ZONE POLICEMAN 88

A CLOSE RANGE STUDY OF THE PANAMA CANAL AND ITS WORKERS

BY

HARRY A. FRANCK

Author of "A Vagabond Journey Around the World" and "Four Months Afootin Spain"

TO A HOST OF GOOD FELLOWS THE ZONE POLICE

Quito, December 31, 1912

CHAPTER I

Strip by strip there opened out before me, as I climbed the "ThousandStairs" to the red-roofed Administration Building, the broad panoramaof Panama and her bay; below, the city of closely packed roofs andthree-topped plazas compressed in a scallop of the sun-gleamingPacific, with its peaked and wooded islands to far Taboga tiltingmotionless away to the curve of the earth; behind, the low, irregularjungled hills stretching hazily off into South America. On thethird-story landing I paused to wipe the light sweat from forehead andhatband, then pushed open the screen door of the passageway that leadsto police headquarters. 

"Emm--What military service have you had?" asked "the Captain, " lookingup from the letter I had presented and swinging half round in hisswivel-chair to fix his clear eyes upon me. 

"None. "

"No?" he said slowly, in a wondering voice; and so long grew thesilence, and so plainly did there spread across "the Captain's" facethe unspoken question, "Well, then what the devil are you applying herefor?" that I felt all at once the stern necessity of putting in a wordfor myself or lose the day entirely. 

"But I speak Spanish and--"

"Ah!" cried "the Captain, " with the rising inflection of awakenedinterest, "That puts another face on the matter. "

Slowly his eyes wandered, with the far-away look of inner reflection, to the vacant chair of "the Chief" on the opposite side of the broadflat desk, then out the wide-open window and across the shimmeringroofs of Ancon to the far green ridges of the youthful Republic, ablazewith the unbroken tropical sunshine. The whirr of a telephone bellbroke in upon his meditation. In sharp, clear-cut phrases he answeredthe questions that came to him over the wire, hung up the receiver, andpushed the apparatus away from him with a forceful gesture. 

"Inspector:" he called suddenly; but a moment having passed withoutresponse, he went on in his sharp-cut tones, "How do you think youwould like police work?"

"I believe I should. "

"The Captain" shuffled for a moment one of several stacks of unfoldedletters on his desk. 

"Well, it's the most thankless damned job in Creation, " he went on, almost dreamily, "but it certainly gives a man much touch with humannature from all angles, and--well, I suppose we do some good. Somebody's got to do it, anyway. "

"Of course I suppose it would depend on what class of police work Igot, " I put in, recalling the warning of the writer of my letter ofintroduction that, "You may get assigned to some dinky little stationand never see anything of the Zone, "--"I'm better at moving around thansitting still. I notice you have policemen on your trains, or perhapsin special duty languages would be--"

"Yes, I was thinking along that line, too, " said "the Captain. "

He rose suddenly from his chair and led the way into an adjoining room, busy with several young Americans over desks and typewriters. 

"Inspector, " he said, as a tall and slender yet muscular man of Indianerectness and noticeably careful grooming rose to his feet, "Here's oneof those rare people, an American who speaks some foreign languages. Have a talk with him. Perhaps we can arrange to fix him up both for hisgood and our own. "

"Ever done police duty?" began the Inspector, when "the Captain" hadreturned to the corner office. 

"No. "

"Military ser--"

"Nor that either. "

"Well, we usually require it, " mused the Inspector slowly, flashing hisdiamond ring, "but with your special qualifications perhaps--

"You'd probably be of most use to us in plain clothes, " he continued, after a dozen questions as to my former activities; "We could put youin uniform for the first month or six weeks until you know the Isthmus, and then--

"Our greatest trouble is burglary, " he broke off abruptly, rising toreach a copy of the "Canal Zone Laws"; "If you have nothing else onhand you might run these over; and the 'Police Rules and Regulations, '"he added, handing me a small, flat volume bound in light brownimitation leather. 

I sat down in an arm-chair against the wall and fell to reading, amidthe clickity-click of typewriters, telephone calls even from far-offColon on the Atlantic, and the constant going and coming of a negroorderly in shiningly ironed khaki uniform. By and by the Inspectordrifted into the main office, where his voice blended for some timewith that of "the Captain, " At length he came back bearing a copy ofthe day's Star and Herald, turned back to the "Estrella de Panama"pages so rarely opened in the Zone. 

"Just run us off a translation of that, if you don't mind, " he said, pointing to a short paragraph in Spanish. 

Some two minutes later I handed him the English version of the accountof a near-duel between two Panamanians, and took once more to reading. It was more than an hour later that I was again interrupted. 

"You'll want to catch the 5:25 back to Corozal?" inquired theInspector; "Mr. ----, give him transportation to Culebra and back, andan order for physical examination. 

"You might fill out this application blank, " he added, handing me along legal sheet, "then in case you are appointed that much will bedone. "

The document began with the usual, "Name----, Birthplace----, and soon. " There followed the information that the appointee "must be atleast five feet eight; weigh one hundred and forty, chest at leastthirty-four inches--" Then suddenly near the bottom of the back of thesheet my eyes caught the startling words;--"Unless you are sure you area man of physical appearance far above the average do not fill out thisapplication. "

I was suddenly aware of a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach; theblank all but slipped from my nerveless fingers. Then all at once therecame back to me the words of some chance acquaintance of some far-offtime and place, words which were the only memory that remained to me ofthe speaker, except that he had lived long and gathered muchexperience, "Bluff, my boy, is what carries a man through the world. Act as if you're sure you are and can and you'll generally make theother fellow think so. " I sat down at a desk and filled out theapplication in my most self-confident flourish. 

"Go to Culebra to-morrow, " said the Inspector, as I bade the roomgood-day and stepped forth with my most military stride and bearing, "and report back here Friday morning. "

I descended to the world below, not by the long perspective of stairsthat leads down and across the gully to the heart of Ancon, but by ashort-cut that took me quickly into a foreign land. The graveledhighway at the foot of the hill I might not have guessed was aninternational boundary had I not chanced to notice the instant changefrom the trim, screened Zone buildings, each in its green lawn, to thefeatureless architecture of a city where grass is all but unknown; forthe formalities of crossing this frontier are the same as those ofcrossing any village street. It was my first entrance into the land ofthe panamenos, technically known on the Zone as "Spigoties, " andfamiliarly, with a tinge of despite, as "Spigs"; because the firstAmericans to arrive in the land found a few natives and cabmen whoclaimed to "Speaga dee Eng-leesh. "

To Americans direct from the States Panama city ranks still as rather amiserable dawdling village. But that is due chiefly to lack ofperspective. Against the background of Central America it seemed almosta great, certainly a flourishing, city. Even to-day there are many whocomplain of its unpleasant odors; to those who have lived in othertropical cities its scent is like the perfumes of Araby; and none butthose can in any degree realize what "Tio Sam" has done for the place. 

Toward sunset I passed through a gateway with scores offellow-countrymen, all as composedly at home as in the heart of theirnative land. Across the platform stood a train distinctively Americanin every feature, a bilious-yellow train divided by the baggage carinto two sections, of which the five second-class coaches behind theengine, with their wooden benches, were densely packed in everyavailable space with workmen and laborer's wives, from Spaniards toebony negroes, with the average color decidedly dark. In thefirst-class cars at the Panama end were Americans, all but exclusivelywhite Americans, with only here and there a "Spigoty" with his longgreased hair, his finger rings, and his effeminate gestures, and even anegro or two. For though Uncle Sam may permit individual states to doso, he may not himself openly abjure before the world his assertion asto the equality of all men by enacting "Jim Crow" laws. 

We were soon off. Settled back in the ample seat of the first realtrain I had boarded in months, with the roar of its length over thesmooth and solid road-bed, the deep-voiced, masculine whistle insteadof the painful, puerile screech that had recently assailed my ear, Iall but forgot I was in a foreign land. The fact was recalled by thepassing of the train-guard, --an erect and self-possessed young Americanin "Texas" hat, khaki uniform, and leather leggings, striding along theaisle with a jerking, half-arrogant swing of the shoulders. So, perhaps, might I too soon be parading across the Isthmus! It was not, to be sure, exactly the role I had planned to play on the Zone. I hadcome rather with the hope of shouldering a shovel and descending intothe canal with other workmen, that I might some day solemnly raise myright hand and boast, "I helped dig IT. " But that was in the callowdays before I had arrived and learned the awful gulf that separates thesacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world. Besides, had I not always wanted to be a policeman and twirl a club and stalkwith heavy, law-compelling tread ever since I had first staredspeechless upon one of those noble beings on my first trip out into theworld twenty-one years before?

It was not without effort that I rose in time next morning to continueon the 6:37 from Corozal across another bit of the Zone. Exactly thusshould one first see the Great Work, piece-meal, slowly; unless he willgo home with it all in an undigested lump. The train rolled across astretch of almost uninhabited country, with a vast plain of broken rockon the right, plunged unexpectedly through a short tunnel, and stoppedat a station perched on the edge of a ridge above a small Zone townbacked by some vast structure, above which here and there a huge craneloomed against the sky of dawn. Another mile and the collectors wereannouncing as brazenly as if they challenged the few "Spigs" on boardto correct them, "Peter M'Gill! Peter M'Gill!" We were already movingon again before I had guessed that by this noise they designated noneother than the famous Pedro Miguel. The sun rose suddenly as we swungsharply to the left and rumbled across a girderless bridge. Barely hadI time to discover that we were crossing the great canal itself and tocatch a brief glimpse of the jagged gulf in either direction, beforethe train had left it behind, as if the sight of the world-famouschannel were not worth a pause, and was roaring on through a hillycountry of perpetual summer. A peculiarly shaped reservoir sped past onthe left, twice or thrice more the green horizon rose and fell, and at7:30 we drew up at the base of Culebra, the Zone capital. 

On the screened veranda of a somewhat sooty and dismal building high upnear the summit of the town, another and I were pacing anxiously backand forth when, well on in the morning, an abrupt and rathergloomy-faced American dashed into the building and one of the roomsthereof, snapping over his shoulder as he disappeared, "One of you!"The other had precedence. Then soon from behind the wooden shutterscame a growl of "Next!" and two moments later I was standing in thereputed costume of Adam on the scales within. At about ten-secondintervals a monosyllable fell from the lips of the morose American ashe delved into my personal make-up from crown to toe with all theinstrumental circumspection known to his secret-discovering profession. Then with a gruff "Dress!" he sat down at a table to scratch a fewfantastic marks on the blank I had brought, and hand it to me as Icaught up my last garment and turned to the door. But, alas--tightsealed! and all the day, though carrying the information in my pocket, I must live in complete ignorance of whether I had been found lackingan eye or a lung. For sooner would one have asked his future of thescowling Parques than venture to invoke a hint thereof from thatfurrow-browed being from the Land of Bruskness. 

Meanwhile, as if it had been thus planned to give me such opportunity, I stood at the very vortex of canal interest and fame, with nearly anentire day before the evening train should carry me back to Corozal. Idescended to the "observation platform. " Here at last at my very feetwas the famous "cut" known to the world by the name of Culebra; amighty channel a furlong wide plunging sheer through "Snake Mountain, "that rocky range of scrub-wooded hills; severing the continentaldivide. At first view the scene was bewildering. Only gradually did theeye gather details out of the mass. Before and beyond were poundingrock drills, belching locomotives, there arose the rattle and bump oflong trains of flat-cars on many tracks, the crash of falling boulders, the snort of the straining steam-shovels heaping the cars high withearth and rock, everywhere were groups of little men, some workingleisurely, some scrambling down into the rocky bed of the canal ordodging the clanging trains, all far below and stretching endless ineither direction, while over all the scene hovered a veritablePittsburg of smoke. 

All long-heralded sights--such is the nature of the world and man--areat first glimpse disappointing. To this rule the great Culebra "cut"was no exception. After all this was merely a hill, a moderate ridge, this backbone of the Isthmus the sundering of which had sent its echoesto all corners of the earth. The long-fed imagination had led one topicture a towering mountain, a very Andes. 

But as I looked longer, noting how little by comparison were the trainsI knew to be of regulation U. S. Size, how literally tiny were thescores upon scores of men far down below who were doing this thing, itssignificance regained bit by bit its proper proportions. Train aftertrain-load of the spoil of the "cut" ground away towards the Pacific;and here man had been digging steadily, if not always earnestly, sincea year before I was born. The gigantic scene recalled to the mind the"industrial army" of which Carlyle was prone to preach, with the samediscipline and organization as an army in the field; and every now andthen, to bear out the figure, there burst forth the mighty cannonade, not of war, but of peace and progress in the form of earth-upheavingand house-rocking blasts of dynamite, tearing away the solid rock belowat the very feet of the town. 

I took to the railroad and struck on further into the unknown country. Almost before I was well started I found myself in another town, yetlarger than Culebra and with the name "Empire" in the station building;and nearly every rod of the way between had been lined with villages ofnegroes and all breeds and colors of canal workers. So on again along abroad macadamized highway that bent and rose through low bushy ridges, past an army encamped in wood and tin barracks on a hillside, withkhaki uniformed soldiers ahorse and afoot enlivening all the roadwayand the neighboring fields. Never a mile without its town--howdifferent will all this be when the canal is finished and all thiscommunity is gone to Alaska or has scattered itself again over the faceof the earth, and dense tropical solitude has settled down once moreover the scene. 

Panama, they had said, is insupportably hot. Comparing it with otherlands I knew I could not but smile at the notion. Again it was the lackof perspective. Sweat ran easily, yet so fresh the air and sorefreshing the breeze sweeping incessantly across from the Atlanticthat even the sweating was almost enjoyable. Hot! Yes, like June on theCanadian border--though not like July. It is hot in St. Louis on anAugust Sunday, with all the refreshment doors tight closed--tostrangers; hot in the cotton-fields of Texas, but with these plutoniccorners the heat of the Zone shows little rivalry. 

The way led round a cone-shaped hill crowned by another military campwith the Stars and Stripes flapping far above, until I came at last insight of the renowned Chagres, seven miles above Culebra, to allappearances a meek and harmless little stream spanned by a huge newiron bridge and forbidden to come and play in the unfinished canal by alittle dam of earth that a steam-shovel will some day eat up in a fewhours. Here, where it ends and the flat country begins, I descendedinto the "cut, " dry and waterless, with a stone-quarry bottom. A sharpclimb out on the opposite side and I plunged into rampant jungle, halfexpecting snake-bites on my exposed ankles--another pre-conceivednotion--and at length falling into a narrow jungle trail that pitcheddown through a dense-grown gully, came upon a fenced compound withseveral Zone buildings on the banks of the Chagres, down to whichsloped a broad green lawn. 

Here dwells hale and ruddy "Old Fritz, " for long years keeper of thefluviograph that measures and gives warning of the rampages of theChagres. Fritz will talk to you in almost any tongue you may choose, ashe can tell you of adventures in almost any land, all with acaptivating accent and in the vocabulary of a man who has lived longamong men and nature. Nor are Fritz' opinions those gleaned from othermen or the printed page. So we fell to fanning ourselves this Januaryafternoon on the screened and shaded veranda above the Chagres, and"Old Fritz, " lighting his pipe, raised his slippered feet to the screenrailing and, tossing away the charred remnant of a match, began:--

"Vidout var dere iss no brogress. Ven all der vorld iss at peace, allder vorld goes to shleep. "

Police headquarters looked all but deserted on Friday morning. Therehad been "something doing" in Zone criminal annals the night before, and not only "the Captain" but both "the Chief" and the Inspector were"somewhere out along the line. " I sat down in the arm-chair against thewall. A half-hour, perhaps, had I read when "Eddie"--I am not entitled, perhaps, to such familiarity, but the solemn title of "chief clerk" isfar too stiff and formal for that soul of good-heartedness striving invain to hide behind a bluff exterior--"Eddie, " I say, blew a last cloudof smoke from his lungs to the ceiling, tossed aside the butt of hiscigarette, and motioned to me to take the chair beside his desk. 

"It's all off!" said a voice within me. For the expression on "Eddie's"face was that of a man with an unpleasant duty to perform, and hisopening words were in exactly that tone of voice in which a man begins, "I am sorry, but--" Had I not often used it myself?

"The Captain, " is how he really did begin, "called me up from Colonlast night, and--"

"Here's where I get my case nol prossed, " I found myself whispering. Inall probability that sealed document I had sent in the day beforeannounced me as a physical wreck. 

"--and told me, " continued "Eddie" in his sad, regretful tone, "to tellyou we will take you on the force as a first-class policeman. Ithappens, however, that the department of Civil Administration is aboutto begin a census of the Zone, and they are looking for any men thatcan speak Spanish. If we take you on, therefore, the Captain wouldassign you to the census department until that work is done--it willprobably take something over a month--and then you would be returned toregular police duty. The Chief says he'd rather have you learn theIsthmus on census than on police pay. 

"Or, " went on "Eddie, " just as I was about to break in with, "Allright, that suits me, "--"or, if you prefer, the census department willenroll you as a regular enumerator and we'll take you on the force assoon as that job is over. The--er--pay, " added "Eddie, " reaching for acigarette but changing his mind, "of enumerators will be five dollars aday, and--er--five a day beats eighty a month by more than a nose. "

We descended a story and I was soon in conference with a slender, sharp-faced young man of mobile features and penetrating eyes behindwhich a smile seemed always to be lurking. On the Canal Zone, as inBritish colonies, one is frequently struck by the youthfulness of menin positions of importance. 

"I'll probably assign you to Empire district, " the slender young manwas saying, "there's everything up there and almost any language willsure be some help to us. This time we are taking a thorough, completecensus of all the Zone clear back to the Zone line. Here's a samplecard and list of instructions. "

In other words kind Uncle Sam was about to give me authority to enterevery dwelling in the most cosmopolitan and thickly populated districtof his Canal Zone, and to put questions to every dweller therein, note-book and pencil in hand; authority to ramble around a month ormore in sunshine and jungle--and pay me for the privilege. There arereally two methods of seeing the Canal Zone; as an employee or as aguest at the Tivoli, both of them at about five dollars a day--but atopposite ends of the thermometer. 

There remained a week-end between that Friday morning and the last dayof January, set for the beginning of the census. Certainly I should notregret the arrival of the day when I should become an employee, withall the privileges and coupon-books thereunto appertained. For the Zoneis no easy dwelling-place for the non-employee. Our worthy Uncle of thechin whiskers makes it quite plain that, while he may tolerate the merevisitor, he does not care to have him hanging around; makes it soplain, in fact, that a few weeks purely of sight-seeing on the Zoneimplies an adamantine financial backing. In his screened andfull-provided towns, where the employee lives in such well-furnishedcomfort, the tourist might beat his knuckles bare and shake yellow goldin the other hand, and be coldly refused even a lodging for the night;and while he may eat a meal in the employees' hotels--at near twice theemployee's price--the very attitude in which he is received says openlythat he is admitted only on suffrance--permitted to eat only because ifhe starved to death our Uncle would have the bother of burying him andhis Zone Police the arduous toil of making out an accident report. 

Meanwhile I must change my dwelling-place. For the quartermaster ofCorozal had need of all the rooms within his domain, need so imperativethat seventeen bona fide and wrathy employees were even then bunking inthe pool-room of Corozal hotel. Work on the Zone was moving steadilyPacificward and the accommodations refused to come with it--at least atthe same degree of speed. 

Nor was I especially averse to the transfer. The room-mate with whomfate had cast me in House 81 was a pleasant enough fellow, a youth ofunobjectionable personal manners even though his "eight-hour graft" wasin the sooty seat of a steam-crane high above Miraflores locks. But hehad one slight idiosyncrasy that might in time have grown annoying. Onthe night of our first acquaintance, after we had lain exchangingrandom experiences till the evening heat had begun a retreat before thegentle night breeze, I was awakened from the first doze by my companionsitting suddenly up in his cot across the room. 

"Say, I hope you're not nervous?" he remarked. 

"Not immoderately. "

"One of my stunts is night-mare, " he went on, rising to switch on theelectric light, "and when I get 'em I generally imagine my room-mate isa burglar trying to go through my junk and--"

He reached under his pillow and brought to light a "Colt's" of 45caliber; then crossing the room he pointed to three large irregularsplintered holes in the wall some three or four inches above me, andwhich I had not already seen simply because I had not chanced to lookthat way. 

"There's the last three. But I'm tryin' to break myself of 'em, " heconcluded, slipping the revolver back under his pillow and turning offthe light again. 

Which is among the various reasons why it was without protest that, with "the Captain's" telephoned consent on the ground that I was nowvirtually on the force, I took up my residence in Corozal policestation. 'T is a peaceful little building of the usual Zone type on abreezy knoll across the railroad, with a spreading tree and a littlewell-tended flower plot before it, and the broad world stretching awayin all directions behind. Here lived Policeman T---- and B----. "First-class policemen" perhaps I should take care to specify, for inZone parlance the unqualified noun implies African ancestry. But itseems easier to use an adjective of color when necessary. Among theirregular duties was that of weighing down the rocking-chairs on the airyfront veranda, whence each nook and cranny of Corozal was in sight, andof strolling across to greet the train-guard of the seven dailypassengers; though the irregular ones that might burst upon them at anymoment were not unlikely to resemble a Moro expedition in thePhilippines. B---- and I shared the big main room; for T----, being thehaughty station commander, occupied the parlor suite beside the office. That was all, except the black Trinidadian boy who sat on the woodenshelf that was his bed behind a huge padlocked door and gazed dreamilyout through the bars--when he was not carrying a bundle to the trainfor his wardens or engaged in the janitor duties that kept Corozalstation so spick and span. Oh! To be sure there were also a couple ofnegro policemen in the smaller room behind the thin wooden partition ofour own, but negro policemen scarcely count in Zone Police reckonings. 

"By Heck! They must use a lot o' mules t' haul aout all thet dirt, "observed an Arkansas farmer to his nephew, home from the Zone onvacation. He would have thought so indeed could he have spent a day atCorozal and watched the unbroken deafening procession of dirt-trainsscream by on their way to the Pacific, --straining Moguls dragging afurlong of "Lidgerwood flats, " swaying "Oliver dumps" with their sidechains clanking, a succession as incessant of "empties" grinding backagain into the midst of the fray. On the tail of every train lounged anAmerican conductor, dressed more like a miner, though his "front" and"hind" negro brakemen were as apt to be in silk ties andpatent-leathers. To say nothing of the train-loads that go Atlanticwardand to jungle "dumps" and to many an unnoticed "fill. " Then when he hadthus watched the day through it would have been of interest to go andchat with some of the "Old Timers" who live here beside the track andwho have seen, or at least heard, this same endless stream of rock andearth race by six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for six years, asconstant and heavily-laden to-day as in the beginning. He mightdiscover, as not all his fellow-countrymen have as yet, that the littlesurgical operation on Mother Earth we are engaged in is no mule job. 

The week-end gave me time to get back in touch with affairs in theStates among the newspaper files at the Y. M. C. A. Building. Uncle Samsurely makes life comfortable for his children wherever he takes hold. It is not enough that he shall clean up and set in order these tropicalpest-holes; he will have the employee fancy himself completely at home. Here I sat in one of the dozen big airy recreation halls, well stockedwith man's playthings, which the government has erected on the Zone; I, who two weeks before had been thankful for lodging on the earth floorof a Honduranean hut. The Y. M. C. A. Is the chief social center on theIsthmus, the rendezvous and leisure-hour headquarters of the thousandsthat inhabit bachelor quarters--except the few of the purely barroomtype. "Everybody's Association" it might perhaps more properly becalled, for ladies find welcome and the laughter of children over theparlor games is rarely lacking. It is not the circumspect place thatare many of its type in the States, but a real man's place where he canbuy his cigarettes and smoke his pipe in peace, a place for men as menare, not as the fashion plates that mama's fond imagination picturesthem. With all its excellences it would be unjust to complain that theZone "Y. M. " is a trifle "low-brow" in its tastes, that the books onits shelves are apt to be "popular" novels rather than reading matter, that its phonographs are most frequently screeching vaudeville noiseswhile the Slezak and Homer disks lie tucked away far down near thebottom of the stack. 

With the new week I moved to Empire, the "Rules and Regulations" in apocket and the most indispensable of my possessions under an arm. Oncemore we rumbled through Miraflores tunnel through a mole-hill, past herconcrete light-house among the astonished palms, and her giant hose ofwater wiping away the rock hills, across the trestleless bridge withits photographic glimpse of the canal before and behind for thelimber-necked, and again I found myself in the metropolis of the CanalZone. At the quartermaster's office my "application for quarters" wasduly filed without a word and a slip assigning me to Room 3, House 47, as silently returned. I climbed by a stone-faced U. S. Road to my newhome on the slope of a ridge overlooking the railway and its buildingsbelow. 

It was the noon-hour. My two room-mates, therefore, were on hand forinspection, sprawlingly engrossed in a--quite innocent and legal--cardgame on a table littered with tobacco, pipes, matches, dog-eared wadsof every species of literature from real estate pamphlets to locomotivejournals, and a further mass of indiscriminate matter that none but aprofessional inventory man would attempt to classify. About the roomwas the usual clutter of all manner of things in the usual unarranged, "unwomaned" Zone way, which the negro janitor feels it neither his dutynor privilege to bring to order; while on and about my cot and bureauwere helter-skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent employee, whohad left for his six-weeks' vacation without hanging up hisshirt--after the fashion of "Zoners. " So when I had wiped away the dustthat had been gathering thereon since the days of de Lesseps andchucked my odds and ends into a bureau drawer, I was settled, --afull-fledged Zone employee in the quarters to which every man on the"gold roll" is entitled free of charge. 

