hand of the little shaver, especially a man who is working in the carpenter shop.”
“She’ll be glad to see us all,” said the little doctor, with the conviction that every one on earth had a nature as simple and noble as his own.
Two days later he was arrested for stealing one thousand dollars from his room mate, who had the money tied up in the sleeve of an old coat, which was kept in a trunk in one corner of the tent in which the two men lived. The official measured carefully the ground on which the tent stood, and found that the part of the trunk in which the coat lay was on Panamanian territory. He therefore turned the poor little old doctor over to the Panamanian authorities, and the gentle little old man was handcuffed to a negro murderer, and, while the crowds looked on and jeered, he was led through the streets of Panama to Chiriqui prison, where he was kept for five months, until a kind-hearted Panamanian lawyer investigated the matter and learned that the money had been found three days after the little old man had been committed.
Then the little old doctor was liberated from Chiriqui prison and resumed his occupation in the carpenter shop, with bowed head and broken spirit. His old comrades endeavored to cheer him, but, in spite of the gentleness of his nature, he nursed the terrible wrong until it became a nightmare. He had a fear that the official called Mike was plotting against his life, and he began to have dreams that he thought came true. Each evening he sought his best friends and told them that he had not long to live. He would conjure up a picture for them of his mother and father, who were dead about twenty years, and of an old sweetheart called Betty, whose father, away back in old Virginia, was not only a colonel, but a judge as well. He would stand in the center of a group of his friends and tell them that he could close his eyes and see his dead loved one. “There they are now,” he would say. “There’s little Betty, like a pink and white carnation, and there’s the judge and colonel sitting beside Betty and looking lovingly at her like he used to when I used to go to court her. Ah, see, she loves me still, and I’ll soon be with her, boys.” At first the men tried to soothe him, but after a time they decided to agree with him that his end was at hand, and this, as Martin L. put it, “made the wheels go round faster,” and the little old man became quite ill in anticipation of his coming demise. Then he was sent to Taboga to recuperate, and there he fell madly in love with a young nurse, and became, as a result, quite restored to his normal frame of mind.
Meantime Mike and the little shaver were leading society by the nose, as the tent lawyer tritely put it. They had moved into a more palatial dwelling house and were entertaining foreign ministers and their ladies, while their old-time friends of the dreamy old war days spent their waking hours of leisure playing poker.
I had lived in the tent five months, and the time for me to depart to the United States was drawing to a close. Every day for five months I had sat on the piazza and gazed upon the lovely Pacific in all its splendor. Every night during that time I listened to the quiet games of poker that were being played about me, and I heard the exultant shouts of the revellers as they cheered the performers in the cantina of Edmardillo, as they bounded to the fandango and wriggled to the bolero. In all the five months no woman ever called upon me, and I can safely say that never in my life have I had so long a period of perfect peace. Finally the day came when I was to sail away to the U. S. A., and I impartially distributed the furnishings of the tent among the other tent residents. The little doctor declined to accept anything of commercial value, but he begged to be allowed to take as a souvenir a lock of my hair. He finally consented taking a photograph which some one of the tent dwellers had taken of me as I sat reading on the tent piazza. On the ninth of July, with a sad heart, I left the hill to go to New York. The tent dwellers accompanied me to Colon and stood in a group, waving their handkerchiefs until the ship was out of sight. With the exception of three, I have never seen them since. When I returned two years later I found that they were scattered far and wide. Many are now in California, in Ecuador, in Brazil, in Peru, in Alaska, and many of them are dead. But the most pleasant experience of my life was the months in the tent on Ancon Hill, and I shall always remember with gratitude the chivalry and kindness with which I was treated by the poor soldiers of fortune when I was alone, friendless and a stranger in Panama.
Two years later I alighted from a train at Panama and was driven to the Tivoli Hotel. There was to be a ball there that night, and I sat in the lobby and watched the smiling throng passing from the dining-room to the ballroom and balconies.