From a strictly professional standpoint they made not a single blunder. Their one error--almost a fatal one--was in not being good churchmen. For they had planned to enter the bank late on a Saturday night. Tuesday was to be pay day and on Monday the full amount of the pay roll would be drawn out. But Saturday night it would all be there--several hundred thousand dollars--and they would have all day Sunday to pack it securely and make their getaway. Midnight, then, saw them creeping into the bank. The safe yielded readily to their assaults, but it disgorged only a beggarly $30,000 or so. What could be the trouble? Just then the knowledge dawned on the disappointed bandits that Monday was a Saint’s day, the bank would be closed, therefore the prudent Zone paymaster had drawn his funds on Saturday. The joke was on the cracksmen. With the comparatively few thousands they had accumulated the disappointed outlaws took a motor boat and made for Colombia. Had they secured the loot they expected they would have been made welcome there, for Colombia does not recognize her run-away child Panama, and no extradition treaty could have been appealed to by the Panamanians against their despoilers. As it was they quarreled over the booty. One of the three was killed; the other two were arrested for the murder, but soon went free. Their complete immunity from prosecution calls attention to the fact that a few hours’ trip in a motor boat will take any one guilty of crime in Panama to a land where he will be wholly free from punishment. Churches in Panama, or the ruins of them, are many, and while not beautiful are interesting. Everybody goes to see the famous flat arch of the San Domingo Church, and its disappearance will be a sore blow to guides and post-card dealers. Aside from its curious architectural quality the arch derives interest from a legend of its construction by a pious monk. Twice it fell before the mortar had time to set. The third time its designer brought a stool and sat himself down below the heavy keystone. “If it falls”, he said, “I go with it”. But that time the arch stood firm, and it has withstood the assaults of centuries to come at last to the ignoble end of incorporation in a tenement house. The arch, which certainly looks unstable, is often pointed to as an evidence of the slight peril on the Isthmus from earthquake shocks. Such convulsions of nature are indeed not unknown but are usually feeble. That great shock that overthrew San Francisco was not even registered by the seismograph on the Canal zone. [Illustration: IN A PANAMA PARK]