Just here it may be well to explain that the I. C. C. Has verydexterously dodged the necessity of lining the Zone with the offensivesigns "Black" and "White. " 'T would not be exactly the distinctiondesired anyway. Hence the line has been drawn between "Gold" and"Silver" employees. The first division, paid in gold coin, is made up, with a few exceptions, of white American citizens. To the second belongany of the darker shade, and all common laborers of whatever color, these receiving their wages in Panamanian silver. 'T is a deep andsharp-drawn line. The story runs that Liza Lawsome, not long arrivedfrom Jamaica, entering the office of a Zone dentist, paused suddenlybefore the announcement:

 Crownwork. Gold and Silver Fillings. Extractions wholly without Pain. 

There was deep disappointment in face and voice as she sat down with aflounce of her starched and snow-white skirt, gasping:

"Oh, Doctah, does I HAVE to have silver fillings?"

My room-mates, "Mitch" and "Tom, " sat respectively at the throttle of alocomotive that jerked dirt-trains out of the "cut" and straddled asteam-shovel that ate its way into Culebra range. Whence, of course, they were covered with the grease and grime incident to thoseoccupations. Which did not make them any the less companionable--thoughit did promise a distinct increase in my laundry bill. When they haddescended again to the labor-train and been snatched away to theirappointed tasks, I sat a short hour in one of the black "Mission"rocking-chairs on the screened veranda puzzling over a serious problem. The quarters of the "gold" employee is as completely furnished as anyreasonable man could demand, his iron cot with springs and mattressunimpeachable--but just there the maternal generosity of the governmentceases. He must furnish his own sheets and pillow--MUST becauseplacards on the wall sternly warn him not to sleep on the baremattress; and the New York Sunday edition that had served me thus far Ihad carelessly left behind at Corozal police station. To be sure therewere sheets for sale in Empire, at the Commissary--where money has thepurchasing-power of cobble-stones, and coupon-books come only to thosewho have worked a day or more on the Zone. Then the Jamaican janitor, drifting in to potter about the room, evidently guessed the cause of myperplexity, for he turned to point to the bed of the absent "Mitch" andgurgled:

"Jes' you make lub to dat man what got dat bed. Him got plenty obsheets. " Which proved a wise suggestion. 

Empire hotel sat a bit down the hill. There the "gold" ranks were againsubdivided. The coatless ate and sweltered inside the greatdining-room; the formal sat in haughty state in what was virtually asecond-story veranda overlooking the railroad yards and a part of thetown, where were tables of four, electric fans, and "Ben" to serve withbutler formality. I found it worth while to climb the hill for my coatthrice a day. As yet I was jangling down a Panamanian dollar at eachappearance, but the day was not far distant when I should receive the"recruits" hotel-book and soon grow as accustomed as the rest to havinga coupon snatched from it by the yellow negro at the door. Uncle Sam'sboarding scale on the Zone is widely varied. Three meals cost thenon-employee $1. 50, the "gold" employee $. 90, the white Europeanlaborer $. 40, and negroes in general $. 30. 

That afternoon, when the sun had begun to bow its head on the thitherside of the canal, I climbed to the newly labeled census office on theknoll behind the police station, from the piazza of which all nativeEmpire lies within sweep of the eye. "The boss, " a smiling youth onlywell started on his third decade, whose regular duties were in thesanitary department, had already moved bed, bag, and baggage into theroom that had been assigned the census, that he might be "always on thejob. "

Not till eight that evening, however, did the force gather to lookitself over. There was the commander-in-chief of the census bureau, sent down from Washington specifically for the task in hand, under whomas chairmen we settled down into a sort of director's meeting, a whollyinformal, coatless, cigarette-smoking meeting in which even the chiefhimself did not feel it necessary to let his dignity weigh upon him. Hehad been sent down alone. Hence there had been great scrambling togather together on the Zone men enough who spoke Spanish--and with nostriking success. Most noticeable of my fellow-enumerators, being inuniform, were three Marines from Bas Obispo, fluent with the workingSpanish they had picked up from Mindanao to Puerto Rico, andflush-cheeked with the prospect of a full month on "pass, " to saynothing of the $4. 40 a day that would be added to their daily militaryincome of $. 60. Then there were four of darker hue, --Panamanians andWest Indians; and how rare are Spanish-speaking, Americans on the Zonewas proved by the admittance of such complexions to the "gold" roll. 

Of native U. S. Civilians there were but two of us. Of whom Barter, speaking only his nasal New Jersey, must perforce be assigned to the"gold" quarters, leaving me the native town of Empire. At which we wereboth satisfied, Barter because he did not like to sully himself bycontact with foreigners, I because one need not travel clear to theCanal Zone to study the ways of Americans. As for the other seven, eachwas assigned his strip of land something over a mile wide and five longrunning back to the western boundary of the Zone. That region ofwilderness known as "Beyond the Canal" was to be left for specialtreatment later. The Zone had been divided for census purposes intofour sections, with headquarters and supervisor in Ancon, Empire, Gorgona, and Cristobal respectively. Our district, stretching from thetrestleless bridge over the canal to a great tree near Bas Obispo, waseasily the fat of the land, the most populous, most cosmopolitan, andembracing within its limits the greatest task on the Zone. 

Meanwhile we had fallen to studying the "Instructions to Enumerators, "the very first article of which was such as to give pause andreflection;

"When you have once signed on as an enumerator you cannot cease toexercise your functions as such without justifiable cause under penaltyof $500 fine. " Which warning was quickly followed by the hair-raisingannouncement:

"If you set down the name of a fictitious person"--what can have giventhe good census department the notion of such a possibility?--"you willbe fined $2, 000 or sentenced to five years' imprisonment, or both. "

From there on the injunctions grew less nerve-racking: "You must use amedium soft black pencil (which will be furnished)"--law-breaking undersuch conditions would be absurdity--"use no ditto marks and"--here Icould not but shudder as there passed before my eyes memories ofcollege lecture rooms and all the strange marks that have come to meansomething to me alone--"take pains to write legibly!"

Then we arose and swarmed upstairs to an empty court-room, where JudgeG----, throwing away his cigarette and removing his Iowa feet from thebar of justice, caused us each to raise a right hand and swear an oathas solemn as ever president on March fourth. An oath, I repeat, notmerely to uphold and defend the constitution against all enemies, armedor armless, but furthermore "not to share with any one any of theinformation you gather as an enumerator, or show a census card, or keepa copy of same. " Yet, I trust I can spin this simple yarn of my CanalZone days without offense to Uncle Sam against the day when mayhap Ishall have occasion to apply to him again for occupation. For thatreason I shall take abundant care to give no information whatsoever inthe following pages. 

CHAPTER II

"The boss" and I initiated the Canal Zone Census that very night. Legally it was to begin with the dawning of February, but there weremany labor camps in our district and the hours bordering on midnightthe only sure time to "catch 'em in. " Up in House 47 I gatheredtogether the legion paraphernalia of this new occupation, --some twohundred red cards a foot long and half as wide, a surveyor's fieldnotebook for the preservation of miscellaneous information, tags forthe tagging of canvassed buildings, tacks for the tacking of the same, the necessary tack-hammer, the medium soft black pencil, above all theawesome legal "Commission, " impressively signed and sealed, whereinnone other than our weighty nation's chief himself did expresslyauthorize me to search out, enter, and question ad libitum. All thisswung over a shoulder in a white canvas sack, that carried memory backthrough the long years to my newsboy days, I descended to the town. 

"The boss" was ready. It was nearly eleven when we crossed the silentP. R. R. Tracks and, plunging away into the night past great heaps ofabandoned locomotives huddled dim and uncertain in the thin moonlightlike ghosts of the French fiasco, dashed into a camp of the laborer'svillage of Cunette, pitched on the very edge of the now black andsilent void of the canal. Eighteen thick-necked negroes in undershirtsand trousers gazed up white-eyed from a suspended card game at the longcamp table. But we had no time for explanations. 

"Name?" I shouted at the coal-hued Hercules nearest at hand. 

"David Providence, " he bleated in trembling voice, and the great Zonequestionnaire was on. 

We had enrolled the group before a son of wisdom among them surmisedthat we were not, after all, plain-clothes men in quest of criminals;and his announcement brought visible relief. Twice as many blacks weresprawled in the two rows of double-sided, three-story bunks, --merestrips of canvas on gas-pipes that could be hung up like swingingshelves when not in use. Mere noise did not even disturb their dreams. We roused them by pencil-jabs in the ribs, and they started up withsavage, animal-like grunts and murderous glares which instantlysubsided to sheepish grins and voiceless astonishment at sight of awhite face bending over them. Now and again open-mouthed guffaws oflaughter greeted the mumbled admission of some powerful buck that hecould not read, or did not know his age. But there was nothing evenfaintly resembling insolence, for these were all British West Indianswithout a corrupting "States nigger" among them. A half-hour after ourarrival we had tagged the barracks and dived into the next camp, blacker and sleepier and more populous than the first. It was Februarymorning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and stepped under theshower-bath that is always preliminary, on the Zone, to a night'srepose. 

A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general destruction developedgradually into full consciousness at four-thirty. House 47 was inriotous uproar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign invasion waspending; it was merely the houseful of engineers in their customarydaily struggle to catch the labor-train and be away to work bydaylight. When the hour's rampage had subsided I rose to switch off thelight and turned in again. 

The rays of the impetuous Panama sun were spattering from them when Ipassed again the jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and machinery, reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by green jungle strands andtropical creepers. By day the arch-roofed labor-camps were silent andempty, but for a lonely janitor languidly mopping a floor. Before thebuildings a black gang was dipping the canvas and gas-pipe bunks one byone into a great kettle of scalding water. But there are also "marriedquarters" at Cunette. A row of six government houses tops the ridge, with six families in each house, and--no, I dare not risk nomination toan ever expanding though unpopular club by stating how many in afamily. I will venture merely to assert that when noon-time came I wasnot well started on the second house, yet carried away more than sixtyfilled-out cards. 

More than two days that single row of houses endured, varied by nightsspent with "the boss" in the labor-camps of Lirio, Culebra way. Thenone morning I tramped far out the highway to the old Scotchman'sfarm-house that bounds Empire on the north and began the long intricatejourney through the private-owned town itself. It was like attending acongress of the nations, a museum exhibition of all the shapes and huesin which the human vegetable grows. Tenements and wobbly-kneed shantiesswarming with exhibits monopolized the landscape; strange the room thatdid not yield up at least a man and woman and three or four children. Day after blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs, ironing-boards, veranda railings, climbing creaking stairways, now andagain descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste andungraceful posture, burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes, hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hiddenaway behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions intodilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human being whofell in my way. West Indian negroes easily kept the lead of all othernationalities combined; negroes blacker than the obsidian cutlery ofthe Aztecs, blonde negroes with yellow hair and blue eyes whose racewas betrayed only by eyelids and the dead whiteness of skin, and whomone could not set down as such after enrolling swarthy Spaniards as"white" without a smile. 

They lived chiefly in windowless, six-by-eight rooms, always a cheap, dirty calico curtain dividing the three-foot parlor in front from thefive-foot bedroom behind, the former cluttered with a van-load ofuseless junk, dirty blankets, decrepit furniture, glittering gewgaws, ablack baby squirming naked in a basket of rags with an Episcopalprayerbook under its pillow--relic of the old demon-scaringsuperstitions of Voodoo worship. Every inch of the walls was"decorated, " after the artistic temperament of the race, with pages ofillustrated magazines or newspapers, half-tones of all thingsconceivable with no small amount of text in sundry languages, many apage purely of advertising matter, the muscular, imbruted likeness of acertain black champion rarely missing, frequently with a Bible laidreverently beneath it. Outside, before each room, a tin fireplace forcooking precariously bestrided the veranda rail. 

Often a tumble-down hovel where three would seem a crowd yielded upmore than a dozen inmates, many of whom, being at work, must be lookedfor later--the "back-calls" that is the bete-noire of the censusenumerator. West Indians, however, are for the most part wellacquainted with the affairs of friends and room-mates, and enrolment ofthe absent was often possible. Occasionally I ran into a den ofimpertinence that must be frowned down, notably a notorious swarmingtenement over a lumber-yard. But on the whole the courtesy of BritishWest Indians, even among themselves, was noteworthy. Of the two greatdivisions among them, Barbadians seemed more well-mannered thanJamaicans--or was it merely more subtle hypocrisy? Among them all themost unspoiled children of nature appeared to be those from the littleisland of Nevis. 

"You ain't no American?"

"Yes, ah is. "

"Why, you de bery furst American ah eber see dat was perlite. "

Which spoke badly indeed for the others, that not being one of thevirtues I strive particularly to cultivate. 

But "perlite" or not, there can be no question of the astoundingstupidity of the West Indian rank and file, a stupidity amusing if youare in an amusable mood, unendurable if you neglect to pack yourpatience among your bag of supplies in the morning. Tropical patience, too, is at best a frail child. The dry-season sun rarely even veiledhis face, and there were those among the enumerators who complained ofthe taxing labor of all-day marching up and down streets and stairs andZone hills beneath it; but to me, fresh from tramping over themountains of Central America with twenty pounds on my shoulders, thiswas mere pastime. Heat had no terrors for the enumerated, however. Often in the hottest hour of the day I came upon negroes sleeping intightly closed rooms, the sweat running off them in streams, yetapparently vastly enjoying the situation. 

Sunday came and I chose to continue, though virtually all the Zone wason holiday and even "the boss, " after what I found later to be hisinvariable custom, had broken away from his card-littereddwelling-place on Saturday evening and hurried away to Panama, drawnthither and held till Monday morning--by some irresistible attraction. Sunday turns holiday completely on the Zone, even to hours of trainsand hotels. The frequent passengers were packed from southern white endto northern black end with all nations in gladsome garb, boundPanamaward to see the lottery drawing and buy a ticket for thefollowing Sunday, across the Isthmus to breezy Colon, or to one of ahundred varying spots and pastimes. Others in khaki breeches fresh fromthe government laundry in Cristobal and the ubiquitous leather leggingsof the "Zoner" were off to ride out the day in the jungles; stillothers set resolutely forth afoot into tropical paths; a dozen or so, gleaned one by one from all the towns along the line were even on theirway to church. Yet with all this scattering there still remained arespectable percentage lounging on the screened verandas in pajamas andkimonas, "Old Timers" of four or five or even six years' standing whowere convinced they had seen and heard, and smelt and tasted all thatthe Zone or tropical lands have to offer. 

Well on in the morning there was a general gathering of all theditch-digging clans of Empire and vicinity in a broad field close underthe eaves of the town, and soon there came drifting across to me at mylabor, hoarse, frenzied screams; sounding strangely incongruous beneaththe swaying palm-trees;

 "Come on! Get down with his arm! Aaaaahrrr!"

But my time was well chosen. In the Spanish camps above the canal, still and silent with Sunday, men at no other time to be run to earthwere entrapped in their bunks, under their dwelling-places in theshade, shaving, exchanging hair-cuts, washing workaday clothes, reminiscing over far-off homes and pre-migratory days, or merelyloafing. The same cheery, friendly, quick-witted fellows they were asin their native land, even the few Italians and rare Portuguesescattered among them inoculated with their cheerfulness. 

Came sudden changes to camps of Martiniques, a sort of wild, untamedcreature, who spoke a distressing imitation of French which even he didnot for a moment claim to be such, but frankly dubbed patois. Restless-eyed black men who answered to their names only at thequestion "Cummun t'appelle?" and give their age only to those who openwide their mouths and cry, "Caje-vous?" Then on again to the no lessstrange, sing-song "English" of Jamaica, the whining tones of thosewhose island trees the conquesting Spaniards foundbearded--"barbados"--now and again a more or less dark Costa Rican, Guatemalteco, Venezuelan, stray islanders from St. Vincent, Trinidad, or Guadalupe, individuals defying classification. But the chief rewardfor denying myself a holiday were the "back-calls" in the town itselfwhich I was able to check out of my field-book. Many a long-soughtnegro I roused from his holiday siesta, dashing past the tawdry calicocurtains to pound him awake--mere auricular demonstration having onlythe effect of lulling him into deeper child-like slumber. The surestand often only effective means was to tickle the slumberer gently onthe soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate instrument such asmy tack-hammer, or a convenient broom-handle or flat-iron. Frequently Icame upon young negro men of the age and type that in white skins wouldhave been loafing on pool-room corners, reading to themselves in loudand solemn voices from the Bible, with a far-away look in their eyes;always I was surrounded by a never-broken babble of voices, for theWest Indian negro can let his face run unceasingly all the day through, and the night, though he have never a word to say. 

Thus my "enumerated" tags spread further and wider over the city ofEmpire. I reached in due time the hodge-podge shops and stores ofRailroad Avenue. Chinamen began to drift into the rolls, there appearedsuch names as Carmen Wah Chang, cooks and waitresses living in darksomeback cupboards must be unearthed, negro shoemakers were caught at theirstands on the sidewalks, shiny-haired bartenders gave up theirbiographies in nasal monosyllables amid the slop of "suds" and thescrape of celluloid froth-eradicators. Rare was the land that had notsent representatives to this great dirt-shoveling congress. A Syrianmerchant gasped for breath and fell over his counter in delight to findthat I, too, had been in his native Zakleh, five Punjabis all but diedof pleasure when I mispronounced three words of their tongue. Occasionally there came startling contrast as I burst unexpectedly intothe ancestral home of some educated native family that had withstoodall the tides of time and change and still lived in the beloved"Emperador" of their forefathers. Anger was usually near the surface atmy intrusion, but they quickly changed to their ingrown politeness andchatty sociability when addressed in their own tongue and treated intheir own extravagant gestures. It was almost sure to return again, however, at the question whether they were Panamanians. Distinctly not!They were Colombians! There is no such country as Panama. 

Thus the enrolling of the faithful continued. Chinese laundrymendivulged the secrets of their mysterious past between spurts of waterat steaming shirt-bosoms; Chinese merchants, of whom there are hordeson the Zone, cueless, dressed and betailored till you must look at themtwice to tell them from "gold" employees, the flag of the new republicflapping above their doors, the new president in their lapels, left offselling crucifixes and breastpin medallions of Christ to negro women, to answer my questions. One evening I stumbled into a nest of elevenBengali peddlers with the bare floor of their single room as bed, table, and chairs; in one corner, surmounted by their littleembroidered skull-caps, were stacked the bundles with which they pesterZone housewives, and in another their god wrapped in a dirty ragagainst profaning eyes. 

Many days had passed before I landed the first Zone resident I couldnot enroll unassisted. He was a heathen Chinee newly arrived, who spokeneither Spanish nor English. It was "Chinese Charlie" who helped meout. "Chinese Charlie" was a resident of the Zone before the days of deLesseps and at our first meeting had insisted on being enrolled underthat pseudonym, alleging it his real name. Upstairs above his store allwas sepulchral silence when I mounted to investigate--and I camequickly and quietly down again; for the door had opened on the gaudyOriental splendor of a joss-house where dwelt only grinning woodenidols not counted as Zone residents by the materialistic censusofficials. On the Isthmus as elsewhere "John" is a law-abidingcitizen--within limits; never obsequious, nearly always friendly, readyto answer questions quite cheerily so long as he considers the matterany of your business, but closing infinitely tighter than themaltreated bivalve when he fancies you are prying too far. 

In time I reached the Commissary--the government department store--andenrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel, from stewardto scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography; the police stationon its knoll fell like the rest. I went to jail--and set down a largescore of black men and a pair of European whites, back from a day'ssweaty labor of road building, who lived now in unaccustomedcleanliness in the heart of the lower story of a fresh wooden buildingwith light iron bars, easy to break out of were it not that policemen, white and black, sleep on all sides of them. Crowded old Empire notonly faces her streets but even her back yards are filled with shacksand inhabited boxes to be hunted out. On the hem of her tatteredoutskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandonedjunk, --locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters "U. S. " painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day investigatormaterial to charge the I. C. C. With untold waste); all now soon to beremoved by a Chicago wrecking company. 

Then all the town must be done again--"back calls. " By this time sowide and varied was my acquaintance in Empire that wenches withdrew adripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with a sympathetic giggle, and piccaninnies ran out to meet me as I returned in quest of onemissing inmate in a house of fifty. For the few laborers still uncaughtI took to coming after dark. But West Indians rarely own lamps, noteven the brass tax-numbers above the doors were visible, and as for anegro in the dark--

Absurd rumors had begun early to circulate among the darker brethren. In all negrodom the conviction became general that this individualdetailed catechising and house-branding was really a government schemeto get lists of persons due for deportation, either for lack of work asthe canal neared completion or for looseness of marital relations. Hardly a tenement did I enter but laughing voices bandied back andforth and there echoed and reechoed through the building such remarksas:

"Well, dey gon' sen' us home, Penelope, " or "Yo an' Percival betterhurry up an' git married, Ambrosia. "

Several dusky females regularly ran away whenever I approached; one atleast I came a-seeking in vain nine times, and found her the tenthbehind a garbage barrel. Many fancied the secret marks on the"enumerated" tag--date, and initials of the enumerator--were intimatelyconcerned with their fate. So strong is the fear of the law imbued bythe Zone Police that they dared not tear down the dreaded placard, butwould sometimes sit staring at it for hours striving to penetrate itssecret or exorcise away its power of evil, and now and then some bolderspirit ventured out--at midnight--with a pencil and put tails and extraflourishes on the penciled letters in the hope of disguising themagainst the fatal day. 

Except for the chaos of nationalities and types on the Zone, enumerating would have become more than monotonous. But the enumeratedtook care to break the monotony. There was the wealth of nomenclaturefor instance. What more striking than a shining-black waiter struttingproudly about under the name of Levi McCarthy? There was no necessityof asking Beresford Plantaganet if he were a British subject. Naturallythe mother of Hazarmaneth Cumberbath Smith, baptized that very week, had to claw out the family Bible from among the bed-clothes and look upthe name on the fly-leaf. 

To the enumerator, who must set down concise and exact answers to eachof his questions, fifty or sixty daily scenes and replies somethinglike these were delightful;

Enumerator (sitting down on the edge of a barrel): "How many living inthis room?"

Explosive laughter from the buxom, jet-black woman addressed. 

Enumerator (on a venture): "What's the man's name?"

"He name 'Rasmus Iggleston. "

"What's his metal-check number?"

"Lard, mahster, ah don' know he check number. "

"Haven't you a commissary-book with it in?"

"Lard no, mah love, commissary-book him feeneesh already befo' las'week. "

"Is he a Jamaican?"

"No, him a Mont-rat, mahster. " (Monsterratian. )

"What color is he?"

"Te! He! Wha' fo' yo as' all dem questions, mahster?"

"For instance. "

"Oh, him jes' a pitch darker'n me. "

"How old is he?"

(Loud laughter) "Law', ah don' know how ol' him are!"

"Well, about how old?"

"Oh, him a ripe man, mah love, him a prime man. "

"Is he older than you?"

"Oh, yes, him older 'n me. "

"And how old are you?"

"Te! He! 'Deed ah don' know how ol' ah is; ah gone los' mah age paper. "

"Is he married?"

(Quickly and with very grave face) "Oh, yes indeed, mahster, Ah hissure 'nough wife. "

"Can he read?"

(Hesitatingly) "Er--a leetle, sir, not too much, sir. " (Which generallymeans he can spell out a few words of one syllable and make some sortof mark representing his name. )

"What kind of work does he do?"

(Haughtily) "Him employed by de I. C. C. "

"Yes, naturally. But what kind of work does he do. Is he a laborer?"

(Quickly and very impressively) "Laborer! Oh, no, mah sweet mahster, hejes' shovel away de dirt befo' de steam shovel. "

"All right. That 'll do for 'Rasmus. Now your name?"

"Mah name Mistress Jane Iggleston. "

"How long have you lived on the Canal Zone?"

"Oh, not too long, mah love. "

"Since when have you lived in this house?"

"Oh, we don' come to dis house too long, sah. "

"Can you read and write?"

"No, ah don' stay in Jamaica. Ah come to Panama when ah small. "

"Do you do any work besides your own housework?"

(Evasively) "Work? If ah does any work? No, not any. "

Enumerator looks hard from her to washtub. 

"Ah--er--oh, ah washes a couple o' gentlemen's clot'es. "

"Very good. Now then, how many children?"

"We don' git no children, sah. "

"What! How did that happen?"

Loud, house-shaking laughter. 

Enumerator (looking at watch and finding it 12:10): "Well, goodafternoon. "

"Good evenin', sah. Thank you, sah. Te! He!"

Variations on the above might fill many pages:

"How old are you?"

Self-appointed interpreter of the same shade; "He as' how old is yo?"

"How old _I_ are? Ah don rightly know mah age, mahster, mah mothernever tol' me. "

St. Lucian woman, evidently about forty-five, after deep thought, plainly anxious to be as truthful as possible: "Er--ah's twenty, sir. "

"Oh, you're older than that. About sixty, say?"

"'Bout dat, sah. "

"Are you married?"

(Pushing the children out of the way. ) "N-not as yet, mah sweetmahster, bu-but--but we go 'n' be soon, sah. "

To a Barbadian woman of forty: "Just you and your daughter live here?"

"Dat's all, sir. "

"Doesn't your husband live here?"

"Oh, ah don't never marry as yet, sah. "

Anent the old saying about the partnership of life and hope. 

To a Dominican woman of fifty-two, toothless and pitted with small-pox:"Are you married?"

