“’Twas a beautiful system of medical practice introduced by old Doc into that isthmus of land. He’d take that bracket-saw and the mild chloride and his hypodermic, and treat anything from yellow fever to a personal friend.

“Besides his other liabilities Doc could play a flute for a minute or two. He was guilty of two tunes—‘Dixie’ and another one that was mighty close to the ‘Suwanee River’—you might say one of its tributaries. He used to come down and sit with me while I was getting well, and aggrieve his flute and say unreconstructed things about the North. You’d have thought the smoke from the first gun at Fort Sumter was still floating around in the air.

“You know that was about the time they staged them property revolutions down there, that wound up in the fifth act with the thrilling canal scene where Uncle Sam has nine curtain-calls holding Miss Panama by the hand, while the bloodhounds keep Senator Morgan treed up in a coco-nut palm.

“That’s the way it wound up: but at first it seemed as if Colombia was going to make Panama look like one of the $3.98 kind, with dents made in it in the factory, like they wear at North Beach fish fries. For mine I played the straw-hat crowd to win; and they gave me a colonel’s commission over a brigade of twenty-seven men in the left wing and second joint of the insurgent army.

“The Colombian troops were awfully rude to us. One day when I had my brigade in a sandy spot, with its shoes off doing a battalion drill by squads, the Government army rushed from behind a bush at us, acting as noisy and disagreeable as they could.

“My troops enfiladed, left-faced, and left the spot. After enticing the enemy for three miles or so we struck a brier-patch and had to sit down. When we were ordered to throw up our toes and surrender we obeyed. Five of my best staff-officers fell, suffering extremely with stone-bruised heels.

“Then and there those Colombians took your friend Barney, sir, stripped him of the insignia of his rank, consisting of a pair of brass knuckles and a canteen of rum, and dragged him before a military court. The presiding general went through the usual legal formalities that sometimes cause a case to hang on the calendar of a South American military court as long as ten minutes. He asked me my age, and then sentenced me to be shot.

“They woke up the court interpreter, an American named Jenks, who was in the rum business and vice versa, and told him to translate the verdict.

“Jenks stretched himself and took a morphine tablet.

“‘You’ve got to back up against th’ ’dobe, old man,’ says he to me. ‘Three weeks, I believe, you get. Haven’t got a chew of fine-cut on you, have you?’

“‘Translate that again, with foot-notes and a glossary,’ says I. ‘I don’t know whether I’m discharged, condemned, or handed over to the Gerry Society.’

“‘Oh,’ says Jenks, ‘don’t you understand? You’re to be stood up against a ’dobe wall and shot in two or three weeks—three, I think, they said.’

“‘Would you mind askin’ ’em which?’ says I. ‘A week don’t amount to much after you are dead, but it seems a real nice long spell while you are alive.’

“‘It’s two weeks,’ says the interpreter, after inquiring in Spanish of the court. ‘Shall I ask ’em again?’

“‘Let be,’ says I. ‘Let’s have a stationary verdict. If I keep on appealing this way they’ll have me shot about ten days before I was captured. No, I haven’t got any fine-cut.’