Such
best-seller artifices as disguise were absurd. Not only would
disguise in all but the rarest cases be impossible, but useless.
The A-B-C of plain-clothes work is to learn to know a man by his
face rather than by his clothing--and at the outset one will be
astonished to find how much he has hitherto been depending on the
latter. It must be the same with criminals, too, unless your
criminal is an amateur or a fool, in which event you will "land"
him without the trouble of disguising. A detective furthermore
should not be a handsome man or a man of striking appearance in
any way; the ideal plain-clothes man is the little insignificant
snipe whom even the ladies will not notice.
Since April tenth I had been settled in notorious House 111,
Ancon, a sort of frontiersman resort or smugglers' retreat--had
there been anything to smuggle--where to have fallen through the
veranda screening would have been to fall into a foreign land. As
pay-day approached there came the duty of standing a half-hour at
the station gate before the departure of each train to watch and
discuss with the ponderous, smiling, dark-skinned chief of
Panama's plain-clothes squad, or with a vigilante the suspicious
characters and known crooks of all colors going out along the
line. On the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth the I.
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