(With simpering smile) "Not as yet, mah sweet mahster. "

To a Jamaican youth;

"How many people live in this room?"

"Three persons live here, sir. "

"I stand grammatically corrected. When did you move here?"

"We remove here in April. "

"Again I apologize for my mere American grammar. Now, Henry, what isyour room-mate's name?"

"Well, we calls him Ethel, but I don't know his right title. Peradventure he will not work this evening [afternoon] and you can askhim from himself. "

"Do his parents live on the Zone?"

"Oh, yes, sah, he has one father and one mother. "

An answer: "Why HIMSELF [emphatic subject pronoun among Barbadians]didn't know if he'd get a job. "

To a six-foot black giant working as night-hostler of steam-shovels:

"Well, Josiah, I suppose you're a Jamaican?"

"Oh, yes, boss, ah work in Kingston ten years as a bar-maid. "

"Married?"

"No, boss, ah's not 'xactly married. Ah's livin' with a person. "

A colored family:

Sarah Green, very black, has a child named Edward White, and is nowliving with Henry Brown, a light yellow negro. 

West Indian wit:

A shop-sign in Empire: "Don't ask for credit. He is gone on vacationsince January 1, 1912. "

Laughter and carefree countenances are legion in the West Indian ranks, children seem never to be punished, and to all appearances man and wifelive commonly in peace and harmony. Dr. O---- tells the followingstory, however:

In his rounds he came upon a negro beating his wife and had him placedunder arrest. The negro: "Why, boss, can't a man chastize his wife whenshe desarves and needs it?"

Dr. O----: "Not on the Canal Zone. It's against the law. "

Negro (in great astonishment): "Is dat so, boss. Den ah'll never do itagain, boss--on de Canal Zone. "

One morning in the heart of Empire a noise not unlike that of a rockywaterfall began to grow upon my ear. Louder and louder it swelled as Iworked slowly forward. At last I discovered its source. In a lower roomof a tenement an old white-haired Jamaican had fitted up a privateschool, to which the elite among the darker brethren sent theirchildren, rather than patronize the common public schools Uncle Samprovides free to all Zone residents. The old man sat before some twentywide-eyed children, one of whom stood slouch-shouldered, book in hand, in the center of the room, and at regular intervals of not more thantwenty seconds he shouted high above all other noises of theneighborhood:

"Yo calls dat Eng-leesh! How eber yo gon' l'arn talk proper lika dat, yo tell me?"

Far back in the interior of an Empire block I came upon an old, oldnegro woman, parchment-skinned and doddering, living alone in astoop-shouldered shanty of boxes and tin cans. "Ah don' know how ol' ahis, mahster, " was one of her replies, "but ah born six years befo' decholera diskivered. "

"When did you come to Panama?"

"Ah don' know, but it a long time ago. "

"Before the Americans, perhaps?"

"Oh, long befo'! De French ain't only jes' begin to dig. Ah's ashamedto say how long ah been here" (just why was not evident, unless shefancied she should long ago have made her fortune and left). "Is you aAmerican? Well, de Americans sure have done one thing. Dey mak' discountry civilize. Why, chil', befo' dey come we have all de time hererevolutions. Ah couldn't count to how many revolutions we had, an'ebery time dey steal all what we have. Dey even steal mah clothes. Ahsure glad fo' one de Americans come. "

It was during my Empire enumerating that I was startled one morning toburst suddenly from the tawdry, junk-jumbled rooms of negroes into abare-floored, freshly scrubbed room containing some very clean cots, asmall table and a hammock, and a general air of frankness andsimplicity, with no attempt to disguise the commonplace. At the tablesat a Spaniard in worn but newly washed working-clothes, book in hand. I sat down and, falling unconsciously into the "th" pronunciation ofthe Castilian, began blithely to reel off the questions that had grownso automatic. 

"Name?"-;-Federico Malero. "Check Number?"--"Can you read?" "A little. "The barest suggestion of amusement in his voice caused me to look upquickly. "My library, " he said, with the ghost of a weird smile, nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf made of pieces ofdynamite boxes, "Mine and my room-mates. " The shelf was filled withfour--REAL Barcelona paper editions of Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and a half-dozen others accustomed to sit in the same company, alldog-eared with much reading. 

"Some ambitious foreman, " I mused, and went on with my queries:

"Occupation?"

"Pico y pala, " he answered. 

"Pick and shovel!" I exclaimed--"and read those?"

"No importa, " he answered, again with that elusive shadow of a smile, "It doesn't matter, " and as I rose to leave, "Buenos dias, senor, " andhe turned again to his reading. 

I plunged into the jumble of negroes next door, putting my questionsand setting down the answers without even hearing them, my thoughtsstill back in the clean, bare room behind, wondering whether I shouldnot have been wiser after all to have ignored the sharp-drawn lines andthe prejudices of my fellow-countrymen and joined the pick and shovelZone world. There might have been pay dirt there. A few months before, I remembered, a Spanish laborer killed in a dynamite explosion in the"cut" had turned out to be one of Spain's most celebrated lawyers. Irecalled that EL UNICO, the anarchist Spanish weekly published inMiraflores contains some crystal-clear thinking set forth in asharp-cut manner that shows a real inside knowledge of the "job" andthe canal workers, however little one may agree with its philosophy andmethods. 

Then it was due to the law of contrasts, I suppose, that the thought of"Tom, " my room-mate, suddenly flashed upon me; and I discovered myselfchuckling at the picture, "Tom, the Rough-neck, " to whom all such asFederico Malero with his pick and shovel were mere "silver men, " onwhom "Tom" looked down from his high perch on his steam-shovel as farless worthy of notice than the rock he was clawing out of the hillside. How many a silent chuckle and how many a covert sneer must the Maleroson the Zone indulge in at the pompous airs of some American ostensiblyfar above them. 

CHAPTER III

Meanwhile my fellow enumerators were reporting troubles "in the bush. "I heard particularly those of two of the Marines, "Mac" and Renson, merry, good-natured, earnest-by-spurts, even modest fellows quitedifferent from what I had hitherto pictured as an enlisted man. 

"Mac" was a half and half of Scotch and Italian. Naturally he wasconstantly effervescing, both verbally and temperamentally, hissnapping black eyes were never still, life played across his excitable, sunny boyish face like cloud shadows on a mountain landscape, whoeverwould speak to him at any length must catch him in a vice-like grip andhold his attention by main force. He spoke with a funny littlealmost-foreign accent, was touching on forty, and was the youngest manat that age in the length and breadth of the Canal Zone. 

At first sight you would take "Mac" for a mere roustabout, like mostwho go a'soldiering. But before long you'd begin to wonder where he gothis rich and fluent vocabulary and his warehouse of information. Thenyou'd run across the fact that he had once finished a course in amiddle-western university--and forgotten it. The schools had leftlittle of their blighting mark upon him, yet "pump" "Mac" on anysubject from rapid-fire guns to grand opera and you'd get at least areasonable answer. Though you wouldn't guess the knowledge was thereunless you did pump for it, for "Mac" was not of the type of those whooverwork the first person pronoun, not because of foolish diffidencebut merely because it rarely occurred to him as a subject ofconversation. Seventeen years in the marine corps--you were sure he was"jollying" when he first said it--had taken "Mac" to most places wherewarships go, from Pekin and "the Islands" to Cape Town and BuenosAyres, and given him not merely an acquaintance with the worldbut--what is far more of an acquisition--the gift of getting acquaintedin almost any stratum of the world in the briefest possible space oftime. 

"Mac" spoke not only his English and Italian but a fluent "Islands"Spanish; he knew enough French to talk even to Martiniques, and hecould moreover make two distinct sets of noises that were understood byChinese and Japanese respectively. He was a man just reckless enough inall things to be generous and alive, yet never foolishly wastefuleither of himself or his meager substance. "Mac" first rose to fame inthe census department by appearing one afternoon at Empire policestation dragging a "bush" native by the scruff of the neck with onehand, and carrying in the other the machete with which the bushman hadtried to prove he was a Colombian and not subject to questioning by theagents of other powers. 

Renson--well, Renson was in some ways "Mac's" exact antithesis and insome his twin brother. He was one of those youths who believe inspending prodigally and in all possible haste what little nature hasgiven them. Wherefore, though he was younger than "Mac" appeared to be, he already looked older than "Mac" was. In Zone parlance "he hadalready laid a good share of the road to Hell behind him. " Yet such acheery, likable chap was Renson, so large-hearted and unassuming--thatwas just why you felt an itching to seize him by the collar of hisolive-drab shirt and shake him till his teeth rattled for tossinghimself so wantonly to the infernal bow-wows. 

Renson's "bush" troubles were legion. Not only were there the seducingbrown "Spigoty" women out in the wilderness to help him on hisdescending trail, but when and wherever fire-water of whatevernationality or degree of voltage showed its neck--and it is to be foundeven in "the bush"--there was Renson sure to give battle--and fall. "It's no use bein' a man unless you're a hell of a man, " was Renson's"influenced" philosophy. How different this was from his native goodsense when the influence was turned off was demonstrated when hereturned from cautiously reconnoitering a cottage far back in the wildsone dark night and reported as his reason for postponing theenumerating: "If you'd butt in on one o' them Martinique boozefestivals they'd crown you with a bottle. "

Already one or two enumerators had gone back to private life--byrequest. Particularly sad was the case of our dainty, blue-bloodedPanamanian. As with many Panamanians, and not a few of the self-exaltedelsewhere, he was more burdened with blue corpuscles than with graymatter. At any rate--

On our cards, after the query "Color?" was a small space, a very smallspace in which was to be written quite briefly and unceremoniously "W, ""B, " or "Mx" as the case might be. Uncle Sam was in a hurry for hiscensus. Early one afternoon our Panamanian helpmate burst upon one ofhis numerous aristocratic relatives in his royal thatched domains inthe ancestral bush. When he had embraced him the customary fifteentimes on the right side and the fifteen accustomed times on the leftside, and had performed the eighty-five gestures of greeting requiredby the social manual of the bush, and asked the three hundred andsixty-five questions de rigueur regarding the honorable health of hishonorable horde of offspring, and his eye had fallen again on the redcards in his hand, the fact struck him that the relative was ofprecisely the same shade of complexion as himself. Could he set himdown as he had many a mere red-blooded person and thereby perhapsestablish a precedent that might result in his own mortification? Yetcould he stretch a shade--or several shades--and set him down as"white"? No, there was the oath of office, and the government thatadministered it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed. Long he satin deepest meditation. Being a Panamanian, he could not of course knowthat Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census. Till at length, as thesun was firing the western jungle tree-tops, a scintillating idearewarded his unwonted cogitation. He caught up the medium soft penciland wrote in aristocratic hand down across the sheet where otherinformation is supposed to find place:

"Color;--A very light mixture, " and taking his leave with the requisiteseventy-five gestures and genuflexions, he drifted Empireward with thedozen cards the day had yielded. 

Which is why I was shocked next morning by the disrespectful report ofRenson that "my friend the boss had tied a can to the Spig's tail, " andour dainty and lamented comrade went back to the more fittingblue-blood occupation of swinging a cane in the lobbies of Panama'sfamous hostelries. 

But what mattered such small losses? Had not "Scotty" been engaged tofill the breach--or all of them, one or two breaches more or less madesmall difference to "Scotty. " He was a cozy little barrel of a man, born in "Doombahrton, " and for some years past had been dispensing goodold Dumbarton English in Panama's proudest educational institution. ButPanama's school vacation is during her "summer, " her dry season fromFebruary to April. What more natural then than that "Scotty" shouldhave concluded to pass his vacation taking census, for obviously--"amon must pick up a wee bit o' change wherever he can. "

I seemed to have been appointed to a purely sight-seeing job. OneFebruary noon I reported at the office to find that passes to Gatun hadbeen issued to five of us, "Scotty, " "Mac, " Renson, and Barter amongthe number. The task in the "town by the dam site" it seemed, wasproving too heavy for the regular enumerators of that district. 

We left by the 2:10 train. Cascadas and Bas Obispo rolled away behindus, across the canal I caught a glimpse of the wilderness surroundingthe abode of "Old Fritz, " then we entered a to me unknown land. I couldeasily have fancied myself a tourist, especially so at Matachin when"Mac" solemnly attempted to "spring" on me the old tourist hoax ofsuicided Chinamen as the derivation of the town's name. ThroughGorgona, the Pittsburg of the Zone with its acres of machine-shops, rumbled the train and plunged beyond into a deep, if not exactly rank, endless jungle. The stations grew small and unimportant. Bailamonos andSan Pablo were withering and wasting away, "'Orca L'garto, " or theHanged Alligator was barely more than a memory, Tabernilla a mere heapof lumber being tumbled on flatcars bound for new service furtherPacificward. Of Frijoles there remained barely enough to shudder at, with the collector's nasal bawl of "Free Holys!" and everywhere theirrepressible tropical greenery was already rushing back to engulf thepigmy works of man. It seemed criminally wasteful to have built theseentire towns with all the detail and machinery of a well governed andfully furnished city from police station to salt cellars only to tearthem down again and utterly wipe them out four or five years aftertheir founding. A forerunner of what, in a few brief years, will havehappened to all the Zone--nay, is not this the way of life itself?

For soon the Spillway at Gatun is to close its gates and all this vastregion will be flooded and come to be Gatun Lake. Villages that wereold when Pizarro began his swine-herding will be wiped out, even thissplendid double-tracked railroad goes the way of the rest, for onFebruary fifteenth, a bare few days away, it was to be abandoned andwhere we were now racing northwestward through brilliant sunshine andAtlantic breezes would soon be the bottom of a lake over which greatocean steamers will glide, while far below will be tall palm-trees andthe spreading mangoes, the banana, king of weeds, gigantic fernsand--well, who shall say what will become of the brilliant parrots, themonkeys and the jaguars?

For nearly an hour we had not a glimpse of the canal, lost in thejungle to the right. Then suddenly we burst out upon the growing lake, now all but licking at the rails beneath us, the Zone city of Gatunclimbing up a hillside on its edge and scattering over several more. Tothe left I caught my first sight of the world-famous locks and dam, andat 3:30 we descended at the stone station, first mile-post ofpermanency, for being out of reach of the coming flood it is built tostay and shows what Canal Zone stations will be in the years to come. There remained for me but seven miles of the Isthmus still unseen. 

On the cement platform was a great foregathering of the census clansfrom all districts, whence we climbed to the broad porch of theadministration building above. There before me, for the first timein--well, many months, spread the Atlantic, the Caribbean perhaps Ishould say, seeming very near, so near I almost fancied I could havethrown a stone to where it began and stretched away up to the bluishhorizon, while the entrance to the canal where soon great ships willenter poked its way inland to the locks beside us. Across the tree-topsof the flat jungle, also seeming close at hand though the railroadtakes seven miles--and thirty-five cents if you are no employee--toreach it, was Colon, the tops of whose low buildings were plainlyvisible above the vegetation. Not many "Zoners, " I reflected, catchtheir first view of Colon from the veranda of the AdministrationBuilding at Gatun. 

We had arrived with time to spare. Fully an hour we loafed and yarnedand smoked before a whistle blew and long lines of little figures beganto come up out of the depths and zigzag across the landscape until soona line of laborers of every shade known to humanity began to form, pay-checks in hand; its double head at the pay-windows on the two sidesof the veranda, its tail serpentining off down the hillside and awaynearly to the edge of the mammoth locks. Packs of the yellow cards ofCristobal district in hand--a relief to eyes that had been staring fordays at the pink ones of Empire--we lined up like birds of prey justbeyond the windows. As the first laborer passed this, one--nay, severalof us pounced upon him, for all plans we had laid to line up and taketurns were thus quickly overthrown and wild competition soon reigned. From then on each dived in to snatch his prey and, dragging him to thenearest free space, began in some language or other: "Where d'ye live?"

That was the overwhelming problem, --in what language to address eachvictim. Barter, speaking only his nasal New Jersey, took to picking outnegroes, and even then often turned away in disgust when he landed aMartinique or a Haytian. West Indian "English" alternated with a blackpatois that smelt at times faintly of French, muscular, bullet-headednegroes appeared slowly and laboriously counting their money in theirhats, eagle-nosed Spaniards under the boina of the Pyrenees, Spaniardsfrom Castile speaking like a gatling-gun in action, now and again evena snappy-eyed Andalusian with his s-less slurred speech, slow, laborious Gallegos, Italians and Portuguese in numbers, Colombians ofnondescript color, a Slovak who spoke some German, a man from Palestinewith a mixture of French and Arabic noises I could guess at, andscattered here and there among the others a Turk who jabbered thelingua franca of Mediterranean ports. I "got" all who fell into myhands. Once I dragged forth a Hindu, and shuddered with fear of a firstfailure. But he knew a bit of a strange English and I found I recalledsix or seven words of my forgotten Hindustanee. 

Then suddenly a flood of Greeks broke upon us, growing deeper withevery moment. Above the pandemonium my companions were howling hoarselyand imploringly for the interpreter, while clutching their tremblingvictim by the slack of his labor-stained shirt lest he escapeun-enrolled. The interpreter, in accordance with a well-known law ofphysics and the limitations of human nature, could not be in sixteenplaces at once. I crowded close, caught his words, memorized the fewquestions, and there was I with my "Poomaynes?" "Poseeton?" and"Padremaynos?" enrolling Greeks unassisted, not only that but haughtilyacting as interpreter for my fellows--not only without having studiedthe tongue of Achilles but never even having graced a Greek letterfraternity. 

Quick tropical twilight descended, and still the labor-smeared linewound away out of sight into the darkness, still workmen of every shadeand tongue jingled their brass-checks timidly on the edge of thepay-window, from behind which came roaring noises that the Americanswithin fancied Spaniards, or Greeks, or Roumanians must understandbecause they were not English noises; still we pounced upon the paid asupon a tackling-dummy in the early days of spring practice. 

The colossal wonder of it all was how these deep-chested, muscle-knotted fellows endured us, how they refrained from taking us upbetween a thumb and forefinger and dropping us over the verandarailing. For our attack lacked somewhat in gentle courtesy, notably sothat of "the Rowdy. " He was a chestless youth of the type that hasgrown so painfully prevalent in our land since the soft-heartedabolishment of the beech-rod of revered memory; of that all toofamiliar type whose proofs of manhood are cigarettes and impudence anddiscordant noise, and whose national superiority is demonstrated by themaltreating of all other races. But the enrolled were all, black, white, or mixed, far more gentlemen than we. Some, of brief Zoneexperience, were sheepish with fear and the wonder as to what newmandate this incomprehensible U. S. Was perpetrating to match itsstrange sanitary laws that forbade a man even to be uncleanly in hishabits, after the good old sacred right of his ancestors to remotestages. Then, too, there was a Zone policeman in dressy, new-starchedkhaki treading with dangling club and the icy-eye of public appearance, waiting all too eagerly for some one to "start something. " But thegreat percentage of the maltreated multitude were "Old Timers, " men offour or five years of digging who had learned to know this strangecreature, the American, and the world, too; who smiled indulgently downupon our yelping and yanking like a St. Bernard above the snappingpuppy he well knows cannot seriously bite him. 

Dense black night had fallen. Here and there lanterns were hung, underone of which we dragged each captive. The last passenger back to Empireroared away into the jungle night; still we scribbled on, "backed" ayellow card and dived again into the muscular whirlpool to emergedragging forth by the collar a Greek, a Pole, or a West Indian. It waslike business competition, in which I had an unfair advantage, beingable to understand any jargon in evidence. When at last the pay-windowscame down with a bang and an American curse, and the serpentining tailsquirmed for a time in distress and died away, as a snake's tail diesafter sundown, I turned in more than a hundred cards. To-morrow thetail would revive to form the nucleus of a new serpent, and we shouldreturn by the afternoon train to the lock city, and so on for severaldays to come. 

It was after nine of a black pay-day night. We were hungry. "TheRowdy, " familiar with the lay of the land, volunteered to lead theforaging expedition. We stumbled down the hill and away along therailroad. A faint rumbling that grew to a confused roar fell on ourears. We climbed a bank into a wild conglomeration of wood and tinarchitecture, nationalities, colors, and noises, and across a dark, bottomless gully from the high street we had reached lights flashedamid a very ocean of uproar. "The Rowdy, " as if to make the campaign asreal as possible, led us racing down into the black abyss, whence wecharged up the further slope and came sweating and breathless into therampant rough and tumble of pay-day night in New Gatun, the time andplace that is the vortex of trouble on the Isthmus. Merely a shortstreet of one of the half-dozen Zone towns in which liquor licenses aregranted, lined with a few saloons and pool-rooms; but such a singing, howling, swarming multitude as is rivaled almost nowhere else, exceptit be on Broadway at the passing of the old year. But this mob, moreover, was fully seventy percent black, and rather largelyFrench--and when black and French and strong drink mix, trouble sproutslike jungle seeds. Now and then Policeman G---- drifted by through theuproar, holding his "sap" loosely as for ready use and often halfconsciously hitching the heavy No. 38 "Colt" under his khaki jacket abit nearer the grasp of his right hand. I little knew how familiarevery corner of this scene would one day be to me. 

A Chinese grocer sold us bread and cheese. Down on the further cornerof the hubbub we entered a Spanish saloon and spread ourselves over the"white" bar, adding beer to our humble collation. Beyond thelattice-work that is the "color line" in Zone dispensaries, WestIndians were dancing wild, crowded "hoe-downs" and "shuffles" amid muchhowling and more liquidation; on our side a few Spanish laborersquietly sipped their liquor. The Marines of course were "busted. " Therest of us scraped up a few odd "Spigoty" dimes. The Spanishbar-tender--who is never the "tough" his American counterpart strivesto show himself--but merely a cheery good-fellow--drifted into ourconversation, and when we found I had slept in his native village hewould have it that we accept a round of Valdepenas. Which must havebeen potent, for it moved "Scotty" to unbutton an inner pocket and setup an entire bottle of amontillado. So midnight was no great space offwhen we turned out again into the howling night and, having helpedRenson to reach a sleeping-place, scattered to the bachelor quartersthat had been found for us and lay down for the few hours that remainedbefore the 5:51 should carry us back to Empire. 

At last I had crossed all the Isthmus and heard the wash of theCaribbean at my feet. It was the Sunday following our Gatun days, andnearly a month since my landing on the Zone. The morning train fromEmpire left me at the lake-side city for a run over locks and dam whichthe working days had not allowed, and there being no other train forhours I set off along the railroad to walk the seven miles to Colon. Oneither side lay hot, rampant jungle, low and almost swampy. It was noonwhen I reached the broad railroad yards and Zone storehouses of Mt. Hope and turned aside to Cristobal hotel. 

Cristobal is built on the very fringe of the ocean with the roll ofwaves at the very edge of its windows, and a far-reaching view of theCaribbean where the ceaseless Zone breeze is born. There stands thefamous statue of Columbus protecting the Indian maid, crude humor inbronze; for Columbus brought Indian maids anything but protection. Nearat hand in the joyous tropical sunshine lay a great steamer that inanother week would be back in New York tying up in sleet and ice. Awestern bronco and a lariat might perhaps have dragged me on board, with a struggle. 

There is no more line of demarkation between Cristobal and Colon thanbetween Ancon and Panama. A khaki-clad Zone policeman patrols onesidewalk, a black one in the sweltering dark blue uniform and heavywintry helmet of the Republic of Panama lounges on the other side of acertain street; on one side are the "enumerated" tags of the census, onthe other none. Cross the street and you feel at once a foreigner. Itis distinctly unlawful to sell liquor on Sunday or to gamble at anytime on the Canal Zone; it is therefore with something approaching ashock that one finds everything "wide open" and raging just across thestreet. 

I wandered out past "Highball's" merry-go-round, where huge negro buckswere laughing and playing and riding away their month's pay on thewooden horses like the children they are, and so on to the edge of thesea. Unlike Panama, Colon is flat and square-blocked, as it isconsiderably darker in complexion with its large mixture of negroesfrom the Caribbean shores and islands. Uncle Sam seems to have takenthe city's fine beach away from her. But then, she probably never tookany other advantage of it than to turn it into a garbage heap as bad asonce was Bottle Alley. On one end is a cement swimming pool with theannouncement, "Only for gold employees of the I. C. C. Or P. R. R. Andguests of Washington Hotel. " It is merely a softer way of saying, "Onlywhite Americans with money can bathe here. "

Then beyond are the great hospitals, second only to those of Ancon, the"white" wards built out over the sea, and behind them the "black" wherethe negroes must be content with second-hand breezes. Some of the costsof the canal are here, --sturdy black men in a sort of bed-tick pajamassitting on the verandas or in wheel chairs, some with one leg gone, some with both. One could not but wonder how it feels to be hopelesslyruined in body early in life for helping to dig a ditch for a foreignpower that, however well it may treat you materially, cares not awhistle-blast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotivesrusting away in the jungle. 

Under the beautiful royal palms beyond, all bent inland in the constantbreeze are park benches where one can sit with the Atlantic spreadingaway to infinity before, breaking with its ages-old, mysterious roll onthe shore just as it did before the European's white sails first brokethe gleaming skyline. Out to sea runs the growing breakwater from ToroPoint, the great wireless tower, yet just across the bay on a littlejutting, dense-grown tongue of land is the jungle hut of a junglefamily as utterly untouched by civilization as was the verdant valleyof Typee on the day Melville and Toby came stumbling down into it fromthe hills above. 

