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.
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