Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers

by Harry Alverson Franck

All this and more I learned in the swivel-chair waiting for orders, reading the latest novel that had found its way to Ancon station, and receiving frequent assurances that I should be quite busy enough once I got started. Opposite sat Lieutenant Long pouring choice bits of sub-station orders into the 'phone:

"Don't you believe it. That was no accident. He didn't lose everything he had in every pocket rolling around drunk in the street. He's been systematically frisked. Sabe frisked? Get on the job and look into it."

For the Lieutenant was one of those scarce and enviable beings who can live with his subordinates as man to man, yet never find an ounce of his authority missing when authority is needed.

Now and then a Z. P. story whiled away the time. There was the sad case of Corporal —— in charge of —— station. Early one Sunday afternoon the Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the railroad. Naturally the day was hot. The Corporal sent a policeman to arrest the inhuman wretch for cruelty to animals. When he had left the culprit weeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the goat, tied in the shade under the police station.

"Poor little beast," said the sympathetic Corporal, as he set before it a generous pan of ice-water fresh from the police station tank. The goat took one long, eager, grateful draught, turned over on its back, curled up like the sensitive-plants of Panama jungles when a finger touches them, and departed this vale of tears. But Corporal —— was an artist of the first rank. Not only did he "get away with it" under the very frowning battlements of the judge, but sent the Spaniard up for ten days on the charge against him. Z. P.'s who tell the story assert that the Spaniard did not so much mind the sentence as the fact that the Corporal got his goat.

Then there was "the Mystery of the Knocked-out Niggers." Day after day there came reports from a spot out along the line that some negro laborer strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner suddenly lay down, threw a fit, and went into a comatose state from which he recovered only after a day or two in Ancon or Colon hospitals. The doctors gave it up in despair. As a last resort the case was turned over to a Z. P. sleuth. He chose him a hiding-place as near as possible to the locality of the strange manifestation. For half the morning he sweltered and swore without having seen or heard the slightest thing of interest to an old "Zoner." A dirt-train rumbled by now and then. He strove to amuse himself by watching the innocent games of two little Spanish switch-boys not far away. They were enjoying themselves, as guileless childhood will, between their duties of letting a train in and out of the switch. Well on in the second half of the morning another diminutive Iberian, a water-boy, brought his compatriots a pail of water and carried off the empty bucket. The boys hung over the edge of the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their home-made drinking-can, no doubt, and went on playing.

By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in the distance. Now and then as he advanced he sang a snatch of West Indian ballad. As he espied the "switcheros" a smile broke out on his features and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-pail. In a working species of Spanish he made some request of the boys, the while wiping his ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys protested. Evidently they had lived on the Zone so long they had developed a color line. The negro pleaded. The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still shook their heads. One of them was idly tapping the ground with a broom-handle that had lain beside him. The negro glanced up and down the track, snatched up the boys' drinking vessel, of which the wire hooked over the pail was not after all the handle, and stooped to dip up a can of water. The little fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing a useless protest, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the rail in front of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent the can of water some rods down the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thin air above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after trying a moment in vain to kick the railroad out by the roots, lay still.

By this time the sleuth was examining the broom-handle. From its split end protruded an inch of telegraph wire, which chanced also to be the same wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized bucket. Close in front of the innocent little fellows ran a "third rail!"

Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended. There was thrust into my hands a typewritten-sheet and I caught the next thing on wheels out to Corozal for my first investigation. It was one of the most commonplace cases on the Zone. Two residents of my first dwelling-place on the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150 in U. S. gold.

Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. Every bachelor quarters on the Isthmus, completely screened in, is entered by two or three screen-doors, none of which is or can be locked. In the building are from twelve to twenty-four wide-open rooms of two or three occupants each, no three of whom know one another's full names or anything else, except that they are white Americans and ipso facto (so runs Zone philosophy) above dishonesty. The quarters are virtually abandoned during the day. Two negro janitors dawdle about the building, but they, too, leave it for two hours at mid-day. Moreover each of the forty-eight or more occupants probably has several friends or acquaintances or enemies who may drift in looking for him at any hour of the day or night. No negro janitor would venture to question a white American's errand in a house; Panama is below the Mason and Dixon line. In practice any white American is welcome in any bachelor quarters and even to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though he be a total stranger to all the community. Add to this that the negro tailor's runner often has permission to come while the owner is away for suits in need of pressing, that John Chinaman must come and claw the week's washing out from under the bed where the "rough-neck" kicked it on Saturday night, that there are a dozen other legitimate errands that bring persons of varying shades into the building, and above all that the bachelors themselves, after the open-hearted old American fashion, have the all but universal habit of tossing gold and silver, railroad watches and real-estate bonds, or anything else of whatever value, indifferently on the first clear corner that presents itself. Precaution is troublesome and un-American. It seems a fling at the character of your fellow bachelors—and in the vast majority of Zone cases it would be. But it is in no sense surprising that among the many thousands that swarm upon the Isthmus there should be some not averse to increasing their income by taking advantage of these guileless habits and bucolic conditions. There are suggestions that a few—not necessarily whites—make a profession of it. No wonder "our chief trouble is burglary" and has been ever since the Z. P. can remember. Summed up, the pay-day gold that has thus faded away is perhaps no small amount; compared with what it might have been under prevailing conditions it is little.