But meanwhile I was not getting the long hours of unbroken sleep theheavy mental toil of enumeration requires. Free government bachelorquarters makes strange bed-fellows--or at least room-fellows. Quartermasters, like justice, are hopelessly blind or I might have beenassigned quarters upon the financial knoll where habits and hours werea bit more in keeping with my own. But a bachelor is a bachelor on theZone, and though he be clerk to his highness "the Colonel" himself hemay find himself carelessly tossed into a "rough-neck" brotherhood. 

House 47 was distinctly an abode of "rough-necks. " A "rough-neck, " itmay be essential to explain to those who never ate at the same tablewith one, is a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed, cast-ironfellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, rock-tearing steam-shovelall day, wrestle the night through with various starred Hennessey andits rivals, and continue that round indefinitely without once failingto turn up to straddle his beam in the morning. He seems to have beencreated without the insertion of nerves, though he is never lacking in"nerve. " He is a fine fellow in his way, but you sometimes wish his waybranched off from yours for a few hours, when bed-time or a mood forquiet musing comes. He is a man you are glad to meet in a saloon--ifyou are in a mood to be there--or tearing away at the cliffs ofCulebra; but there are other places where he does not seem exactly tofit into the landscape. 

House 47, I say, was a house of "rough-necks. " That fact becameparticularly evident soon after supper, when the seven phonographs werestriking up their seven kinds of ragtime on seven sides of us; and itwas the small hours before the poker games, carried on in much the samespirit as Comanche warfare, broke up through all the house. Then, too, many a "rough-neck" is far from silent even after he has fallen asleep;and about the time complete quiet seemed to be settling down it wasfour-thirty; and a jarring chorus of alarm-clocks wrought new upheaval. 

Then there was each individual annoyance. Let me barely mention two orthree. Of my room-mates, "Mitch" had sat at a locomotive throttlefourteen years in the States and Mexico, besides the four years he hadbeen hauling dirt out of the "cut. " Youthful ambition "Mitch" had leftbehind, for though he could still look forward to forty, railroad ruleshad so changed in the States during his absence that he would have hadto learn his trade over again to be able to "run" there. Moreover fouryears on the Zone does not make a man look forward with pleasure to aStates winter. So "Mitch, " like many another "Zoner, " was planning tobuy with the savings of his $210 a month "when the job is done" a chunkof land on some sunny slope of a southern state and settle down for aneasy descent through old age. There was nothing objectionable about"Mitch"--except perhaps his preference for late-hour poker. But he hada way of stopping with one leg out of his trousers when at last all thehouse had calmed down and cots were ceasing to creak, to make some suchwholly irrelevant remark as; "By ----, that ---- dispatcher give me 609to-day and she wouldn't pull a greased string out of a knot-hole"--andthereby always hung a tale that was sure to range over half the trackmileage of the States and wander off somewhere into the sandy cactuswilderness of Chihuahua at least before "Mitch" succeeded in gettingout of the other trouser leg. 

The cot directly across from my own groaned--occasionally--under thecoarse-grained bulk of Tom. Tom was a "rough-neck" par excellence, somuch so that even in a houseful of them he was known as "Tom theRough-neck, " which to Tom was high tribute. Some preferred to call him"Tom the Noisy. " He was built like a steam caisson, or an oil-barrel, though without fat, with a neck that reminded you of a Miura bull withhis head down just before the estoque; and when he neglected to buttonhis undershirt--a not infrequent oversight--he displayed the hairychest of a mammoth gorilla. 

Tom's philosophy of getting through life was exactly the same as hisphilosophy of getting through a rocky hillside with his steam-shovel. When it came to argument Tom was invariably right; not that he wasover-supplied with logic, but because he possessed a voice and thebellows to work it that could rise to the roar of his own steam-shovelon those weeks when he chose to enter the shovel competition, and wouldhave utterly overthrown, drowned out, and annihilated James StewartMill himself. 

Tom always should have had money, for your "rough-neck" on the Zone hasdecidedly the advantage over the white-collared college graduate whenthe pay-car comes around. But of course being a genuine "rough-neck"Tom was always deep in debt, except on the three days after pay-day, when he was rolling in wealth. 

Once I fancied the bulk of my troubles was over. Tom disappeared, leaving not a trace behind--except his working-clothes tumbled on andabout his cot. Then it turned out that he was not dead, but in Anconhospital taking the Keeley cure; and one summer evening he blew inagain, his "cure" effected--with a bottle in his coat pocket and twoinside his vest. So the next day there was Tom celebrating his recoveryall over House 47 and when next morning he did finally go back to hisshovel there were scattered about the room six empty quart bottles eachlabeled "whiskey. " Luckily Tom ran a shovel instead of a passengertrain and could claw away at his hillside as savagely as he chosewithout any danger whatever, beyond that of killing himself or an odd"nigger" or two. 

We had other treasures on exhibition in 47. There was "Shorty, " forinstance. "Shorty" was a jolly, ugly open-handed, four-eyed littlesnipe of a roughneck machinist who had lost "in the line of duty" twofingers highly useful in his trade. In consequence he was now, afterthe generous fashion of the I. C. C. , on full pay for a year withoutwork, providing he did not leave the Zone. And while "Shorty, " like thegreat majority of us, was a very tolerable member of society under theordinary circumstances of having to earn his "three squares a day, "paid leisure hung most ponderously upon him. 

The amusements in Empire are few--and not especially amusing. There isreally only one unfailing one. That is slid in glass receptacles acrossa yellow varnished counter down on Railroad Avenue opposite EmpireMachine Shops. So it happened that "Shorty" was gradually winning thetitle of a thirty-third degree "booze-fighter, " and passengers on anyafternoon train who took the trouble to glance in at a wide-open doorjust Atlanticward of the station might have beheld him with his back tothe track and one foot slightly raised and resting lightly and with thenonchalance of long practice on a gas-pipe that had missed itslegitimate mission. In fact "Shorty" had come to that point where hewould rather be caught in church than found dead without a bottle onhim, and arriving home overflowing with joy about midnight slept awaymost of the day in 47 that he might spend as much of the night as theearly closing laws of the Zone permitted at the amusement headquartersof Empire. 

With these few hints of the life that raged beneath the roof of 47 itmay perhaps be comprehensible, without going into detail, why I came tocontemplate a change of quarters. I detest a kicker. I have small usefor any but the man who will take his allotted share with the rest ofthe world without either whining or snarling. Yet when an officialgovernment census enumerator falls asleep on the edge of a tenementwashtub with a question dead on his lips, or solemnly sets down acrow-black Jamaican as "white, " it is Uncle Sam who is suffering andtime for correction. 

But it is one thing for a Canal Zone employee to resolve to move, andquite another to carry out that resolution. Nero was a meek, unassertive, submissive, tractable little chap, keenly sensible to thesufferings of his fellows, compared with a Zone quartermaster. So thefirst time I ventured to push open the screen door next to the postoffice I was grateful to escape unmaimed. But at last, when I had donea whole month's penance in 47, I resorted to strategy. On March first Ientered the dreaded precinct shielded behind "the boss" with hiscontagious smile, and the musical quartermaster of Empire wasoverthrown and defeated, and I marched forth clutching in one hand anew "assignment to quarters. "

That night I moved. The new, or more properly the older, room was inHouse 35, a one-story building of the old French type, many of whichthe Americans revamped upon taking possession of the Isthmianjunk-heap, across and a bit down the graveled street. It was a singleroom, with no roommate to question, which I might decorate andotherwise embellish according to my own personal idiosyncrasies. At theback, with a door between, dwelt the superintendent of the Zonetelephone system, with a convenient instrument on his table. In short, fortune seemed at last to be grinning broadly upon me. 

But--the sequel. I hate to mention it. I won't. It's absurdlycommonplace. Commonplace? Not a bit of it. He was a champion, an artistin his specialty. How can I have used that word in connection with hisincomparable performance? Or attempt to give a hint of life on theCanal Zone without mentioning the most conspicuous factor in it?

He lived in the next room south, a half-inch wooden partition reachinghalf-way to the ceiling between his pillow and mine. By day he lay onhis back in the right hand seat of a locomotive cab with his hand onthe throttle and the soles of his shoes on the boiler plate--he wasjust long enough to fit into that position without wrinkling. Duringthe early evening he lay on his back in a stout Mission rocking-chairon the front porch of House 35, Empire, C. Z. And about 8 P. M. Daily heretired within to lie on his back on a regulation I. C. C. Metalcot--they are stoutly built--one pine half-inch from my own. Obviouslytwenty-four hours a day of such onerous occupation had left some slighteffects on his figure. His shape was strikingly similar to that of apush-ball. Had he fallen down at the top of Ancon or Balboa hill itwould have been an even bet whether he would have rolled down sidewiseor endwise--if his general type of build and specifications will permitany such distinction. 

When I first came upon him, reposing serenely in the porchrocking-chair on the cushion that upholstered his spinal column, I waspleased. Clearly he was no "rough-neck"--he couldn't have been and kepthis figure. There was no question but that he was perfectly harmless;his stories ought to prove cheerful and laugh-provoking and kindly. Hisvery presence seemed to promise to raise several degrees the merrimentin that corner of House 85. 

It did. Toward eight, as I have hinted, he transferred fromrocking-chair to cot. He was not afflicted with troublesome nerves. Attimes he was an entire minute in falling asleep. Usually, however, histime was something under the half; and he slept with the innocent, undisturbed sleep of a babe for at least twelve unbroken hours, unlessthe necessity of getting across the "cut" to his engine absolutelyprohibited. Just there was the trouble. His first gentle, slumberousbreath sounded like a small boy sliding down the sheet-iron roof of 35. His second resembled a force of carpenters tearing out the half-grownpartitions. His third--but mere words are an absurdity. At times thenoises from his gorilla-like throat softened down till one merelyfancied himself in the hog-corral of a Chicago stockyards; at others weprayed that we might at once be transferred there. A thousand timesduring the night we were certain he was on the very point of choking todeath, and sat up in bed praying he wouldn't, and offering our month'ssalary to charity if he would; and through all our fatiguing anguish hesnorted undisturbedly on. In House 35 he was known as "the Sloth. " Itwas a gentle and kindly title. 

There were a few inexperienced inmates who had not yet utterly given uphope. The long hours of the night were spent in solemn conference. Pounding on the walls with hammers, chairs, and shoe-heels was likesinging a lullaby. One genius invented a species of foghorn whichproved very effective--in waking up all Empire east of the tracks, except "the Sloth. " Some took to dropping their heavier and moredispensable possessions over the partition. One memorable night afellow-sufferer cast over a young dry-goods box which, bouncing fromthe snorer's figure to the floor, caused him to lose a beat--one; andthe feat is still one of the proud memories of 35. On Sundays when allthe rest of the world was up and shaved and breakfasted and off on the8:39 of a brilliant, sunny day to Panama, "the Sloth" would be stillimperturbably snorting and choking in the depths of his cot. And in theevening, as the train roamed back through the fresh cool jungle duskand deposited us at Empire station, and we crossed the wooden bridgebefore the hotel and began to climb the graveled path behind, hopingagainst hope that we might find crape on that door, from the nightahead would break on our cars a sound as of a hippopotamus strugglingwildly against going down for the third and last time. 

Most annoying of all, "the Sloth" was not even a bona fide bachelor. Heproudly announced that, though he was a model of marital virtue, he hadnot lived with his wife in many years. I never heard a man who knew himby night ask why. It was close upon criminal negligence on the part ofthe I. C. C. To overlook its opportunity in this matter. There were somany, many uninhabited hilltops on the Zone where a privateSloth-dwelling might have been slapped together from the remains offalling towns at Gatun end; near it a grandstand might even have beenerected and admission charged. Or at least the daily climb to it wouldhave helped to reduce a push-ball figure, and thereby have improved thegeneral appearance of the Canal Zone force. 

CHAPTER IV

One morning early in March "the boss" and I crossed the suspensionbridge over the canal. A handcar and six husky negroes awaited us, andwe were soon bumping away over temporary spurs through the jungle, tostrike at length the "relocation" opposite the giant tree near BasObispo that marked the northern limit of our district. 

The P. R. R. , you will recall, has been operating across the Isthmussince 1855. When the United States took over the Zone in 1904 it builta new double-tracked line of five-foot gauge for nearly the wholeforty-seven miles. Much of this, however, runs through territory soonto be covered by Gatun Lake, nearly all the rest of it is on the wrongside of the canal. An almost entirely new line, therefore, is beingbuilt through the virgin jungle on the South American side of thecanal, which is to be the permanent line and is known in Zone parlanceas the "relocation. " This is forty-nine miles in length from Panama toColon, and is single track only, as freight traffic especially isexpected, very naturally, to be lighter after the canal is opened. Already that portion from the Chagres to the Atlantic had been put inuse--on February fifteenth, to be exact; and the time was not far offwhen the section within our district--from Gamboa to PedroMiguel--would also be in operation. 

That portion runs through the wilderness a mile or more back from thecanal, through jungled hills so dense with vegetation one could onlymake one's way through it with the ubiquitous machete of the nativejungle-dweller, except where tiny trails appear that lead to squatters'thatched huts thrown together of tin, dynamite and dry-goods boxes andjungle reeds in little scattered patches of clearing. Some of thesehills have been cut half away for the new line--great generous "cuts, "for to the giant 90-ton steam-shovels a few hundred cubic yards ofearth more or less is of slight importance. All else is virtuallyimpenetrable jungle. Travelers by rail across the Isthmus, as no doubtmany ships' passengers will be in the years to come while their steameris being slowly raised and lowered to and from the eighty-five-footlake, will see little of the canal, --a glimpse of the Bas Obispo "cut"at Gamboa and little else from the time they leave Gatun till theyreturn to the present line at Pedro Miguel station. But in compensationthey will see some wondrous jungle scenery, --a tangled tropicalwilderness with great masses of bush flowers of brilliant hues, gigantic ferns, countless palm and banana trees, wonderfully slenderarrow-straight trees rising smooth and branchless more than a hundredfeet to end in an immense bouquet of brilliant purplish-hue blossoms. 

"The boss" barely noticed these things. One quickly grows accustomed tothem. Why, Americans who have been down on the Zone for a year don'tknow there's a palm-tree on the Isthmus--or at least they do notremember there were no palm-trees in Keokuk, Iowa, when they left there. 

Along this new-graveled line, still unused except by work-trains, werode in our six negro-power car, dropping off in the gravel each timewe caught sight of any species of human being. Every little way was agang, averaging some thirty men, distinct in nationality, --Antiguansshoveling gravel, Martiniques snarling and quarreling as they wallowedthigh-deep in swamps and pools, a company of Greeks unloadingtrain-loads of ties, Spaniards leisurely but steadily grading andsurfacing, track bands of "Spigoties" chopping away the aggressivejungle with their machetes--the one task at which the native Panamanian(or Colombian, as many still call themselves) is worth his brass-check. Every here and there we caught labor's odds and ends, diminutive"water-boys, " likewise of varying nationality, a negro switch-boydozing under the bit of shelter he had rigged up of jungle ferns, frightening many a black laborer speechless as we pounced upon himemerging from his "soldiering" in the jungle; occasionally even anative bushman on his way to market from his palm-thatched homegenerations old back in the bush, who has scarcely noticed yet that thecanal is being dug, fell into our hands and was inexorably set down inspite of all protest unless he could prove beyond question that he hadalready been "taken" or lived beyond the Zone line. 

Thus we scribbled incessantly on, even through the noon hour, dragginggangs one by one away from their tasks, shaking laborers out of thebrief after-lunch siesta in a patch of shade. "The boss" was hamperedby having only two languages where ten were needed. In the earlyafternoon he went on to Paraiso to feed himself and the traction power, while I held the fort. Soon after rain fell, a sort of advance agent ofthe rainy season, a sudden tropical downpour that ran in rivulets downacross the pink card-boards and my victims. Yet strange to note, thewriting of the medium soft pencil remained as clear and unsmudged as inthe driest weather, and so clean a rain was it that it did not evensoil my white cotton shirt. I continued unheeding, only to note withsurprise a few minutes later that the sun was shining on the densegreen jungle about me as brilliantly as ever and that I was dry againas when I had set out in the morning. 

"The boss" returned, and when I had eaten the crackers and the bottleof pink lemonade he brought, we pushed on toward the Pacific. Till atlength in mid-afternoon we came to the top of the descent to PedroMiguel and knew that the end of our district was at hand. So powerfulwas the breeze from the Atlantic that our six man-power engine sweatedprofusely as they toiled against it, even on the downgrade of thereturn to Empire. 

To "Scotty" had been assigned my Empire "recalls" and I had been givena new and virgin territory, --namely, the town of Paraiso. It lies"somewhat back from the village street, " that is, the P. R. R. Indeed, trains do not deign to notice its existence except on Sundays. Butthere is the temporary bridge over the canal which few engineersventure to "snake her across" at any great speed, and the enumeratorhoused in Empire need not even be a graduate "hobo" to be able to dropoff there a bit after seven in the morning and prance away up thechamois path into the town. 

Wherever on the Zone you espy a town of two-story skeleton screenedbuildings scattered over hills, with winding gravel roads and trees andflowers between there you may be sure live American "gold" employees. Yet somehow the Canal Commission had dodged the monotony you expected, somehow they have broken up the grim lines that make so dismal thebest-intentioned factory town. There are hints that the builders haveheard somewhere of the science of landscape gardening. At times thesesame houses are deceiving, for all I. C. C. Buildings bear a strongfamily resemblance, and it is only at the door that you know whether itis bachelors' quarters, a family residence, or the supreme court. 

From the outside world "P'reeso" scarcely draws a glance of attention;but once in it you find a whole Zone town with all the accustomedparaphernalia of I. C. C. Hotel and commissary, hospital and policestation, all ruled over and held in check by the famous "Colonel" incommand of the latter. Moreover Paraiso will some day come again intoher own, when the "relocation" opens and brings her back on the mainline, while proud Culebra and haughty Empire, stranded on a raillessshore of the canal, will wither and waste away and even their broadmacadamed roads will sink beneath a second-growth jungle. 

Renson had come to lend assistance. He set to work among the negrocabins, the upper gallery seats of Paraiso's amphitheater of hills, forRenson had been a free agent for more than a month now and was notexactly in a condition to interview American housewives. My own taskbegan down at the row of inhabited box-cars, and so on through shacksand tenements with many Spanish laborers' wives. Then toward noon thelabor-train screamed in, with two "gold" coaches and many opencattle-cars with long benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily sixhundred men in the six cars, who swept in upon the town like a floodthrough a suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused andshrieked away again. 

Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds ofsun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-mellaround a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumblefood--yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days wheneach man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour tocook himself an unsanitary lunch. We jotted them down at express speed, with changes of tongue so abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, andin the place where our minds should have been sounded only a confusedchaotic uproar like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglotdictionary. Then suddenly I landed a Russian! It was the final straw. Ilike to speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting totalk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating "French" ofMartinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I willNOT run the risk of talking Russian. It was the second and last caseduring my census days when I was forced to call for interpretativeassistance. 

At best we caught only a small percentage at each table before thecrowd had wolfed and melted away. An odd half dozen more, perhaps, wefound stretched out in the shade under the mess-hall and neighboringquarters before the imperative screech of the labor-train whistle endeda scene that must be several times repeated, and now left us silent andalone, to wander wet and weary to the nearest white bachelor quarters, there to lie on our backs an hour or more till the polyglot jumble ofwords in the back of our heads had each climbed again to its propershelf. 

Speaking of white bachelor quarters, therein lay the enumerator'sgreatest problem. The Spaniard or the Jamaican is in nine cases out often fluently familiar with his companion's antecedents and pedigree. Hecan generally furnish all the information the census department callsfor. But it is quite otherwise with the American bachelor. He may knowhis room-mate's exact degree of skill at poker, he probably knows hisprivate opinion of "the Colonel, " he is sure to know his degree ofenmity to the prohibition movement; but he is not at all certain toknow his name and rarely indeed has he the shadow of a notion when andin what particular corner of the States he began the game of existence. So loose are ties down on the Zone that a man's room-mate might go offinto the jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for himfor a week. Especially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage of"Zoners, " with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating whereverthe job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of our past in ourown heads only. No wanderer of experience would dream of asking hisfellow where he came from. The answer would be too apt to be, "from thelast place. " So difficult did this matter become that I gave up rushingfor the bus to Pedro Miguel each evening and the even more distressingnecessity of catching that premature 6:30 train each morning in Empireand, packing a sheet and pillow and tooth-brush, moved down to Paraisothat I might spend the first half of the night in quest of theseelusive bits of bachelor information. 

Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued unabated. I had my firstexperience enumerating "gold" married quarters--white Americanfamilies; just enough for experience and not enough to suffer severely. The enrolling of West Indians was pleasanter. The wives of locomotiveengineers and steam-shovel cranemen were not infrequently superciliousladies who resented being disturbed during their "social functions" andlacked the training in politeness of Jamaican "mammies. " Living inParadise now under a paternal all-providing government, they seemed tohave forgotten the rolling-pin days of the past. It was here in Paraisothat I first encountered that strange, that wondrous strange custom oflying about one's age. Negro women never did. What more absurd, uncalled-for piece of dishonesty! Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs. Jonesnext door will succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit ofinformation? Little does she know the long prison sentence at "hardlabor" that stares me in the face for any such slip; to say nothing ofmy naturally incommunicative disposition. Or is she ashamed to let MEknow the truth?--unaware that all such information goes in at my earsand down my pencil to the pink card before me like a message over thewires, leaving no more trace behind. Surely she must know that I carenot a pencil-point whether she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor rememberwhich one minute after her screen door has slammed behind me--unlessshe has caused me to glance up in wonder at her silvering temples ofthirty-five when she simpers "twenty-two"--and to set her down as fortyto be on the safe side. Oh now, please, ladies, do not understand me asaccusing the American wives of Paraiso in general of this weakness. Thelarge majority were quite pleasant, frank, and overflowing with cheerygood sense. But the percentage who were not was far larger than I, whoam also an American, was pleased to find it. 

But doubly astonishing were the few cases of lying by proxy. A"clean-cut, " college-graduated civil engineer of thirty-two whom onewould have cited as an example of the best type of American, gave alldata concerning himself in an unimpeachable manner. His wife wasabsent. When the question of her age arose he gave it, with theslightest catch in his voice, as twenty. Now that might be all verywell. Men of thirty-two are occasionally so fortunate as to marry girlsof twenty. But a moment later the gentleman in question finds himselfannouncing that his wife has been living on the Zone with him since1907; and that she was born in New England! Thus is he tripped over hisown clothes-line. For New England girls do not marry at fifteen; motherwould not let them even if they would. 

I, too, had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescriptcabins on the upper rim of Paraiso that seem on the very verge ofpitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the jar ofthe next explosion, when one sunny mid-afternoon I caught sight ofRenson dejectedly trudging down across what might be called the"Maiden" of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge-hall. I took leave ofmy ebony hostess and descended. Renson's troubles were indeeddisheartening. Back in the jungled fringe of the town he had falleninto a swarm of Martiniques, and Renson's French being nothing morethan an unstudied mixture of English and Spanish, he had not gatheredmuch information. Moreover negro women from the French isles are enoughto frighten any virtuous young Marine. 

"What's the sense o' me tryin' to chew the fat in French?" askedRenson, with tears in his voice. "I ain't in no condition to work atthis census business any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed before threein the morning this week"--in his air was open suggestion that it wassome one else's fault--"Some day I'll be gettin' in bad, too. Thismornin' a fool nigger woman asked me if I didn't want her blackpickaninny I was enumeratin', thinkin' it was a good joke. You know howthese bush kids is runnin' around all over the country before a whiteman's brat could walk on its hind legs. 'Yes, ' I says, 'if I was goin'alligator huntin' an' needed bait!' I come near catchin' the brat up bythe feet an' beatin' its can off. I'm out o' luck any way, an'--"

The fact is Renson was aching to be "fired. " More than thirty days hadhe been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he returnedto the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out of cigarettes. Islipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes grew--for Renson wasas tractable as a child, rightly treated--and set him to takingJamaican tenements in the center of town, while I struck off into thejungled Martinique hills myself. 

There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a close. Myfirst pay-day had already come and gone and I had strolled up thegravel walk one noon-day to the Disembursing Office with my yellow paycertificate duly initialed by the examiner of accounts, and was handedmy first four twenty-dollar gold pieces--for hotel and commissary bookssadly reduce a good paycheck. Already one evening I had entered thecensus office to find "the boss" just peeling off his sweat-drippingundershirt and dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a daymule-back on the thither side of the canal; an utterly fruitless day, for not only had he failed during eight hours of plunging through thewilderness to find a single hut not already decorated with the"enumerated" tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands on when thenoon-hour overhauled him far from the ministrations of "Ben" and thebreeze-swept veranda of Empire hotel. 

It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson's linguistic troublesthat "the boss" came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy mule. In hiseagerness to "clean up" the territory we fell to corraling negroeseverywhere, in the streets, at work, buying their supplies at thecommissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside trees, anywhere andeverywhere, until at last in his excitement "the boss" let his mediumsoft pencil slip by the column for color and dashed down theabbreviation for "mixed" after the question, "Married or Single?" Whichmay have been near enough the truth of the case, but suggested it wastime to quit. So we marked Paraiso "finished except for recalls" andreturned to Empire. 

One by one our fellow-enumerators had dropped by the wayside, some bymutual agreement, some without any agreement whatever. Renson was nowrelieved from census duty, to his great joy, there remained but four ofus, --"the boss" and "Mac" in the office, "Scotty" and I outside. A deepconference ensued and, as if I had not had good luck enough already, itwas decided that we two should go through the "cut" itself. It was likeoffering us a salary to view all the Great Work in detail, forvirtually all the excavation of any importance on the Zone lay withinthe confines of our district. 

