Here was even less a
criminal type than the boy.
"Senor," I asked, "did you go to the dance in Miraflores last
Saturday night with this youth?"
"Si, senor."
"Then I place you under arrest. We will take the one o'clock
train."
He opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again without having
uttered a sound. He opened it a second time, then sat suddenly
down on the low edge of the box-car porch. A more genuinely
astonished man I have never seen. No actor could have approached
it. Still, whatever my own conviction, it was my business to bring
him before his accuser. After a time he recovered sufficiently to
ask permission to change his clothes, and disappeared in one of
the resident box-cars. The boy was already being fed in another.
Had my prisoners been of almost any one of the other seventy-one
nationalities I should not have thought of letting them out of my
sight. But the Zone Spaniard's respect for law is proverbial.
"Jose! Pinched Jose!" cried his American boss, when I explained
that he would find himself a man short that afternoon. "You people
are sure barking up the wrong tree this time. Why, Jose has been
my engineer for over two years, and the steadiest man on the Zone.
He writes for some Spanish paper and tells 'em the truth over
there so straight that the rest of 'em down here, the anarchists
and all that bunch, are aching to get him into trouble.
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