P. who, if you
can get them started on the subject of lottery tickets, will keep
it up until you run away, showing you the infallibility of their
various systems, believing the drawing to be honest, yet oblivious
to the fact that both the one and the other cannot be true. Dreams
are held in special favor. It is probably safe to assert that one-
half the numbers over 1,000 and under 10,000 that appear in Zone
dreams are snapped up next day in lottery tickets. Many have
systems of figuring out the all-important number from the figures
on engines and cars. More than one Zone housewife has slipped into
the kitchen to find the roast burning and her West Indian cook
hiding hastily behind her ample skirt a long list of the figures
on every freight-car that has passed that morning, from which by
some Antillian miscalculation and the murmuring of certain
invocations she was to find the magic number that would bring her
cooking days to an end.
Yet there is sometimes method in their madness. Did not "Joe" who
slept in the next room to me at Gatun "hit Duque for two pieces"--
which is to say he had $3,000 to sprinkle along with his police
salary? Yet personally the only really appealing "system" was that
of Cristobal. Upon his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he
picked out a number at random, took out a yearly subscription to
it, and thought no more about it than one does of a newspaper
delivered at the door each morning--until one Monday during this
month of May, after he had squandered something over $500, on
worthless bits of paper, he strolled into the lottery office and
was handed an inconspicuous little bag containing $7,500 in yellow
gold.
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