So one day "Scotty" and I descended at the girderless railroad bridgeand, taking each one side of the canal, set out to canvass its everynook and cranny. The canal as it then stood was about the width of twocity blocks, an immense chasm piled and tumbled with broken rock andearth, in the center a ditch already filled with grimy water, on eitherside several levels of rough rock ledges with sheer rugged stone faces;for the hills were being cut away in layers each far above the other. High above us rose the jagged walls of the "cut" with towns hanging bytheir fingernails all along its edge, and ahead in the abysmal, smokydistance the great channel gashed through Culebra mountain. 

The different levels varied from ten to twenty feet one above theother, each with a railroad on it, back and forth along whichincessantly rumbled and screeched dirt-trains full or empty, haltingbefore the steam-shovels, that shivered and spouted thick black smokeas they ate away the rocky hills and cast them in great giant handsfulon the train of one-sided flat-cars that moved forward bit by bit atthe flourish of the conductor's yellow flag. Steam-shovels that seemedhuman in all except their mammoth fearless strength tore up the solidrock with snorts of rage and the panting of industry, now and thenflinging some troublesome, stubborn boulder angrily upon the cars. Yetthey could be dainty as human fingers too, could pick up a railroadspike or push a rock gently an inch further across the car. Each wasrun by two white Americans, or at least what would prove such when theyreached the shower-bath in their quarters--the craneman far out on theshovel arm, the engineer within the machine itself with a labyrinth oflevers demanding his unbroken attention. Then there was of course agang of negroes, firemen and the like, attached to each shovel. 

All the day through I climbed and scrambled back and forth between thedifferent levels, dodging from one track to another and along the rockyfloor of the canal, needing eyes and ears both in front and behind, notmerely for trains but for a hundred hidden and unknown dangers to keepthe nerves taut. Now and then a palatial motorcar, like some rail-roadbreed of taxi, sped by with its musical insistent jingling bells, usually with one of the countless parties of government guests ortourists in spotless white which the dry season brings. Dirt-trainskept the right of way, however, for the Work always comes first atPanama. Or it might be the famous "yellow car" itself with members ofthe Commission. Once it came all but empty and there dropped offinconspicuously a man in baggy duck trousers, a black alpaca coat ofmany wrinkles; and an unassuming straw hat, a white-haired man withblue--almost babyish blue-eyes, a cigarette dangling from his lips ashe strolled about with restless yet quiet energy. There has been noflash and glitter of military uniforms on the Zone since the Frenchsailed for home, but every one knew "the Colonel" for all that, thesoldier who has never "seen service, " who has never heard the shrapnelscream by overhead, yet to whom the world owes more thanks than sixconquering generals rolled into one. 

Scores of "trypod" and "Star" drills, whole battalions of deafeningmachines run by compressed air brought from miles away, are poundingand grinding and jamming holes in the living rock. After them willpresently come nonchalantly strolling along gangs of the ubiquitousblack "powder-men" and carelessly throw down boxes of dynamite andpound the drill-holes full thereof and tamp them down ready to "blow"at 11:30 and 5:30 when the workmen are out of range, --those mightyexplosions that twelve times a week set the porch chairs of everyI. C. C. House on the Isthmus to rocking, and are heard far out at sea. 

Anywhere near the drills is such a roaring and jangling that I mustbellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire gamut ofsound-waves surrounds and enfolds me, and with it all the powerfulAtlantic breeze sweeps deafeningly through the channel. Down in thebottom of the canal if one step behind anything that shuts off thebreeze it is tropically hot; yet up on the edge of the chasm above, thetrees are always nodding and bowing before the ceaseless wind from offthe Caribbean. Scores of "switcheros" drowse under their sheet-ironwigwams, erected not so much as protection from the sun, for thedrowsers are mostly negroes and immune to that, as from young rocksthat the dynamite blasts frequently toss a quarter-mile. Then over itall hang heavy clouds of soft-coal dust from trains and shovels, shifting down upon the black, white and mixed, and the enumeratoralike; a dirty, noisy, perilous, enjoyable job. 

Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or three gangs workingtogether at the same task. Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing gangs, dynamite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with shovel and pickand crowbar, gangs down on the floor of the canal, gangs far up thesteep walls of cut rock, gangs stretching away in either direction tillthose far off look like upright bands of the leaf-cutting ants ofPanamanian jungles; gangs nearly all, whatever their nationality, inthe blue shirts and khaki trousers of the Zone commissary, giving apeculiar color scheme to all the scene. 

Now and then the boss is a stony-eyed American with a black cigarclamped between his teeth. More often he is of the same nationality asthe workers, quite likely from the same town, who jabbers a littleimitation English. Which is one of the reasons why a force of "timeinspectors" is constantly dodging in and out over the job, time-bookand pencil in hand, lest some fellow-townsman of the boss be earninghis $1. 50 a day under the shade of a tree back in the jungle. Here areBasques in their boinas, preferring their native "Euscarra" to Spanish;French "niggers" and English "niggers" whom it is to the interest ofpeace and order to keep as far apart as possible; occasionally a fewsunburned blond men in a shovel gang, but they prove to be Teutons orScandinavians; laborers of every color and degree--except Americanlaborers, more than conspicuous by their absence. For the Americannegro is an untractable creature in large numbers, and the caste systemthat forbids white Americans from engaging in common labor side by sidewith negroes is to be expected in an enterprise of which the leadersare not only military men but largely southerners, however many may beshivering in the streets of Chicago or roaming hungrily through thebyways of St. Louis. It is well so, perhaps. None of us who feels anaffection for the Zone would wish to see its atmosphere lowered fromwhat it is to the brutal depths of our railroad construction camps inthe States. 

The attention of certain state legislatures might advantageously becalled to the Zone Spaniard's drinking-cup. It is really a tin can onthe end of a long stick, cover and all. The top is punched sieve-likethat the water may enter as it is dipped in the bucket with which thewater-boy strains along. In the bottom is a single small hole out ofwhich spurts into the drinker's mouth a little stream of water as heholds it high above his head, as once he drank wine from his leatherbota in far-off Spain. Many a Spanish gang comes entirely from the sametown, notably Salamanca or Avila. I set them to staring and chatteringby some simple remark about their birthplace: "Fine view from the Paseodel Rastro, eh?" "Does the puente romano still cross the river?" But Ihad soon to cease such personalities, for picks and shovels lay idle aslong as I remained in sight and Uncle Sam was the loser. 

So many were the gangs that I advanced barely a half-mile during thisfirst day and, lost in my work, forgot the hour until it was suddenlyrecalled by the insistent, strident tooting of whistles that forewarnsthe setting-off of the dynamite charges from the little red electricboxes along the edge of the "cut. " I turned back toward Paraiso and, all but stumbling over little red-wound wires everywhere on the ground, dodging in and out, running forward, halting or suddenly retreating, Iworked my way gradually forward, while all the world about me wasupheaving and spouting and belching forth to the heavens, as if I hadbeen caught in the crater of a volcano as it suddenly erupted withoutwarning. The history of Panama is strewn with "dynamite stories. " Eventhe French had theirs in their sixteen per cent, of the excavation ofCulebra; in American annals there is one for every week. Three daysbefore, one of my Empire friends set off one afternoon for a strollthrough the "cut" he had not seen for a year. In a retired spot he cameupon two negroes pounding an irregular bundle. "What you doing, boys?"he inquired with idle curiosity. "Jes' a brealdn' up dis yere dynamite, boss, " languidly answered one of the blacks. My friend was one of thoseapprehensive, over-cautious fellows so rare on the Zone. Without somuch as taking his leave he set off at a run. Some two car-lengthsbeyond an explosion pitched him forward and all but lifted him off hisfeet. When he looked back the negroes had left. Indeed neither of themhas reported for work since. 

Then there was "Mac's" case. In his ambition for census efficiency"Mac" was in the habit of stopping workmen wherever he met them. Oneday he encountered a Jamaican carrying a box of dynamite on his headand, according to his custom, shouted:

"Hey, boy! Had your census taken yet?"

"What dat, boss?" cried the Jamaican with wide-open eyes, as he threwthe box at "Mac's" feet and stood at respectful attention. 

Somehow "Mac" lacked a bit of his old zealousness thereafter. 

On the second day I pushed past Cucaracha, scene of the greatest"slide" in the history of the canal when forty-seven acres went intothe "cut, " burying under untold tons of earth and rock steam-shovelsand railroads, "Star" and "trypod" drills, and all else insight--except the "rough-necks, " who are far too fast on their feet tobe buried against their will. One by one I dragged shovel gangs away toa distance where my shouting could be heard, one by one I commandeddrillmen to shut off their deafening machines, all day I dodgedswitching, snorting trains, clambered by steep rocky paths, or laddersfrom one level to another, howling above the roar of the "cut" thetime-worn questions, straining my ear to catch the answer. Many a negrodid not know the meaning of the word "census, " and must have itexplained to him in words of one syllable. Many a time I climbed tosome lofty rock ledge lined with drills and, gesticulating like asemaphore in signal practice, caught at last the wandering attention ofa negro, to shout sore-throated above the incessant pounding ofmachines and the roaring of the Atlantic breeze:

"Hello, boy! Census taken yet?"

A long vacant stare, then at last, perhaps, the answer:

"Oh, yes sah, boss. "

"When and where?"

"In Spanish Town, Jamaica, three year ago, sah. "

Which was not an attempt to be facetious but an answer in allseriousness. Why should not one census, like one baptism, suffice for alife-time? It was fortunate that enumerators were not accustomed tocarry deadly weapons. 

Quick changes from negro to Spanish gangs demonstrated beyond allfuture question how much more native intelligence has the white man. Rarely did I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice, still less askhim to repeat the answer. His replies came back sharp and swift as apelota from a cesta. West Indians not only must hear the question anaverage of three times but could seldom give the simplest informationclearly enough to be intelligible, though ostensibly speaking English. A Spanish card one might fill out and be gone in less time than thenegro could be roused from his racial torpor. Yet of the Spaniards onthe Zone surely seventy per cent, were wholly illiterate, while thenegroes from the British Weat Indies, thanks to their good fortune inbeing ruled over by the world's best colonist, could almost invariablyread and write; many of those shoveling in the "cut" have been trainedin trigonometry. 

Few are the "Zoners" now who do not consider the Spaniard the bestworkman ever imported in all the sixty-five years from the railroadsurveying to the completion of the canal. The stocky, muscle-boundlittle fellows come no longer to America as conquistadores, but toshovel dirt. And yet more cheery, willing workers, more law-abidingsubjects are scarcely to be found. It is unfortunate we could not haveimported Spaniards for all the canal work; even they have naturallylearned some "soldiering" from the example of lazy negroes who, wherelaborers must be had, are a bit better than no labor--though not much. 

The third day came, and high above me towered the rock cliffs ofCulebra's palm-crowned hill, steam-shovels approaching the summit inechelon, here and there an incipient earth and rock "slide" dribblingwarningly down. He who still fancies the digging of the canal anordinary task should have tramped with us through just our section, halting to speak to every man in it, climbing out of this man-madecanon twice a day, a strenuous climb even near its ends, while atCulebra one looks up at all but unscalable mountain walls on eitherside. 

From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad that Americans are makinglight of catastrophies on the Isthmus, that they cover up their greatdisasters by a strict censorship of news. The latter is mere absurdity. As to catastrophies, a great "slide" or a premature dynamite explosionare serious disaster to Americans on the job just as they would be toEuropeans. But whereas the continental European would sit down beforethe misfortune and weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on hishands, and pitches in to shovel the "slide" out again. He isn'tbelittling the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has gotto be dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on theZone. Amid all the childish snarling of "Spigoties, " the back-biting ofEurope, the congressional wrangles, the Cabinet politics, the man onthe job, --"the Colonel, " the average American, the "rough-neck"--goesright on digging the canal day by day as if he had never heard a rumorof all this outside noise. 

Mighty is the job from one point of view; yet tiny from another. Withall his enormous equipment, his peerless ingenuity, and his feverishactivity all little man has succeeded in doing is to scratch a littlesurface wound in Mother Earth, cutting open a few superficial veins, ofwater, that trickle down the rocky face of the "cut. "

By March twelfth we had carried our task past and under Empiresuspension bridge, and the end of the "cut" was almost in sight. Thatday I clawed and scrambled a score of times up the face of rock walls. I zigzagged through long rows of negroes pounding holes in rock ledges. I stumbled and splashed my way through gangs of Martinique "muckers. " Islid down the face of government-made cliffs on the seat of mycommissary breeches. I fought my way up again to stalk through longlines of men picking away at the dizzy edge of sheer precipices. Irolled down in the sand and rubble of what threatened to develop into"slides. " I crawled under snorting steam-shovels to drag out besootednegroes--negroes so besooted I had to ask them their color--whiledodging the gigantic swinging shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie"blasts and rocks of the size of drummers' trunks that spilled from itas it swung. I climbed up into the quivering monster itself tointerrupt the engineer at his levers, to shout at the craneman on hisbeam. I sprang aboard every train that was not running at full speed, walking along the running-board into the cab; if not to "get" theengineer at least to gain new life from his private ice-water tank. Iscrambled over tenders and quarter-miles of "Lidgerwood flats" piledhigh with broken rock and earth, to scream at the American conductorand his black brakemen, often to find myself, by the time I had setdown one of them, carried entirely out of my district, to Pedro Miguelor beyond the Chagres, and have to "hit the grit" in "hobo" fashion andcatch something back to the spot where I left off. In short I pokedinto every corner of the "cut" known to man, bawling in theNovember-first voice of a presidential candidate to everything introusers:

"Eh! 'Ad yer census taken yet?"

And what was my reward? From the northern edge of Empire to where the"cut" sinks away into the Chagres and the low, flat country beyond, Ienrolled--just thirteen persons. It was then and there, though it stilllacked an hour of noon, that I ceased to be a census enumerator. Withslow and deliberate step I climbed out of the canal and across a pathedfield to Bas Obispo and, sitting down in the shade of her station, patiently awaited the train that would carry me back to Empire. 

Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven Zone residents had Ienrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these wereJamaicans. Of the states Pennsylvania was best represented. Martiniquenegroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Panamanians were some eighty per centilliterate; of some three hundred of the first only a half dozen evenclaimed to read and write; and non-wedlock was virtually universalamong them. 

Rumor has it that there are seventy-two separate states anddependencies represented on the Isthmus. My own cards showed a fewless. Most conspicuous absences, besides American negroes, were nativesof Honduras, of four countries of South America, of most of Africa, andof entire Australia. That this was largely due to chance was shown bythe fact that my fellow-enumerators found persons from all thesecountries. 

I had enrolled persons born in the following places: All the UnitedStates except three or four states in the far northwest; Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Canal Zone, Colombia, Venezuela, British Guiana (Demarara), French and DutchGuiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile, Cuba, Hayti and SantoDomingo, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent, Trinidad, Saint Lucia, Montserrat, Dominica, Nevis, Nassau, Eleuthera and Inagua, Martinique, Guadalupe, Saint Thomas (Danish West Indies), Curacao and Tobago, England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, France, Spain, Andorra, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Servia, Turkey, Canary Islands, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, India (from Tuticorin to Lahore), China, Japan, Egypt, Sierra Leone, South Africa and--the High Seas. 

"Where you born, boy?" I had run across a wrinkled old negro who hadworked more than thirty years for the P. R. R. 

"'Deed ah don' know, boss, "

"Oh, come! Don't know where you were born?" "Fo' Gawd, boss, ah'stellin' yo de truff. Ah don know, 'cause ah born to sea. "

"Well, what country are you a subject of?"

"Truly ah cahn't say, boss. "

"Well what nationality was your father?"

"Ah neveh see him, sah. " "Well then where the devil did you first landafter you were born?"

"'Deed ah cahn't say, boss. T'ink it were one o' dem islands. Reckonah's a subjec' o' de' worl', boss. "

Weeks afterward the population of Uncle Sam's ten by fifty-mile stripof tropics was found to have been on February first, 1912, 62, 810. No, anxious reader, I am not giving away inside information; the source ofmy remarks is the public prints. Of these about 25, 000 were Britishsubjects (West Indian negroes with very few exceptions). Of the entirepopulation 37, 428 were employed by the U. S. Government. Of whiteAmericans, of the Brahmin caste of the "gold" roll, there were employedon the Zone but 5, 228. 

CHAPTER V

Police headquarters presented an unusual air of preoccupation nextmorning. In the corner office the telephone rang often andimperatively, several times erect figures in khaki and broad "Texas"hats flashed by the doorway, the drone of earnest conference sounded afew minutes, and the figures flashed as suddenly out again into theworld. In the inner office I glanced once more in review through the"Rules and Regulations. " The Zone, too, was now familiar ground, and asfor the third requirement for a policeman--to know the Zone residentsby sight--a strange face brought me a start of surprise, unless itbeamed above the garb that shouted "tourist. " Now all I needed was afew hours of conference and explanation on the duties, rights, andprivileges of policemen; and that of course would come as soon asleisure again settled down over headquarters. 

Musing which I was suddenly startled to my feet by "the Captain"appearing in the doorway. 

"Catch the next train to Balboa;" he said. "You've got four minutes. You'll find Lieutenant Long on board. Here are the people to look outfor. "

He thrust into my hands a slip of paper, from another direction therewas tossed at me a new brass-check and "First-Class Private" policebadge No. 88, and I was racing down through Ancon. In the meadow belowthe Tivoli I risked time to glance at the slip of paper. On it were thenames of an ex-president and two ministers of a frowsy little SouthAmerican republic during whose rule a former president and his henchmenhad been brutally murdered by a popular uprising in the very capitalitself. 

In the first-class coach I found Lieutenant Long, towering so far aboveall his surroundings as to have been easily recognized even had he notbeen in uniform. Beside him sat Corporal Castillo of the"plain-clothes" squad, a young man of forty, with a high forehead, astubby black mustache, and a chin that was decisive without beingaggressive. 

"Now here's the Captain's idea, " explained the Lieutenant, as the trainswung away around Ancon hill, "We'll have to take turns mounting guardover them, of course. I'll have to talk Spanish, and nobody'd have tolook at Castillo more than once to know he was born up in some crack inthe Andes. "--Which was one of the Lieutenant's jokes, for the Corporal, though a Colombian, was as white, sharp-witted, and energetic as anyAmerican on the Zone. --"But no one to look at him would suspect thatFr--French, is it?"

"Franck. "

"Oh, yes, that Franck could speak Spanish. We 'll do our best toinflate that impression, and when it comes your turn at guard-mount youcan probably let several little things of interest drift in at yourears. "

"I left headquarters before the Captain had time to explain, " Isuggested. 

"Oh!" said the Lieutenant. "Well, here it is in a spectacle-case, asour friend Kipling would put it. We're on our way to Culebra Island. There are now in quarantine there three men who arrived yesterday fromSouth America. They are members of the party of the murdered president. To-day there will arrive and also be put in hock the three gents whosenames you have there. Now we have a private inside hunch that the threealready here have come up particularly and specifically to prepare forthe funeral of the three who are arriving. Which is no hair off ourbrows, except it's up to us to see they don't pull off any littlestunts of that kind on Zone territory. "

At least this police business was starting well; if this was a sampleit would be a real job. 

The train had stopped and we were climbing the steps of Balboa policestation; for without the co-operation of the "Admiral of the PacificFleet" we could not reach Culebra Island. 

"By the way, I suppose you're well armed?" asked the Lieutenant in hishigh querulous voice, as we drank a last round of ice-water preparatoryto setting out again. 

"Em--I've got a fountain pen, " I replied. "I haven't been a policemantwenty minutes yet, and I was appointed in a hurry. "

"Fine!" cried "the Admiral" sarcastically, snatching open the door of acloset beside the desk. "With a warm job like this on hand! You knowwhat these South Americans are--" with a wink at the Lieutenant thatwas meant also for Castillo, who stood with his felt hat on the back ofhis head and a far-away look in his eyes. 

"Yah, mighty dangerous--around meal time, " said the Corporal; though atthe same time he drew from a hip pocket a worn leather holstercontaining a revolver, and examined it intently. 

Meanwhile "the Admiral" had handed me a massive No. 88 "Colt" withholster, a box of cartridges, and a belt that might easily have servedas a horse's saddle-girth. When I had buckled it on under my coat thearmament felt like a small boy clinging about my waist. 

We trooped on down a sort of railroad junction with a score ofabandoned wooden houses. It was here I had first landed on the Zone oneblazing Sunday nearly two months before and tramped away for some mileson a rusty sandy track along a canal already filled with water till ashort jungle path led me into my first Zone town. Already that seemedancient history. 

The police launch, manned by negro prisoners, with "the Admiral" in acushioned arm-chair at the wheel, was soon scudding away across thesunlit harbor, the breakwater building of the spoil of Culebra "cut" onour left, ahead the cluster of small islands being torn to pieces forUncle Sam's fortifications. The steamer being not yet sighted, we putin at Naos Island, where the bulky policeman in charge led us to dinnerat the I. C. C. Hotel, during which the noonday blasting on the Zonecame dully across to us. Soon after we were landing at the cementsidewalk of the island--where I had been a prisoner for a day inJanuary as my welcome to U. S. Territory--and were being greeted by thepocket edition doctor and the bay-windowed German who had been mywardens on that occasion. 

We found the conspirators at a table in a corridor of the first-classquarantine station. In the words of Lieutenant Long "they fully lookedthe part, " being of distinctly merciless cut of jib. They were roughlydressed and without collars, convincing proof of some nefarious design, for when the Latin-American entitled to wear them leaves off his whitecollar and his cane he must be desperate indeed. 

We "braced" them at once, marching down upon them as they weremurmuring with heads together over a mass of typewritten sheets. TheCorporal was delegated to inform them in his most urbane andhidalguezco Castilian that we were well acquainted with their errandand that we were come to frustrate by any legitimate means in our powerthe consummation of any such project on American territory. When thefirst paralyzed stare of astonishment that plans they had fanciedlocked in their own breasts were known to others had somewhat subsided, one of them assumed the spokesmanship. In just as courtly andsuperabundant language he replied that they were only too well aware ofthe inadvisability of carrying out any act against its sovereignty onU. S. Soil; that so long as they were on American territory they wouldconduct themselves in a most circumspect and caballeroso manner--"but, "he concluded, "in the most public street of Panama city the first timewe meet those three dogs--we shall spit in their faces--that's all, nada mas, " and the blazing eyes announced all too plainly what he meantby that figure of speech. 

That was all very well, was our smiling and urbane reply, but to be onthe safe side and merely as a matter of custom we were under theunfortunate necessity of requesting them to submit to the annoyance ofhaving their baggage and persons examined with a view to discoveringwhat weapons--

"Como no senores? All the examination you desire. " Which wasexceedingly kind of them. Whereupon, when the Lieutenant hadinterpreted to me their permission, we fell upon them and amidcountless expressions of mutual esteem gave them and their baggage sucha "frisking" as befalls a Kaffir leaving a South African diamond mine, and found them armed with--a receipt from the quarantine doctor for"one pearl-handled Smill and Wilson No. 32. " Either they reallyintended to postpone their little affair until they reached Panama, orthey had succeeded in concealing their weapons elsewhere. 

The doctor and his assistant were already being rowed out to thesteamer that was to bring the victims. They were to be lodged in a roomacross the corridor from the conspirators, which corridor it would beour simple duty to patrol with a view to intercepting any exchange ofstray lead. We fell to planning such division of the twenty-four hoursas should give me the most talkative period. The Lieutenant took thetrouble further to convince the trio of my total ignorance of Spanishby a distinct and elaborate explanation, in English, of the differencebetween the words "muchacho" and "muchacha. " Then we wandered down pastthe grimy steerage station to the shore end of the little wharf toawait the doctor and our proteges. 

The ocean breeze swept unhampered across the island; on its rocky shoresounded the dull rumble of waves, for the sea was rolling a bit now. The swelling tide covered inch by inch a sandy ridge that connected uswith another island, gradually drowning beneath its waters severalrusty old hulls. A little rocky wooded isle to the left cut off thefuture entrance to the canal. Some miles away across the bay on thelower slope of a long hill drowsed the city of Panama in brilliantsunshine; and beyond, the hazy mountainous country stretchedsouthwestward to be lost in the molten horizon. On a distant hill someIndian was burning off a patch of jungle to plant his corn. 

Meanwhile the Lieutenant and the Corporal had settled some Lombrosoproposition and fallen to reciting poetry. The former, who wasevidently a lover of melancholy, mouth-filling verse, was declaiming"The Raven" to the open sea. I listened in wonder. Was this then policetalk? I had expected rough, untaught fellows whose conversation at bestwould be pornographic rather than poetic. My astonishment swelled tothe bursting point when the Colombian not only caught up the poem wherethe Lieutenant left off but topped it off with that peerlesstranslation by Bonalde the Venezuelan, beginning:

 Una fosca media noche, cuando en tristes reflexiones Sobre mas de un raro infolio de olvidados cronicones--

And just then the quarantine launch swung around the neighboringisland. I tightened my horse belt and dragged the "Colt" around withineasy reach; and a moment later the doctor and his bulking understudystepped ashore--alone. 

"They didn't come, " said the former; "they were not allowed to leavetheir own country. "

"Hell and damnation, " said the Lieutenant at length in a calm, conversational tone of voice, with the air of a small boy who has beenwantonly robbed of a long-promised holiday but who is determined not tomake a scene over it. The Corporal seemed indifferent, and stood withthe far-away look in his eyes as if he were already busy with someother plans or worries. But then, the Corporal was married. As formyself, I had somehow felt from the first that it was too good to betrue. Adventure has steadily dodged me all my days. 

A half-hour later we were pitching across the bay toward Ancon hill, scaled bare on one end by the work of fortification like a Hinduhair-cut. The water came spitting inboard now and then, and dejectedsilence reigned within the craft. But spirits gradually revived andbefore we could make out the details of the wharf the Corporal's heartygenuine laughter and the Lieutenant's rousing carcajada were againdrifting across the water. At Balboa I unburdened myself of my shootinghardware and, catching the labor-train, was soon mounting the graveledwalk to Ancon police station. In the second-story squad-room of thebungalow were eight beds. But there were more than enough policemen togo round, and the legal occupant of the bunk I fell asleep in returnedfrom duty at midnight and I transferred to the still warm nest of a manon the "grave-yard" shift. 

"It's customary to put a man in uniform for a while first beforeassigning him to plain-clothes duty, " the Inspector was saying nextmorning when I finished the oath of office that had been omitted in thehaste of my appointment, "but we have waived that in your case becauseof the knowledge of the Zone the census must have given you. "

Thus casually was I robbed of the opportunity to display my manly formin uniform to tourists of trains and the Tivoli--tourists, I say, because the "Zoners" would never have noticed it. But we must allaccept the decrees of fate. 

That was the full extent of the Inspector's remarks; no mentionwhatever of the sundry little points the recruit is anxious to beenlightened upon. In government jobs one learns those details byexperience. For the time being there was nothing for me to do but todescend to the "gum-shoe" desk in Ancon station and sit in theswivel-chair opposite Lieutenant Long "waiting for orders. "

Toward noon a thought struck me. I swung the telephone around and "got"the Inspector. 

"All my junk is up in Empire yet, " I remarked. 

"All right, tell the desk-man down there to make you out a pass. Or--hold the wire! As long as you're going out, there's a prisoner overin Panama that belongs up in Empire. Go over and tell the Chief youwant Tal Fulano. "

I wormed my way through the fawning, neck-craning, many-shaded mob ofpolitical henchmen and obsequious petitioners into the sacred hushedprecincts of Panama police headquarters. A paunched "Spigoty" with ashifty eye behind large bowed glasses, vainly striving to exude dignityand wisdom, received me with the oily smirk of the Panamanianoffice-holder who feels the painful necessity of keeping on outwardlygood terms with all Americans. I flashed my badge and mentioned a name. A few moments later there was presented to me a sturdy, if somewhatflabby, young Spaniard carefully dressed and perfumed. We bowed likelife-long acquaintances and, stepping down to the street, entered acab. The prisoner, which he was now only in name, was a muscular fellowwith whom I should have fared badly in personal combat. I was whollyunarmed, and in a foreign land. All those sundry little unexplainedpoints of a policeman's duty were bubbling up within me. When theprisoner turned to remark it was a warm day should I warn him thatanything he said would be used against him? When he ordered the driverto halt before the "Panazone" that he might speak to some friendsshould I fiercely countermand the order? What was my duty when thefriends handed him some money and a package of cigars? Suppose heshould start to follow his friends inside to have a drink--but hedidn't. We drove languidly on down the avenue and up into Ancon, whereI heaved a genuine sigh of relief as we crossed the unmarked streetthat made my badge good again. The prisoner was soon behind padlocksand the money and cigars in the station safe. These and him and thetransfer card I took again with me into the foreign Republic in timefor the evening train. But he seemed even more anxious than I toattract no attention, and once in Empire requested that we take theshortest and most inconspicuous route to the police station; and myresponsibility was soon over. 

Many were the Z. P. Facts I picked up during the next few days in theswivel-chair. The Zone Police force of 1912 consisted of a Chief ofPolice, an Assistant Chief, two Inspectors, four Lieutenants, eightsergeants, twenty corporals, one hundred and seventeen "first-classpolicemen, " and one hundred and sixteen "policemen" (West Indiannegroes without exception, though none but an American citizen couldaspire to any white position); not to mention five clerks atheadquarters, who are quite worth the mentioning. "Policemen" wore thesame uniform as "first-class" officers, with khaki-covered helmetinstead of "Texas" hat and canvas instead of leather leggings, drewone-half the pay of a white private, were not eligible for advancement, and with some few notable exceptions were noted for what they did knowand the facility with which they could not learn. One Inspector was incharge of detective work and the other an overseer of the uniformedforce. Each of the Lieutenants was in charge of one-fourth of the Zonewith headquarters respectively at Ancon, Empire, Gorgona, andCristobal, and the sub-stations within these districts in charge ofsergeants, corporals, or experienced privates, according to importance. 

Years ago when things were yet in primeval chaos and the memorablesixth of February of 1904 was still well above the western horizonthere was gathered together for the protection of the newly-born CanalStrip a band of "bad men" from our ferocious Southwest, warranted tofeed on criminals each breakfast time, and in command of a man-eatingrough-rider. But somehow the bad men seemed unable to transplant tothis new and richer soil the banefulness that had thrived sosuccessfully in the land of sage-brush and cactus. The gourmandizingpromised to be chiefly at the criminal tables; and before long it wasnoted that the noxious gentlemen were gradually drifting back to theirnative sand dunes, and the rough-riding gave way to a more orderlystyle of horsemanship. Then bit by bit some men--just men without anyqualifying adjective whatever--began to get mixed up in the matter; oneafter another army lieutenants were detailed to help the thing along, until by and by they got the right army lieutenant and the right menand the Z. P. Grew to what it is to-day, --not the love, perhaps, butthe pride of every "Zoner" whose name cannot be found on some old"blotter. "

There are a number of ways of getting on the force. There is the broadand general high-way of being appointed in Washington and shipped downlike a nice fresh vegetable in the original package and delivered justas it left the garden without the pollution of alien hands. Thenthere's the big, impressive, broad-shouldered fellow with some life andmilitary service behind him, and the papers to prove it, who turns upon the Zone and can't help getting on if he takes the trouble to climbto headquarters. Or there are the special cases, like Marley forinstance. Marley blew in one summer day from some uncharted point ofthe compass with nothing but his hat and a winning smile on his brassyfeatures, and naturally soon drifted up the "Thousand Stairs. " ButMarley wasn't exactly of that manly build that takes "the Chief" and"the Captain" by storm; and there were suggestions on his young-oldface that he had seen perhaps a trifle too much of life. So he wipedthe sweat from his brow several times at the third-story landing onlyto find as often that the expected vacancy was not yet. Meanwhile thetropical days slipped idly by and Marley's "standin" with the owners ofI. C. C. Hotel-books began to strain and threaten to break away, andeverything sort of gave up the ghost and died. Everything, that is, except the winning smile. 'Til one afternoon with only that asset leftMarley met the department head on the grass-bordered path in front ofthe Episcopal chapel, just where the long descent ends and a man beginsto regain his tractable mood, and said Marley:

"Say, looka here, Chief. It's a question of eats with me. We can't putthis thing off much longer or--"

Which is why that evening's train carried Marley, with a police badgeand the little flat volume bound in imitation leather in his pocket, out to some substation commander along the line for the corporal incharge to break in and hammer down into that finished product, a ZonePoliceman. 

Incidentally Marley also illustrated some months later one of thespecial ways of getting off the force. It was still simpler. Going "onpass" to Colon to spend a little evening, Marley neglected to leave hisNo. 38 behind in the squad-room, according to Z. P. Rules. Which wascareless of him. For when his spirits reached that stage where herecognized what sport it would be to see the "Spigoty" policemen ofBottle Alley dance a western cancan he bethought him of the No. 38. Which accounts for the fact that the name of Marley can no longer befound on the rolls of the Z. P. But all this is sadly anticipating. 

Obviously, you will say, a force recruited from such dissimilar sourcesmust be a thing of wide and sundry experience. And obviously you areright. Could a man catch up the Z. P. By the slack of the khaki ridingbreeches and shake out their stories as a giant in need of carfaremight shake out their loose change, then might he retire to some sunnyhillside of his own and build him a sound-proof house with a swimmingpool and a revolving bookcase and a stable of riding horses, and causeto be erected on the front lawn a kneeling-place where publishers mightcome and bow down and beat their foreheads on the pavement. 

There are men in the Z. P. Who in former years have played horse withthe startled markets of great American cities; men whose voices willboom forth in the pulpit and whisper sage councils in the professionalin years to come; men whom doting parents have sent to Harvard--on whomit failed to take, except on their clothes--men who have gone down intothe Valley of the Shadow of Death and crawled on hands and kneesthrough the brackish red brook that runs at the bottom and come outagain smiling on the brink above. Careers more varied than Mexicansombreros one might hear in any Z. P. Squad-room--were not the Z. P. Somuch more given to action than to autobiography. 

They bore little resemblance to what I had expected. My mental pictureof an American policeman was that conglomerate average oneunconsciously imbibes from a distant view of our city forces, and bycomparison with foreign, --a heavy-footed, discourteous, half-fanatical, half-irreligious clubber whose wits are as slow as his judgment ishonest. Instead of which I found the Z. P. Composed almost withoutexception of good-hearted, well set up young Americans almost all ofmilitary training. I had anticipated, from other experiences, aconstant bickering and a general striving to make life unendurable fora new-comer. Instead I was constantly surprised at the good fellowshipthat existed throughout the force. There were of course some healthyrivalries; there were no angels among them--or I should have fled theIsthmus much earlier; but for the most part the Z. P. Resembled nothingso much as a big happy family. Above all I had expected early to makethe acquaintance of "graft, " that shifty-eyed monster which we who havelived in large American cities think of as sitting down to dinner withthe force in every mess-hall. Graft? Why a Zone Policeman could notride on a P. R. R. Train in full uniform when off duty without payinghis fare, though he was expected to make arrests if necessary and stopbehind with his prisoner. Compared indeed with almost any other spot onthe broad earth's surface "graft" eats slim meals on the Canal Zone. 

The average Zone Policeman would arrest his own brother--which is afterall about the supreme test of good policehood. He is not a man wholikes to keep "blotters, " make out accident reports and such things, that can be of interest only to those with clerks' and bookkeepers'souls. 

He would far rather be battling with sun, man, and vegetation in thejungle. He is of those who genuinely and frankly have no desire tobecome rich, and "successful, " a lack of ambition that formal societycannot understand and fancies a weakness. 

I had still another police surprise during these swivel-chair days. Idiscovered there was on the Zone a yellow tailor who made Beau Brummeluniforms at $7. 50, compared with which the $5 ready-made ones were mereclothes. All my life long I had been laboring under the delusion that auniform is merely a uniform. But one lives and learns. 

There are few left, I suppose, who have not heard that gray-beardedstory of the American in the Philippines who called his native servantand commanded:

"Juan, va fetch the caballo from the prado and--and--oh, saddle andbridle him. Damn such a language anyway! I'm sorry I ever learned it. "

This is capped on the Zone by another that is not only true butstrikingly typical. An American boss who had been much annoyed byunforeseen absences of his workmen pounced upon one of his Spaniardsone morning crying:

"When you know por la noche that you're not going to trabaja por lamanana why in--don't you habla?"

"Si, senor, " replied the Spaniard. 

By which it may be gathered that linguistic ability on the Zone is on apar with that in other U. S. Possessions. Of the seven of us assignedto plain-clothes duty on this strip of seventy-two nationalities therewas a Colombian, a gentleman of Swedish birth, a Chinaman fromMartinique, and a Greek, all of whom spoke English, Spanish, and atleast one other language. Of the three native Americans two spoke onlytheir mother tongue. In the entire white uniformed force I met onlyLieutenant Long and the Corporal in charge of Miraflores who couldseriously be said to speak Spanish, though I am informed there were oneor two others. 

This was not for a moment any fault of the Z. P. It comes back to ourgovernment and beyond that to the American people. With all ourexpanding over the surface of the earth in the past fourteen yearsthere still hangs over us that old provincial back-woods bogie, "English is good enough for me. " We have only to recall what Englanddoes for those of her colonial servants who want seriously to study thelanguage of some portion of her subjects to have something very likethe blush of shame creep up the back of our necks. Child's task as isthe learning of a foreign language, provincial old Uncle Sam justflat-foots along in the same old way, expecting to govern and judge andlead along the path of civilization his foreign colonies by bellowingat them in his own nasal drawl and treating their tongue as if it weresome purely animal sound. He is well personified by Corporal ----, lateof the Z. P. The Corporal had served three years in the Philippines andfive on the Zone, and could not ask for bread in the Spanish tongue. "Why don't you learn it?" some one asked one day. 

"Awe, " drawled the Corporal, "what's the use o' goin' t' all thattrouble? If you have t' have any interpretin' done all you got t' do ist' call in a nigger. "

Uncle Sam not merely lends his servants no assistance to learn thetongues of his colonies, but should one of his subjects appear bearingthat extraordinary accomplishment he gives him no preference whatever, no better position, not a copper cent more salary; and if things get toa pass where a linguist must be hired he gives the job to the firstcitizen that comes along who can make a noise that is evidently notEnglish, or more likely still to some foreigner who talks English likea mouthful of Hungarian goulash. It is not the least of the reasons whyforeign nations do not take us as seriously as they ought, why ourcolonials do not love us and, what is of far greater importance, do notadvance under our rule as they should. 

Meanwhile there had gradually been reaching me "through the properchannels, " as everything does on the Zone even to our ice-water, thevarious coupon-books and the like indispensable to Zone life and theproper pursuit of plain-clothes duty. Distressing as are statistics thefull comprehension of what might follow requires the enumeration of theodds and ends I was soon carrying about with me. 

A brass-check; police badge; I. C. C. Hotel coupon-book; Commissarycoupon-book; "120-Trip Ticket" (a booklet containing blank passesbetween any stations on the P. R. R. , to be filled out by holder)Mileage book (purchased by employees at half rates of 2 1/2 cents amile for use when traveling on personal business) "24-Trip Ticket" (afree courtesy pass to all "gold" employees allowing one monthly roundtrip excursion over any portion of the line) Freight-train pass for theP. R. R. ; Dirt-train and locomotive pass for the Pacific division;ditto for the Central division; likewise for the Atlantic division; (inshort about everything on wheels was free to the "gum-shoe" except the"yellow car") Passes admitting to docks and steamers at either end ofthe Zone; note-book; pencil or pen; report cards and envelopes (one ofwhich the plain-clothes man must fill out and forward to headquarters"via train-guard" wherever night may overtake him--"the gum-shoe'sday's work, " as the idle uniformed man facetiously dubs it). 

Furthermore the man out of uniform is popularly supposed never toventure forth among the populace without:

Belt, holster, cartridges, and the No. 38 "Colt" that reminds you of adrowning man trying to drag you down; handcuffs; police whistle;blackjack (officially he never carries this; theoretically there is notone on the Isthmus. But the "gum-shoe" naturally cannot twirl a policeclub, and it is not always policy to shoot every refractory prisoner). Then if he chances to be addicted to the weed there is thecigarette-case and matches; a watch is frequently convenient; andincidentally a few articles of clothing are more or less indispensableeven in the dry season. Now and again, too, a bit of money does notcome amiss. For though the Canal Zone is a Utopia where man lives bywork-coupons alone, the detective can never know at what moment hisall-embracing duties may carry him away into the foreign land ofPanama; and even were that possibility not always staring him in theface, in the words of "Gorgona Red, " "You've got t' have money fer yerbooze, ain't ye?"

Which seems also to be Uncle Sam's view of the matter. Far and awaymore important than any of the plain-clothes equipment thus farmentioned is the "expense account. " It is unlike the others in that itis not visible and tangible but a mere condition, a pleasant sensationlike the consciousness of a good appetite or a youthful fullness oflife. The only reality is a form signed by the czar of the Zone himselftucked away among I. C. C. Financial archives. That authorizes the manassigned to special duty in plain clothes to be reimbursed moneyexpended in the pursuance of duty up to the sum of $60 per month;though it is said that the interpretation of this privilege to the fulllimit is not unlikely to cause flames of light, thunderous rumblings, and other natural phenomena in the vicinity of Empire and Culebra. Butplease note further; these expenditures may be only "for cab or boathire, meals away from home, and LIQUOR and CIGARS!" Plainly the"gum-shoe" should be a bachelor. 

Fortunately, however, the proprietor of the expense account is notrequired personally to consume it each month. It is designed rather towin the esteem of bar-tenders, loosen the tongues of suspects, libatethe thirsty stool-pigeon, and prime other accepted sources ofinformation. But beware! Exceeding care in filling out the account ofsuch expenditures at the month's end. Carelessness leads a hunted lifeon the Canal Zone. Take, for instance, the slight error of myfriend--who, having made such expenditure in Colon, by a slip of thepen, or to be nice, of the typewriter, sent in among three score andten items the following:

 Feb. 4/ 2 bots beer; Cristobal. .. .. .. . 50c

and in the course of time found said voucher again on his desk with amarginal note of mild-eyed wonder and more than idle curiosity, in thehandwriting of a man very high up indeed;

 WHERE can you buy beer in Cristobal?

All this and more I learned in the swivel-chair waiting for orders, reading the latest novel that had found its way to Ancon station, andreceiving frequent assurances that I should be quite busy enough once Igot started. Opposite sat Lieutenant Long pouring choice bits ofsub-station orders into the 'phone:

"Don't you believe it. That was no accident. He didn't lose everythinghe had in every pocket rolling around drunk in the street. He's beensystematically frisked. Sabe frisked? Get on the job and look into it. "

For the Lieutenant was one of those scarce and enviable beings who canlive with his subordinates as man to man, yet never find an ounce ofhis authority missing when authority is needed. 

Now and then a Z. P. Story whiled away the time. There was the sad caseof Corporal ---- in charge of ---- station. Early one Sunday afternoonthe Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the railroad. Naturally the day was hot. The Corporal sent a policeman to arrest theinhuman wretch for cruelty to animals. When he had left the culpritweeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the goat, tied in the shadeunder the police station. 

"Poor little beast, " said the sympathetic Corporal, as he set before ita generous pan of ice-water fresh from the police station tank. Thegoat took one long, eager, grateful draught, turned over on its back, curled up like the sensitive-plants of Panama jungles when a fingertouches them, and departed this vale of tears. But Corporal ---- was anartist of the first rank. Not only did he "get away with it" under thevery frowning battlements of the judge, but sent the Spaniard up forten days on the charge against him. Z. P. 's who tell the story assertthat the Spaniard did not so much mind the sentence as the fact thatthe Corporal got his goat. 

Then there was "the Mystery of the Knocked-out Niggers. " Day after daythere came reports from a spot out along the line that some negrolaborer strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner suddenly laydown, threw a fit, and went into a comatose state from which herecovered only after a day or two in Ancon or Colon hospitals. Thedoctors gave it up in despair. As a last resort the case was turnedover to a Z. P. Sleuth. He chose him a hiding-place as near as possibleto the locality of the strange manifestation. For half the morning hesweltered and swore without having seen or heard the slightest thing ofinterest to an old "Zoner. " A dirt-train rumbled by now and then. Hestrove to amuse himself by watching the innocent games of two littleSpanish switch-boys not far away. They were enjoying themselves, asguileless childhood will, between their duties of letting a train inand out of the switch. Well on in the second half of the morninganother diminutive Iberian, a water-boy, brought his compatriots a pailof water and carried off the empty bucket. The boys hung over the edgeof the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their home-madedrinking-can, no doubt, and went on playing. 

By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in thedistance. Now and then as he advanced he sang a snatch of West Indianballad. As he espied the "switcheros" a smile broke out on his featuresand he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-pail. In a workingspecies of Spanish he made some request of the boys, the while wipinghis ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys protested. Evidently they hadlived on the Zone so long they had developed a color line. The negropleaded. The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still shooktheir heads. One of them was idly tapping the ground with abroom-handle that had lain beside him. The negro glanced up and downthe track, snatched up the boys' drinking vessel, of which the wirehooked over the pail was not after all the handle, and stooped to dipup a can of water. The little fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing auseless protest, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the rail infront of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent the can of water some rodsdown the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thinair above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after tryinga moment in vain to kick the railroad out by the roots, lay still. 

By this time the sleuth was examining the broom-handle. From its splitend protruded an inch of telegraph wire, which chanced also to be thesame wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized bucket. Close infront of the innocent little fellows ran a "third rail!"

Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended. There was thrustinto my hands a typewritten-sheet and I caught the next thing on wheelsout to Corozal for my first investigation. It was one of the mostcommonplace cases on the Zone. Two residents of my first dwelling-placeon the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150 in U. S. Gold. 

Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. Every bachelorquarters on the Isthmus, completely screened in, is entered by two orthree screen-doors, none of which is or can be locked. In the buildingare from twelve to twenty-four wide-open rooms of two or threeoccupants each, no three of whom know one another's full names oranything else, except that they are white Americans and ipso facto (soruns Zone philosophy) above dishonesty. The quarters are virtuallyabandoned during the day. Two negro janitors dawdle about the building, but they, too, leave it for two hours at mid-day. Moreover each of theforty-eight or more occupants probably has several friends oracquaintances or enemies who may drift in looking for him at any hourof the day or night. No negro janitor would venture to question a whiteAmerican's errand in a house; Panama is below the Mason and Dixon line. In practice any white American is welcome in any bachelor quarters andeven to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though he be a totalstranger to all the community. Add to this that the negro tailor'srunner often has permission to come while the owner is away for suitsin need of pressing, that John Chinaman must come and claw the week'swashing out from under the bed where the "rough-neck" kicked it onSaturday night, that there are a dozen other legitimate errands thatbring persons of varying shades into the building, and above all thatthe bachelors themselves, after the open-hearted old American fashion, have the all but universal habit of tossing gold and silver, railroadwatches and real-estate bonds, or anything else of whatever value, indifferently on the first clear corner that presents itself. Precaution is troublesome and un-American. It seems a fling at thecharacter of your fellow bachelors--and in the vast majority of Zonecases it would be. But it is in no sense surprising that among the manythousands that swarm upon the Isthmus there should be some not averseto increasing their income by taking advantage of these guilelesshabits and bucolic conditions. There are suggestions that a few--notnecessarily whites--make a profession of it. No wonder "our chieftrouble is burglary" and has been ever since the Z. P. Can remember. Summed up, the pay-day gold that has thus faded away is perhaps nosmall amount; compared with what it might have been under prevailingconditions it is little. 

As for detecting such felonies, police officers the world around knowthat theft of coin of the realm in not too great quantities isvirtually as safe a profession as the ministry. The Z. P. Plain-clothesman, like his fellows elsewhere, must usually be content in such caseswith impressing on the victim his Sherlockian astuteness, gathering theavailable facts of the case, and return to typewrite his report thereofto be carefully filed away among headquarters archives. Which isexactly what I had to do in the case in question, diving out the door, notebook in hand, to catch the evening train to Panama. 

I was growing accustomed to Ancon and even to Ancon police-mess when Istrolled into headquarters on Saturday, the sixteenth, and theInspector flung a casual remark over his shoulder:

"Better get your stuff together. You're transferred to Gatun. "

I was already stepping into a cab en route for the evening train whenthe Inspector chanced down the hill. 

"New Gatun is pretty bad on Saturday nights, " he remarked. (All toowell I remembered it. ) "The first time a nigger starts anything run himin, and take all the witnesses in sight along. "

"That reminds me; I haven't been issued a gun or handcuffs yet, " Ihinted. 

"Hell's fire, no?" queried the Inspector. "Tell the station commanderat Gatun to fix you up. "

CHAPTER VI

I scribbled myself a ticket and was soon rolling northward, greetingacquaintances at every station. The Zone is like Egypt; whoever movesmust travel by the same route. At Pedro Miguel and Cascadas armies oflocomotives--the "mules" of the man from Arkansas--stood steaming andpanting in the twilight after their day's labor and the wild racehomeward under hungry engineers. As far as Bas Obispo this busy, teeming Isthmus seemed a native land; beyond, was like entering intoforeign exile. It is a common Zone experience that only the localityone lives in during his first weeks ever feels like "home. "

The route, too, was a new one. From Gorgona the train returnedcrab-wise through Matachin and across the sand dyke that still holdsthe Chagres out of the "cut, " and halted at Gamboa cabin. Day was dyingas we rumbled on across the iron bridge above the river and away intothe fresh jungle night along the rock-ballasted "relocation. " Thestillness of this less inhabited half of the Zone settled down insidethe car and out, the evening air of summer caressing almost roughlythrough the open windows. The train continued its steady way almostuninterruptedly, for though new villages were springing up to take theplace of the old sinking into desuetude and the flood along with theabandoned line, there were but two where once were eight. We paused atthe new Frijoles and the box-car town of Monte Lirio and, skirting on ahigher level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick jungled andforested hills what is some day to be Gatun Lake, drew up at 7:30 atGatun. 

I wandered and inquired for some time in a black night--for the moonwas on the graveyard shift that week--before I found Gatun policestation on the nose of a breezy knoll. But for "Davie, " the desk-man, who it turned out was also to be my room-mate, and a few wistful-eyednegroes in the steel-barred room in the center of the building, thestation was deserted. "Circus, " said the desk-man briefly. When Imentioned the matter of weapons he merely repeated the word with thefurther information that only the station commander could issue them. 

There was nothing to do therefore but to ramble out armed with a leadpencil into a virtually unknown town riotous with liquor and negroesand the combination of Saturday night, circus time, and the aftermathof pay-day, and to strut back and forth in a way to suggest that I wasa perambulating arsenal. But though I wandered a long two hours intoevery hole and corner where trouble might have its breeding-place, nothing but noise took place in my sight and hearing. I turneddisgustedly away toward the tents pitched in a grassy valley betweenthe two Gatuns. At least there was a faint hope that the equestriennemight assault the ring-master. 

I approached the tent flap with a slightly quickening pulse. World-wideand centuries old as is the experience, personally I was about to"spring my badge" for the first time. Suppose the doortender shouldrefuse to honor it and force me to impress upon him the importance ofthe Z. P. --without a gun? Outwardly nonchalant I strolled in betweenthe two ropes. Proprietor Shipp looked up from counting his winningsand opened his mouth to shout "ticket!" I flung back my coat, and witha nod and a half-wink of wisdom he fell back again to computing hislawful gains. 

By the way, are not you who read curious to know, even as I for longyears wondered, where a detective wears his badge? Know then that longand profound investigation among the Z. P. Seems to prove conclusivelythat as a general and all but invariable rule he wears it pinned to thelining of his coat, or under his lapel, or on the band of his trousers, or on the breast of his shirt, or in his hip pocket, or up his sleeve, or at home on the piano, or riding around at the end of a string in thebaby's nursery; though as in the case of all rules this one too has itsexceptions. 

Entertainments come rarely to Gatun. The one-ringed circus was packedwith every grade of society from gaping Spanish laborers to haughtywives of dirt-train conductors, among whom it was not hard todistinguish in a far corner the uniformed sergeant in command of Gatunand the long lean corporal tied in a bow-line knot at the alleged witof the versatile but solitary clown who changed his tongue every othermoment from English to Spanish. But the end was already near;excitement was rising to the finale of the performance, a wrestlingmatch between a circus man and "Andy" of Pedro Miguel locks. By thetime I had found a leaning-place it was on--and the circus man ofcourse was conquered, amid the gleeful howling of "rough-necks, " whocollected considerable sums of money and went off shouting into theblack night, in quest of a place where it might be spent quickly. Itwould be strange indeed if among all the thousands of men in the primeof life who are digging the canal at least one could not be found whocould subjugate any champion a wandering circus could carry among itsproperties. I took up again the random tramping in the dark unknownnight; till it was two o'clock of a Sunday morning when at last Idropped my report-card in the train-guard box and climbed upstairs tothe cot opposite "Davie, " sleeping the silent, untroubled sleep of ababe. 

I was barely settled in Gatun when the train-guard handed me one ofthose frequent typewritten orders calling for the arrest of somestraggler or deserter from the marine camp of the Tenth Infantry. Thatvery morning I had seen "the boss" of census days off on his vacationto the States--from which he might not return--and here I was coldlyand peremptorily called upon to go forth and arrest and deliver to CampElliott on its hill "Mac, " the pride of the census, with a promise of$25 reward for the trouble. "Mac" desert? It was to laugh. Butnaturally after six weeks of unceasing repetition of that pink set ofquestions "Mac's" throat was a bit dry and he could scarcely beexpected to return at once to the humdrum life of camp without spendinga bit of that $5 a day in slaking a tropical thirst. Indeed I questionwhether any but the prudish will loudly blame "Mac" even because hespent it a bit too freely and brought up in Empire dispensary. Word ofhis presence there soon drifted down to the wily plain-clothes man ofEmpire district. But it was a hot noonday, the dispensary lies somewhatup hill, and the uniformless officer of the Zone metropolis is ratherthickly built. Wherefore, stowing away this private bit of informationunder his hat, he told himself with a yawn, "Oh, I'll drag him in laterin the day, " and drifted down to a wide-open door on Railroad Avenue tospend a bit of the $25 reward in off-setting the heat. Meanwhile "Mac, "feeling somewhat recovered from his financial extravagance, camesauntering out of the dispensary and, seeing his curly-headed friendstrolling a beat not far away, naturally cried out, "Hello, Eck!" Andwhat could Eck say, being a reputable Zone policeman, but:

"Why, hello, Mac! How they framin' up? Consider yourself pinched. "

Which was lucky for "Mac. " For Eck had once worn a marine hat over hisown right eye and, he knew from melancholy experience that the $25 wasno government generosity, but "Mac's" own involuntary contribution tohis finding and delivery; so managed to slip most of it back into"Mac's" hands. 

Long, long after, more than six weeks after in fact, I chanced to be inBas Obispo with a half-hour to spare, and climbed to the flowered andmany-roaded camp on its far-viewing hilltop that falls sheer away onthe east into the canal. In one of the airy barracks I found Renson, cards in hand, clear-skinned and "fit" now, thanks to the regular lifeof this adult nursery, though his lost youth was gone for good. And"Mac"? Yes, I saw "Mac" too--or at least the back of his head andshoulders through the screen of the guard-house where Renson pointedhim out to me as he was being locked up again after a day of shovelingsand. 

The first days in Gatun called for little else than patrol duty, without fixed hours, interspersed with an occasional loaf on thesecond-story veranda of the police-station overlooking the giant locks;close at hand was the entrance to the canal, up which came slowlybarges loaded with crushed stone from Porto Bello quarry twenty mileseast along the coast or sand from Nombre de Dios, twice as distant, while further still, spread Limon Bay from which swept a never-endingbreeze one could wipe dry on as on a towel. So long as he has in hispocket no typewritten report with the Inspector's scrawl across it, "For investigation and report, " the plain-clothes man is virtually hisown commander, with few duties beside trying to be in as many parts ofhis district at once as possible and the ubiquitous duty of "keeping intouch with headquarters. " So I wandered and mingled with all the lifeof the vicinity, exactly as I should have done had I not been paid asalary to do so. By day one could watch the growth of the great locks, the gradual drowning of little green, new-made islands beneath themuddy still waters of Gatun Lake, tramp out along jungle-flankedcountry roads, through the Mindi hills, or down below the old railroadto where the cayucas that floated down the Chagres laden with fruitcame to land on the ever advancing edge of the waters. With nightthings grew more compact. From twilight till after midnight I prowledin and out through New Gatun, spilled far and wide over its severalhills, watching the antics of negroes, pausing to listen to theirguitars and their boisterous merriment, with an eye and ear ever openfor the unlawful. When I drifted into a saloon to see who might bespending the evening out, the bar-tender proved he had the advantage ofme in acquaintance by crying: "Hello, Franck! What ye having?" andshowing great solicitude that I get it. After which I took up thestarlit tramp again, to run perhaps into some such perilous scene as onthat third evening. A riot of contending voices rose from a buildingback in the center of a block, with now and then the sickening thump ofa falling body. I approached noiselessly, likewise weaponless, peepedin and found--four negro bakers stripped to the waist industriouslykneading to-morrow's bread and discussing in profoundest earnest theobject of the Lord in creating mosquitoes. Beyond the native town, asan escape from all this, there was the back country road that wound fora mile through the fresh night and the droning jungle, yet instead ofleading off into the wilderness of the interior swung around toAmerican Gatun on its close-cropped hills. 

I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined among those ordered toreport for target test. A fine piece of luck was this for a man who hadscarcely fired a shot since, aged ten, he brought down with an air-gunan occasional sparrow at three cents a head. We took the afternoontrain to Mt. Hope on the edge of Colon and trooped away to a littleplain behind "Monkey Hill, " the last resting-place of many a "Zoner. "The Cristobal Lieutenant, father of Z. P. , was in charge, and hereagain was that same Z. P. Absence of false dignity and the genuinegood-fellowship that makes the success of your neighbor as pleasing asyour own. 

"Shall I borrow a gun, Lieutenant?" I asked when I found myself "ondeck. "

"Well, you'll have to use your own judgment as to that, " replied theLieutenant, busy pasting stickers over holes in the target. 

The test was really very simple. All you had to do was to cling to oneend of a No. 38 horse-pistol, point it at the bull's-eye of a target, hold it in that position until you had put five bullets into saidbull's-eye, repeat that twice at growing distances, mortally wound tentimes the image of a Martinique negro running back and forth across thefield, and you had a perfect score. Only, simple as it was, none didit, not even old soldiers with two or three "hitches" in the army. So Ihad to be content with creeping in on the second page of a seven-pagelist of all the tested force from "the Chief" to the latest negrorecruit. 

The next evening I drifted into the police station to find a group oflaborers from the adjoining camps awaiting me on the veranda bench, because the desk-man "didn't sabe their lingo. " They proved uponexamination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their story short, sad, but by no means unusual. Upon returning from work one of the Italianshad found the lock hinges of his ponderously padlocked tin trunkhanging limp and screwless, and his pay-day roll of some $30 missingfrom the crown of a hat stuffed with a shirt securely packed away inthe deepest corner thereof. The Turk was similarly unable to accountfor the absence of his $33 savings safely locked the night beforeinside a pasteboard suitcase; unless the fact that, thanks to some sortof surgical operation, one entire side of the grip now swung open likea barn-door might prove to have something to do with the case. The $33had been, for further safety's sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting aburglar with a wheelbarrow. 

The mysterious detective work began at once. Without so much as puttingon a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious crime. It wasthe usual Zone type of laborers' barracks. A screened building of onehuge room, it contained two double rows of three-tier "standee" canvasbunks on gas-pipes. Around the entire room, close under the sheet-ironroof, ran a wooden platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stackedhigh with the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-papersuitcases containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or moreworkmen around the rough table below. 

Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-campduring working hours. Practically the West Indian janitors to whom isleft the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not fallible. In thecourse of the second day I unearthed a second Turk who, having chancedthe morning before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor and soappreparatory to welcoming a fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had beenmildly startled to step on the shoulder-blade of a negro of givenlength and proportions lying prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta. The latter explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and hisunconventional posture by asserting that he was the "mosquito man, " andshortly thereafter went away from there without leaving either card oraddress. 

By all my library training in detective work the next move obviouslywas to find what color of cigarette ashes the Turk smoked. Instead Iblundered upon the absurdly simple notion of trying to locate the negroof given length and proportions. The real "mosquito man"--one of thatdark band that spends its Zone years with a wire hook and a screenedbucket gathering evidence against the defenseless mosquito for thesanitary department to gloat over--was found not to fit the model evenin hue. Moreover, "mosquito men" are not accustomed to carry theirdevotion to duty to the point of crawling under trunks in their quest. 

For a few days following, the hunt led me through all Gatun andvicinity. Now I found myself racing across the narrow plank bridgesabove the yawning gulf of the locks, with far below tiny men and toytrains, now in and out among the cathedral-like flying buttresses, under the giant arches past staring signs of "DANGER!" on everyhand--as if one could not plainly hear its presence without theposting. I descended to the very floor of the locks, far below theearth, and tramped the long half-mile of the three flights betweensoaring concrete walls. Above me rose the great steel gates, standingajar and giving one the impression of an opening in the Great Wall ofChina or of a sky-scraper about to be swung lightly aside. On themresounded the roar of the compressed-air riveters and all the way upthe sheer faces, growing smaller and smaller as they neared the sky, were McClintic-Marshall men driving into place red-hot rivets, thrownat them viciously by negroes at the forges and glaring like comets'tails against the twilight void. 

The chase sent me more than once stumbling away across rock-tumbledGatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for long centuries, eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun with its proudchurch and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peruvian viceroysand "Forty-niners" were wont to pause from their arduous journeyings. They call it a dam. It is rather a range of hills, a part and portionof the highlands that, east and west, enclose the valley of theChagres, its summit resembling the terminal yards of some great city. There was one day when I sought a negro brakeman attached to a givenlocomotive. I climbed to a yard-master's tower above the Spillway andthe yard-master, taking up his powerful field-glasses, swept thehorizon, or rather the dam, and discovered the engine for me as amariner discovers an island at sea. 

"Er--would you be kind enough to tell us where we can find this Gatundam we've heard so much about?" asked a party of four tourists, halfand half as to sex, who had been wandering about on it for an hour orso with puzzled expressions of countenance. They addressed themselvesto a busy civil engineer in leather leggings and rolled up shirtsleeves. 

"I'm sorry I haven't time to use the instrument, " replied the engineerover his shoulder, while he wig-wagged his orders to his negro helpersscattered over the landscape, "but as nearly as I can tell with thenaked eye, you are now standing in the exact center of it. "

The result of all this sweating and sight-seeing was that some dayslater there was gathered in a young Barbadian who had been living formonths in and about Gatun without any visible source of incomewhatever--not even a wife. The Turk and the camp janitor identified himas the culprit. But the primer lesson the police recruit learns is thatit is one thing to believe a man guilty and quite another to convince ajudge--the most skeptical being known to zoology--of that perfectlyapparent fact. With the suspect behind bars, therefore, I continued myunderground activities, with the result that when at length I took thetrain at New Gatun one morning for the court-room in Cristobal I loadedinto a second-class coach six witnesses aggregating five nationalities, ready to testify among other things to the interesting little pointthat the defendant had a long prison record in Barbados. 

When the echo of the black policeman's "Oye! Oye!" had died away andthe little white-haired judge had taken his "bench, " I made thediscovery that I was present not in one, but in four capacities, --asarresting officer, complainant, interpreter, and to a large extentprosecuting attorney. To swear a Turk who spoke only Turkish throughanother Turk, who mangled a little Spanish, for a judge who would notrecognize a non-American word from the voice of a steam-shovel, with asolemn "So Help Me God!" to clinch and strengthen it when the witnesswas a follower of the prophet of Medina--or nobody--was not without itspossibilities of humor. The trial proceeded; the witnesses witnessed intheir various tongues, the perspiring arresting officer reduced theirstatements to the common denominator of the judge's single tongue, andthe smirking bullet-headed defendant was hopelessly buried under theevidence. Wherefore, when the shining black face of his lawyer, retained during the two minutes between the "Oye!" and the opening ofthe case, rose above the scene to purr:

"Your Honor, the prosecution has shown no case. I move the chargeagainst my client be quashed. "

I choked myself just in time to keep from gasping aloud, "Well, of allthe nerve!" Never will I learn that the lawyer's profession admitslying on the same footing with truth in the defense of a culprit. 

"Cause shown, " mumbled the Judge without looking up from his writing, "defendant bound over for trial in the circuit court. "

A week later, therefore, there was a similar scene a story higher inthe same building. Here on Thursdays sits one of the three members ofthe Zone Supreme Court. Jury trial is rare on the Isthmus--which makespossibly for surer justice. This time there was all the machinery ofcourt and I appeared only in my legal capacity. The judge, a man stillyoung, with an astonishingly mobile face that changed at least once aminute from a furrowy scowl with great pouting lips to a smile so broadit startled, sat in state in the middle of three judicial arm-chairs, and the case proceeded. Within an hour the defendant was standing up, the cheery grin still on his black countenance, to be sentenced to twoyears and eight months in the Zone penitentiary at Culebra. A deaf manwould have fancied he was being awarded some prize. One of thenever-ending surprises on the Zone is the apparent indifference ofnegro prisoners whether they get years or go free. Even if they testifyin their own behalf it is in a listless, detached way, as if the matterwere of no importance anyway. But the glance they throw the innocentarresting officer as they pass out on their way to the barb-wireenclosure on the outskirts of the Zone capital tells another story. There are members of the Z. P. Who sleep with a gun under their pillowbecause of that look or a muttered word. But even were I nervous Ishould have been little disturbed at the glare in this case, for itwill probably be a long walk from Culebra penitentiary to where I amthirty-two months from that morning. 

A holiday air brooded over all Gatun and the country-side. Workmen infreshly washed clothing lolled in the shade of labor-camps, blackBritishers were gathering in flat meadows fitted for the national gameof cricket, far and wide sounded the care-free laughter and chatteringof negroes, while even within Gatun police station leisure and peaceseemed almost in full possession. 

The morning "touch" with headquarters over, therefore, I scrambled awayacross the silent yawning locks and the trainless and workless dam tothe Spillway, over which already some overflow from the lake wasescaping to the Caribbean. My friends "Dusty" and H---- had carriedtheir canoe to the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down theriver. It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancercould not equal; just the weather for a perfect "day off. " Aplain-clothes man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off. Someone might run away with the Administration Building on the edge of thePacific and the telephone wires be buzzing for me--with the sad resultthat a few days later there would be posted in Zone police stationswhere all who turned the leaves might read:

 Special Order No. . .. . Having been found Guilty of charges of Neglect of Duty preferred against him by his commanding officer First-class Policeman No. 88 is hereby fined $2. 

 Chief of Division. 

But shades of John Aspinwall! Should even a detective work on such aSunday? Surely no criminal would--least of all a black one. Moreoverthese forest-walled banks were also part of my beat. 

The sun was hot, yet the air of that ozone-rich quality for whichPanama is famous. For headgear we had caps; and did not wear those, though barely a few puffy, snow-white clouds ventured out into the vastchartless sky all the brilliant day through. Then the river; who coulddescribe this lower reach of the Chagres as it curves its seven deepand placid miles from where Uncle Sam releases it from custody, to theocean. Its jungled banks were without a break, for the one or twoclusters of thatch and reed huts along the way are but a part of theliving vegetation. Now and then we had glimpses across the tree-tops ofbrilliant green jungle hills further inland, everywhere were hugesplendid trees, the stack-shaped mango, the soldier-erect palm heavy, yet unburdened, with cocoanuts. Some fish resembling the porpoise rosehere and there, back and forth above the shadows winged snow-whitecranes so slender one wondered the sea breeze did not wreck them. Aboveall the quiet and peace and contentment of a perfect tropical dayenfolded the landscape in a silence only occasionally disturbed by thecry of a passing bird. Once a gasoline launch deep-laden withSunday-starched Americans, snorted by, bound likewise to Fort Lorenzoat the river's mouth; and we lay back in our soft, rumpled khaki anddrowsily smiled our sympathy after them. When they had drawn on out ofearshot life began to return to the banks and nature again tookpossession of the scene. Alligators abounded once on this lowerChagres, but they have grown scarce now, or shy, and though we sat withH----'s automatic rifle across our knees in turns we saw no more than acarcass or a skeleton on the bank at the foot of the sheer wall ofimpenetrable verdure. 

Till at length the sea opened on our sight through the alley-way ofjungle, and a broad inviting cocoanut grove nodded and beckoned on ourleft. Instead we paddled out across the sandbar to play with the surfof the Atlantic, but found it safer to return and glide across thelittle bay to the drowsy straw and tin village. Here--for the mouth ofthe Chagres like its source lies in a foreign land--a solitaryPanamanian policeman in the familiar Arctic uniform enticed us towardthe little thatched office, and house, and swinging hammock of thealcalde to register our names, and our business had we had any. Sodeep-rooted was the serenity of the place that even when "Dusty, " inall Zone innocence, addressed the white-haired little mulatto as"hombre" he lost neither his dignity nor his temper. 

The policeman and a brown boy of merry breed went with us up the grassyrise to the old fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were still themassive, rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of prisoners ofthe old brutal days; blind owls stared upon us; once the boy broughtdown with his honda, or slung-shot, one of the bats that circleduncannily above our heads. In dank corners were mounds of worthlesspowder; the bakery that once fed the miserable dungeon dwellers hadcrumbled in upon itself. Outside great trees straddled and split themassive stone walls that once commanded the entrance to the Chagres, jungle waved in undisputed possession in its earth-filled moat, eventhe old cannon and heaped up cannon-balls lay rust-eaten and dejected, like decrepit old men who have long since given up the struggle. 

We came out on the nose of the fort bluff and had before and below usand underfoot all the old famous scene, for centuries the beginning ofall trans-Isthmian travel, --the scalloped surf-washed shore with itsdwindling palm groves curving away into the west, the Chagres pushingoff into the jungled land. We descended to the beach of the outer bayand swam in the salt sea, and the policeman, scorning the launch party, squatted a long hour in the shade of a tree above in tropical patience. Then with "sour" oranges for thirst and nothing for hunger--for Lorenzohas no restaurant--we turned to paddle our way homeward up the Chagres, that bears the salt taste of the sea clear to the Spillway. Whence oneverse only of a stanza by the late bard of the Isthmus struck a falsenote on our ears;

 Then go away if you have to, Then go away if you will! To again return you will always yearn While the lamp is burning still. You've drunk the Chagres water And the mango eaten free, And, strange though it seems, It will haunt your dreams This Land of the Cocoanut Tree. 

No catastrophe had befallen during my absence. The same peaceful sunnySunday reigned in Gatun; new-laundered laborers were still lolling inthe shade of the camps, West Indians were still batting at interminableballs with their elongated paddles in the faint hope of deciding thenational game before darkness settled down. Then twilight fell and Iset off through the rambling town already boisterous with churchservices. Before the little sub-station a swarm of negroes was poundingtamborines and bawling lustily:

 Oh, yo mus' be a lover of de Lard Or yo cahn't go t' Heaven when yo di-ie. 

Further on a lady who would have made ebony seem light-gray bowed overan organ, while a burly Jamaican blacker than the night outside stoodin the vestments of the Church of England, telling his version of thecase in a voice that echoed back from the town across the gully, as ifhe would drown out all rival sects and arguments by volume of sound. The meeting-house on the next corner was thronged with a singingmultitude, tamborines scattered among them and all clapping hands tokeep time, even to the pastor, who let the momentum carry on and oninto verse after verse as if he had not the self-sacrifice to stop it, while outside in the warm night another crowd was gathered at the edgeof the shadows gazing as at a vaudeville performance. How well-fittedare the various brands of Christianity to the particular likings oftheir "flocks. " The strongest outward manifestation of the religion ofthe West Indian black is this boisterous singing. All over town weredusky throngs exercising their strong untrained voices "in de Lard'ssarvice"; though the West Indian is not noted as being musical. Here apreacher wanting suddenly to emphasize a point or clinch an argumentswung an arm like a college cheer leader and the entire congregationroared forth with him some well-known hymn that settled the questionfor all time. 

I strolled on into darker High street. Suddenly on a veranda abovethere broke out a wild unearthly screaming. Two negroes were engaged insavage, sanguinary combat. Around them in the dim light thrown by acheap tenement lamp I could make out their murderous weapons--machetesor great bars of iron--slashing wildly, while above the din rosescreams and curses:

 Yo ---- Badgyan, ah kill yo!

I sped stealthily yet swiftly up the long steps, drawing my No. 38 (forat last I had been issued one) as I ran and dashed into the heart ofthe turmoil swallowing my tendency to shout "Unhand him, villain!" andcrying instead:

"Here, what the devil is going on here?"

Whereupon two negroes let fall at once two pine sticks and turned uponme their broad childish grins with:

"We only playin', sar. Playin' single-sticks which we larn to de armyin Bahbaydos, sahgeant. "

Thus I wandered on, in and out, till the night lost its youth and thelast train from Colon had dumped its merry crowd at the station, thenwound away along the still and deserted back road through thenight-chirping jungle between the two surviving Gatuns. There was aspot behind the Division Engineer's hill that I rarely succeeded inpassing without pausing to drink in the scene, a scallop in the hillswhere several trees stood out singly and alone against the myriadstarlit sky, below and beyond the indistinct valleys and ravines fromwhich came up out of the night the chorus of the jungle. Further on, inAmerican Gatun there was a seat on the steps before a bungalow thatoffered more than a good view in both directions. A broad, U. S. -tamedravine sank away in front, across which the Atlantic breeze wafted thedistance-softened thrum of guitar, the tones of fifes and happy negrovoices, while overhead feathery gray clouds as concealing as a dancer'sgossamer hurried leisurely by across the brilliant face of the moon; tothe right in a free space the Southern Cross, tilted a bit awry, gleamed as it has these untold centuries while ephemeral humans comeand pass their brief way. 

It was somewhere near here that Gatun's dry-season mosquito had hishiding-place. Rumor whispers of some such letter as the followingreceived by the Colonel--not the blue-eyed czar at Culebra this time;for you must know there is another Colonel on the Zone every whit asindispensable in his sphere:

GATUN, . .. 26, 1912. 

Dear Colonel:--

I am writing to call your attention to a gross violation of SanitaryOrdinance No. 3621, to an apparent loop-hole in your otherwiseexcellent department. The circumstances are as follows;

On the evening of . .. 24, as I was sitting at the roadside betweenGatun and New Gatun (some 63 paces beyond house No. 226) there appeareda MOSQUITO, which buzzed openly and for some time about my ears. It wasprobably merely a male of the species, as it showed no tendency tobite; but a mosquito nevertheless. I trust you will take fittingmeasures to punish so bold and insolent a violation of the rules ofyour department. 

I am, sir, very truly yours, (Mrs. ) HENRY PECK. 

P. S. The mosquito may be easily recognized by a peculiarly triumphant, defiant note in his song, I cannot personally vouch for the above, but if it was received any"Zoner" will assure you that prompt action was taken. It is well so. The French failed to dig the canal because they could not down themosquito. Of course there was the champagne and the other things thatcome with it--later in the night. But after all it was the littlesongful mosquito that drove them in disgrace back across the Atlantic. 

Still further on toward the hotel and a midnight lunch there was onehouse that was usually worth lingering before, though good music israre on the Zone. Then there was the naughty poker game in bachelorquarters number--well, never mind that detail--to keep an ear on incase the pot grew large enough to make a worth-while violation of thelaw that would warrant the summoning of the mounted patrolman. 

Meanwhile "cases" stacked up about me. Now one took me out the hard U. S. Highway that, once out of sight of the last negro shanty, rambleserratically off like the reminiscences of an old man through thehalf-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilderness, rampant green with rootedlife and almost noisy with the songs of birds. Eventually within acouple of hours it crossed Fox River with its little settlement anddescended to Mt. Hope police station, where there is a 'phone withwhich to "get in touch" again and then a Mission rocker on the screenedveranda where the breezes of the near-by Atlantic will have you wellcooled off before you can catch the shuttle-train back to Gatun. 

Or another led out across the lake by the old abandoned line that wasthe main line when first I saw Gatun. It drops down beyond the stationand charges across the lake by a causeway that steam-shovels werealready devouring, toward forsaken Bohio. Picking its way across therotting spiles of culverts, it pushed on through the unpeopled jungle, all the old railroad gone, rails, ties, the very spikes torn up andcarried away, while already the parrots screamed again in derision asif it were they who had driven out the hated civilization and takenpossession again of their own. A few short months and the devouringjungle will have swallowed up even the place where it has been. 

If it was only the little typewritten slip reporting the disappearanceof a half-dozen jacks from the dam, every case called for fullinvestigation. For days to come I might fight my way through theencircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to every native hut formiles around to see if by any chance the lost property could haverolled thither. More than once such a hunt brought me out on thewater-tank knoll at the far end of the dam, overlooking miles ofimpenetrable jungle behind and above chanting with invisible life, tothe right the filling lake stretching across to low blue ranges dimlyoutlined against the horizon and crowned by fantastic trees, and allGatun and its immense works and workers below and before me. 

Times were when duty called me into the squalid red-lighted district ofColon and kept me there till the last train was gone. Then there wasnothing left but to pick my way through the night out along the P. R. R. Tracks to shout in at the yard-master's window, "How soon y' gotanything goin' up the line?" and, according to the answer, return toread an hour or two in Cristobal Y. M. C. A. Or push on at once into theforest of box-cars to hunt out the lighted caboose. Night freights donot stop at Gatun, nor anywhere merely to let off a "gum-shoe. " Butjust beyond New Gatun station is a grade that sets the negro fireman tosweating even at midnight and the big Mogul to straining every nerveand sinew, and I did not meet the engineer that could drag his longload by so swiftly but that one could easily swing off on the road thatleads to the police station. 

Even on the rare days when "cases" gave out there was generallysomething to while away the monotony. As, one morning an Americanwidely known in Gatun was arrested on a warrant and, chatting merrilywith his friend, Policeman ----, strolled over to the station. Therehis friend Corporal Macey subdued his broad Irish smile and ordered thedeskman to "book him up. " The latter was reaching for the keys to acell when the American broke off his pleasant flow of conversation toremark;

"All right, Corporal, I'm going over to the house to get a few thingsand write a few letters. I'll be back inside of an hour. "

Whereupon Corporal Macey, being a man of iron self-control, refrainedfrom turning a double back sommersault and mildly called the prisoner'sattention to a little point of Zone police rules he had overlooked. 

If every other known form of amusement absolutely failed it was stillthe dry, or tourist season, and poured down from the States hordes ofunconscious comedians, or investigators who rushed two whole days aboutthe Isthmus, taking care not to get into any dirty places, and rushedhome again to tell an eager public all about it. Sometimes thesight-seers came from the opposite end of the earth, a little band ofSouth Americans in tongueless awe at the undreamed monster of workabout them, yet struggling to keep their fancied despite of the"yanqui, " to which the "yanqui" is so serenely indifferent. Priestsfrom this southland were especially numerous. The week never passedthat a group of them might not be seen peering over the dizzy precipiceof Gatun locks and crossing themselves ostentatiously as they turnedaway. 

One does not, at least in a few months, feel the "sameness" of climateat Panama and "long again to see spring grow out of winter. " Yet thereis something, perhaps, in the popular belief that even northern energyevaporates in this tropical land. It is not exactly that; but certainlymany a "Zoner" wakes up day by day with ambitious plans, and justdrifts the day through with the fine weather. He fancies himself asstrong and energetic as in the north, yet when the time comes for doinghe is apt to say, "Oh, I guess I'll loaf here in the shade half an hourlonger, " and before he knows it another whole day is charged up againsthis meager credit column with Father Time. 

There came the day early in April when the Inspector must go north onhis forty-two days' vacation. I bade him bon voyage on board the 8:41between the two Gatuns and soon afterward was throwing together mybelongings and leaving "Davie" to enjoy his room alone. For CorporalCastillo was to be head of the subterranean department ad interim, andhow could the digging of the canal continue with no detective in allthe wilderness of morals between the Pacific and Culebra? Thus it wasthat the afternoon train bore me away to the southward. It was atourist train. A New York steamer had docked that morning, and thefirst-class cars were packed with venturesome travelers in their stoutcampaign outfits in which to rough it--in the Tivoli and thesight-seeing motors--in their roof-like cork helmets and green veilsfor the terrible Panama heat--which is sometimes as bad as in northernNew York. 

The P. R. R. Is one of the few railroads whose passengers may drop offfor a stroll, let the train go on without them, and still take it totheir destination. They have only to descend, as I did, at Gamboa cabinand wander down into the "cut, " climb leisurely out to Bas Obispo, andchat with their acquaintances among the Marines lolling about thestation until the trains puffs in from its shuttle-back excursion toGorgona. The Zone landscape had lost much of its charm. For days pastjungle fires had been sweeping over it, doing the larger growths smallharm but leaving little of the greenness and rank clinging life ofother seasons. Everywhere were fires along the way, even in the towns. For quartermasters--to the rage of Zone house-wives were sending up inclouds of smoke the grass and bushes that quickly turn tobreeding-places of mosquitoes and disease with the first rains. Nightclosed down as we emerged from Miraflores tunnel; soon we swung aroundtoward the houses, row upon row and all alight, climbed the lower slopeof Ancon hill, and at seven I descended in familiar, cab-crowded, bawling Panama. 

CHAPTER VII

It might be worth the ink to say a word about socialism on the CanalZone. To begin with, there isn't any of course. No man would dream oflooking for socialism in an undertaking set in motion by the Republicanparty and kept on the move by the regular army. But there are a numberof little points in the management of this private government strip ofearth that savors more or less faintly of the Socialist's program, andthe Zone offers perhaps as good a chance as we shall ever have to studysome phases of those theories in practice. 

Few of us now deny the Socialist's main criticisms of existing society;most of us question his remedies. Some of us go so far as to feel asneaking curiosity to see railroads and similar purely public utilitiesgovernment-owned, just to find how it would work. Down on the CanalZone they have a sort of modified socialism where one can watch much ofthis under a Bell jar. There one quickly discovers that a locomotivewith the brief and sufficient information "U. S. " on her tenderflanks--or more properly the flanks of her tender--gives one a swellingof the chest no other combination of letters could inspire. Thus far, too, theory seems to work well. The service could hardly be better, andrecalling that under the old private system the fare for theforty-seven miles across the Isthmus was $25 with a charge of ten centsfor every pound of baggage, the $2. 40 of today does not seemparticularly exorbitant. 

The official machinery of this private government strip also seems torun like clockwork. To be sure the wheels even of a clock grind a bitwith friction at times, but the clock goes on keeping time for allthat. The Canal Zone is the best governed district in the UnitedStates. It is worth any American's time and sea-sickness to run downthere, if only to assure himself that Americans really can govern;until he does he will not have a very clear notion of just what goodAmerican government means. 

But before we go any further be it noted that the socialism of theCanal Zone is under a benevolent despot, an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent ruler; which is perhaps the one way socialism would work, at least in the present stage of human progress. The three Omnis arecombined in an inconspicuous, white-haired American popularly known onthe Zone as "the Colonel"--so popularly in fact that an attempt toreplace him would probably "start something" among all classes andraces of "Zoners. " That he is omnipotent--on the Zone--not many willdeny; a few have questioned--and landed in the States a week later muchless joyous but far wiser. Omniscient--well they have even Chinesesecret-service men on the Isthmus, and soldiers and marines notinfrequently go out in civilian clothes under sealed orders; to saynothing of "the Colonel's private gum-shoe" and probably a lot of otherunderground sources of information neither you nor I shall ever hearof. But you must get used to spies under socialism, you know, until weall wear one of Saint Peter's halos. Look at the elaborate system ofthe Incas, even with their docile and uninitiative subjects. In thematter of Omnipresence; it would be pretty hard to find a hole on theCanal Zone where you could pull off a stunt of any length or importancewithout the I. C. C. Having a weather-eye on you. When it comes to the noless indispensable ingredient of benevolence one glimpse of those mildblue eyes would probably reassure you in that point, even without thepleasure of watching the despot sit in judgment on his subjects in hiscastle office on Sunday mornings like old Saint Louis under hisoak--though with a tin of cigarettes beside him that old Louis had toworry along without. 

This all-powerful government insists on and enforces many of the thingswhich Americans as a whole stand for, --Sunday closing, suppression ofresorts, forbidding of gambling. But the Zone is no test whether theselaws could be genuinely enforced in a whole nation. For down therePanama and Colon serve as a sort of safety-valve, where a man can rundown in an hour or so on mileage or monthly pass and blow off steam;get rid of the bad internal vapors that might cause explosion in aventless society. This we should not lose sight of when we boast thatthere are few crimes and no real resorts on the Zone. "The Colonel"himself will tell you there is no gambling. Yet it is curious how manyof the weekly prizes of the Panama lottery find their way into thepockets of American canal builders, and in any Zone gathering ofwhatever hour--or sex!--you are almost certain to hear flitting backand forth mysterious whispers of "--have a 6 and a 4 this week. "

The Zone system is work-coupons for all; much as the Socialist wouldhave it. Only the legitimate members of the community--the workers--canlive in it--long. You should see the nonchalant way a clerk at thegovernment's Tivoli hotel charges a tourist a quarter for a cigar thegovernment sells for six cents in its commissaries. Mere money does notrank high in Zone society. It's the labor-coupon that counts. They sellcigarettes at the Y. M. C. A. ; you are in that state where you would giveyour ticket home for a smoke. Yet when you throw down good gold orsilver, black Sam behind the showcase looks up at you with that pityingcold eye kept in stock for new-comers, and says wearily:

"Cahn't take no money heah, boss. "

That surely is a sort of socialism where a slip of paper showing merelythat you have done your appointed task gets you the same meal whereveryou may drop in, a total stranger, yet without being identified, without a word from any one, but merely thrusting your coupon-book atthe yellow West Indian at the door as you enter that he may snatch outso many minutes of labor. Drop in anywhere there is a vacant bed andyou are perfectly at home. There is the shower-bath, the ice-water, theveranda rocker--you knew exactly what was coming to you, just what kindof bed, just what vegetables you would be served at dinner. It remindsone of the Inca system of providing a home for every citizen, andtambos along the way if he must travel. 

But it IS the same meal. That is just the point. There is where youbegin to furrow your brow and look more closely at this splendidsystem, and fall to wondering if that public kitchen of socialism wouldnot become in time an awful bore. There are some things in which wewant variety and originality and above all personality. A meal is ameal, I suppose, as a cat is a cat; yet there are many subtle littlethings that make the same things distinctly different. When it comes todinner you want a rosy fat German or a bulky French madame puttingthought and pride and attention into it; which they will do only ifthey get good coin of the realm or similar material emolument out of itin proportion. No one will ever fancy he has a "mission" to serve goodmeals--to the public. 

In the I. C. C. Hotels we have a government steward who draws a goodsalary and wears a nice white collar. But though he is sometimes a bitdifferent, and succeeds in making his hotel so, it is only in degree. He is not a great frequenter of the dining-room; at times one wondersjust what his activities are. Certainly it is not the planning ofmeals, for the I. C. C. Menu is as fixed and automatic as if it had beentaken from a stone slab in the pyramids. A poor meal neither turns hishair white nor cuts down his income. Frequently, especially if he isEnglish and certainly if he has been a ship's steward, the negrowaiters seem to run his establishment without interference. Dinnerhours, for example, are from 11 to 1. But beware the glare of thewaiter at whose table you sit down at 12:50. He slams cold rubbish atyou from the discard and snatches it away again before you have time tofind you can't eat it. You have your choice of enduring thismaltreatment or of unostentatiously slipping him a coin and a hint togo cook you the best he can himself. For you know that as the closinghour approaches the cooks will not have their private plans interferedwith by accepting your order. Here again is where the fat German or theFrench madame is needed--with an ox-goad. 

In other words the tip system invented by Pharaoh and vitiated byquick-rich Americans rages as fiercely in government hotels on the Zoneas in any "lobster palace" bordering Broadway--worse, for here thenon-tipper has no living being to advocate his cause. All food isgovernment property. Yet I have sat down opposite a man who gave thegovernment at the door a work-coupon identical with mine, but whofurthermore dropped into the waiter's hand "35 cents spig"--which ishalf as bad as to do it in U. S. Currency--and while I was gazingtearfully at a misshapen lump of vacunal gristle there was set beforehim, steaming hot from the government kitchen, a porterhouse steakwhich a dollar bill would not have brought him within scenting distanceof in New York. Do not blame the waiter. If he does not slip anoccasional coin to the cook he will invariably draw the gristle, andeven occasional coins do not grow on his waist band. It would be asabsurd to charge it to the cook. He probably has a large family tosupport, as he would have under socialism. There runs this story on theZone, vouched for by several:

A "Zoner" called an I. C. C. Steward and complained that his waiter didnot serve him reasonably:

"Well, " sneered the steward, "I guess you didn't come across?"

"Come across! Why, damn you, I suppose you're getting your rake-offtoo?"

"I certainly am, " replied the steward; "What do you think I'm down herefor, me health?"

Surely we can't blame it all to the steward, or to any otherindividual. Lay it rather to human nature, that stumbling-block of somany varnished and upholstered systems. 

I hope I am not giving the impression that I. C. C. Hotels areunendurable. "Stay home"--which on the Zone means always eat at thesame hotel table--subsidize your waiter and you do moderately well. Butto move thither and yon, as any plain-clothes man must, is unfortunate. The only difference then is that the next is worse than the last. Whatever their convictions upon arrival, almost all Americans have comedown to paying their waiter the regular blackmail of a dollar a monthand setting it down as one of the unavoidable evils of life. One or twoI knew who insisted on sticking to "principles, " and they grew leanerand lanker day by day. 

Because of these things many an American employee will be found eatingin private restaurants of the ubiquitous Chinaman or the occasionalSpaniard, though here he must often pay in cash instead of in futureson his labor--which are so much cheaper the world over. It is sadenough to dine on the same old identical round for months. But how ifyou were one of those who blew in on the heels of the last Frenchmanand have been eating it ever since? By this time even rat-tails wouldbe a welcome change--and with genuine socialism there would not even bethat escape. It is said to be this hotel problem as much as theperpetual spring-time of the Zone that so frequently reduces--with theopen connivance of the government--a building housing forty-eightquiet, harmless bachelors to a four-family residence housing eight andgradually upwards; that wreaks such matrimonious havoc among thewhite-frocked stenographers who come down to type and remain to cook. 

Besides the hotel there is the P. R. R. Commissary, the governmentdepartment stores. It is likewise laundry, bakery, ice-factory; itmakes ice-cream, roasts coffee, sends out refrigerator-cars and amorning supply train to bring your orders right to your door--oh, yes, it strongly resembles what Bellamy dreamed years ago. Only, as in thecase of the hotel, there seems to be a fly or two in the amber. 

The laundry is tolerable--fancy turning your soiled linen over to arailroad company--all machine done of course, as everything would beunder socialism, and no come-back for the garment that is not hardyenough of constitution to stand the system. In the stores is little orno shoddy material; in general the stock is the best available. If abiscuit or a bolt of khaki is better made in England than in the UnitedStates the commissary stocks with English goods, which is unexpectedbroad-mindedness for government management. But while prices are lowerthan in Panama or Colon they are every whit as high as in Americanstores; and most of us know something of the exorbitant profit ourprivate merchants exact, particularly on manufactured goods. Thegovernment claims to run the commissary only to cover cost. Either thatis a crude government joke or there is a colored gentleman esconced inthe coal-bin. Moreover if the commissary hasn't the stuff you want youhad better give up wanting, for it has no object in laying in a supplyof it just to oblige customers. Its clerks work in the most languid, unexcited manner. They have no object whatever in holding your trade, and you can wait until they are quite ready to serve you, or go homewithout. True, most of them are merely negroes, and the few Americansat the head of departments are chiefly provincial little fellows fromsmall towns whose notions of business are rather those of Podunk, Mass. , than of New York. But lolling about the commissary a half-hourhoping to buy a box of matches, one cannot shake off the convictionthat it is the system more than the clerks. Poets and novelists andpoliticians may work for "glory, " but no man is going to show calicoand fit slippers for such remuneration. 

Nor are all the old evils of the competitive method banished from theZone. In the Canal Record, the government organ, the governmentcommissary advertised a sale of excellent $7 rain-coats at $1 each. The"Record"! It is like reading it in the Bible. Witness the rush ofbargain hunters, who, it proves, are by no means of one gender. Yetthose splendid rain-coats, as manager, clerks, and even negro sweeperswell knew and could not refrain from snickering to themselves atthought of, were just as rain-proof as a poor grade of cheese-cloth. Ido not speak from hear-say for I was numbered among the bargainhunters--"recruits" are the natural victims, and there arrive enough ofthem each year to get rid of worthless stock. Ten minutes after makingthe purchase I set out to walk to Corozal through the first mild showerof the rainy season--and arrived there I went and laid the bargaingently in the waste-basket of Corozal police station. 

Thus does the government sink to the petty rascalities of shop-keepers. Even a government manager on a fixed salary--in work-coupons--willdescend to these tricks of the trade to keep out of the clutches of theauditor, or to make a "good record. " The socialist's answer perhapswould be that under their system government factories would make onlyperfect goods. But won't the factory superintendent also be anxious tomake a "record"? And even government stock will deteriorate on theshelves. 

All small things, to be sure; but it is the sum of small things thatmake up that great complex thing--Life. Few of us would object toliving in that ideal dream world. But could it ever be? I haveanxiously asked this question and hinted at these little weaknessessuggested by Zone experiences to several Zone socialists--who are nothard to find. They merely answer that these things have nothing to dowith the case. But not one of them ever went so far as to demonstrate;and though I was born a long way north of Missouri I once passedthrough a corner of the state. 

As to the other side of the ledger, --equal pay for all, nowhere is manfurther from socialism than on the Canal Zone. Caste lines are assharply drawn as in India, which should not be unexpected in anenterprise largely in charge of graduates of our chief training-schoolfor caste. The Brahmins are the "gold" employees, white Americancitizens with all the advantages and privileges thereto appertaining. But--and herein we out-Hindu the Hindus--the Brahmin caste itself isdivided and subdivided into infinitesimal gradations. Every rank andshade of man has a different salary, and exactly in accordance withthat salary is he housed, furnished, and treated down to the leastitem, --number of electric lights, candle-power, style of bed, size ofbookcase. His Brahmin highness, "the Colonel, " has a palace, relatively, and all that goes with it. The high priests, the members ofthe Isthmian Canal Commission, have less regal palaces. Heads of thebig departments have merely palatial residences. Bosses live inwell-furnished dwellings, conductors are assigned a furnished house--orquarter of a house. Policemen, artisans, and the common garden varietyof bachelors have a good place to sleep. It is doubtful, to be sure, whether one-fourth of the "Zoners" of any class ever lived as wellbefore or since. The shovelman's wife who gives five-o'clock teas andkeeps two servants will find life different when the canal is openedand she moves back to the smoky little factory cottage and learns againto do her own washing. 

At work, "on the job" there is a genuine American freedom ofwear-what-you-please and a general habit of going where you choose inworking clothes. That is one of the incomprehensible Zone things to thelittle veneered Panamanian. He cannot rid himself of his racialconviction that a man in an old khaki jacket who is building a canalmust be of inferior clay to a hotel loafer in a frock coat and a tallhat. The real "Spig" could never do any real work for fear of soilinghis clothes. He cannot get used to the plain, brusk American typewithout embroidery, who just does things in his blunt, efficient waywithout wasting time on little exterior courtesies. None of thesechildish countries is man enough to see through the rough surface. Evenwith seven years of American example about him the Panamanian has notyet grasped the divinity of labor. Perhaps he will eons hence when hehas grown nearer true civilization. 

But among Americans off the job reminiscences of East India flock inagain. D, who is a quartermaster at $225, may be on"How-are-you-old-man?" terms with G, who is a station agent and draws$175. But Mrs. D never thinks of calling on Mrs. G socially. H and J, who are engineer and cranemen respectively on the same steam-shovel, are probably "Hank" and "Jim" to each other, but Mrs. H would behorrified to find herself at the same dance with Mrs. J. Mrs. X, whosehusband is a foreman at $165, and whose dining table is a full sixinches longer and whose ice-box will hold one more cold-storagechicken, would not think of sitting in at bridge with Mrs. Y, whosehusband gets $150. As for being black, or any tint but pure "white"!Even an Englishman, though he may eat in the same hotel if his skin isnot too tanned, is accepted on staring suffrance. As for the man whoseskin is a bit dull, he might sit on the steps of an I. C. C. Hotel withdollars dribbling out of his pockets until he starved to death--and hewould be duly buried in the particular grave to which his colorentitled him. A real American place is the Zone, with outward democracyand inward caste, an unenthusiastic and afraid-to-break-the-conventionsplace in play, and the opposite at work. 

Yet with it all it is a good place in which to live. There you havealways summer, jungled hills to look on by day and moonlight, and toroam in on Sunday--unless you are a policeman seven days a week. It ispossible that perpetual summer would soon breed quite a different typeof American. The Isthmus is nearly always in boyish--or girlish--goodtemper. Zone women and girls are noted for plump figures and care-freefaces. And there is a contentment that is more than climatic. There areno hard times on the Zone, no hurried, worried faces, no famished, wolfish eyes. The "Zoner" has his little troubles of course, --theservant problem, for instance, for the Jamaican housemaid is a thorn inany side. Now and then we hear some one wailing, "Oh, it getsso--tiresome! Everybody's shoveling dirt or talking about the otherfellow. " But he knows it isn't strictly true when he says it and thathe is kicking chiefly to keep in practice. Every one is free fromworries as to job, pay, house, provisions, and even hospital fees, andthe smoothness of it all, perhaps, gets on his nerves at times. Iquestion whether "the Colonel" himself loses much sleep when a chunk ofthe hill that bears up his residence lets go and pitches into thecanal. It sets one to musing at times whether the rock-bound system ofthe Incas was not best after all, --a place for every man and every manin his place, each his allotted work, which he was fully able to do andgetting Hail Columbia if he failed to do it. 

Which brings up the question of results in labor under thepseudo-socialist Zone system. Most American employees work steadily andtake their work seriously. It is as if each were individually proud ofbeing one of the chosen people and builders of the greatest work ofmodern times. Yet the far-famed "American rush" is not especiallyprevalent. The Zone point of view seems to be that no shoveling is soimportant, even that of digging a ditch half the ships of the world arewaiting to cross, that a man should bring upon himself a prematurefuneral. The common laborers, non-Americans, almost dawdle. There areno contractor's Irish straw-bosses to keep them on the move. The answerto the Socialist's scheme of having the government run all big buildingenterprises is to go out and watch any city street gang for an hour. 

The bringing together into close contact of Americans from everysection of our broad land is tending to make a new amalgamated type. Even New Englanders grow almost human here among their broader-mindedfellow-countrymen. Any northerner can say "nigger" as glibly as aCarolinian, and growl if one of them steps on his shadow. It is noteasy to say just how much effect all this will have when the canal isdone and this handful of amalgamated and humanized Americans issprinkled back over all the States as a leaven to the whole. They tellon the Zone of a man from Maine who sat four high-school years on thesame bench with two negro boys, and returning home after three years onthe Isthmus was so horrified to find one of those boys an alderman thathe packed his traps and moved to Alabama, "where a nigger IS anigger"--and if there isn't the "makings" of a story in that I 'llleave it to the postmaster of Miraflores. 

CHAPTER VIII

"There is much in this police business, " said "the Captain, " with hisslow, deliberate enunciation, "that must lead to a blank wall. Out often cases to investigate it is quite possible nine will result innothing. This percentage could not of course be true of a thousandcases and a man's services still be considered satisfactory. But of tenit is quite possible. As for knowing HOW to do detective work, all Ibring to the department myself is some ordinary common sense and alittle knowledge of human nature, and with these I try to work thingsout as best I can. This peeping-through-the-key-hole police work I knownothing whatever about, and don't want to. Nor do I expect a man to. "

I had been discussing with "the Captain" my dissatisfaction at myfailure to "get results" in an important case. A few weeks on the forcehad changed many a preconceived notion of police life. It had graduallybecome evident, for instance, that the profession of detective isadventurous, absorbing, heart-stopping chiefly between the covers ofpopular fiction; that real detective work, like almost any othervocation, is made up largely of the little unimportant every-daydetails, with only a rare assignment bulking above the mass. As "theCaptain" said, it was just plain every-day work carried on by theapplication of ordinary common sense. Such best-seller artifices asdisguise were absurd. Not only would disguise in all but the rarestcases be impossible, but useless. The A-B-C of plain-clothes work is tolearn to know a man by his face rather than by his clothing--and at theoutset one will be astonished to find how much he has hitherto beendepending 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 furthermoreshould not be a handsome man or a man of striking appearance in anyway; the ideal plain-clothes man is the little insignificant snipe whomeven the ladies will not notice. 

Since April tenth I had been settled in notorious House 111, Ancon, asort of frontiersman resort or smugglers' retreat--had there beenanything to smuggle--where to have fallen through the veranda screeningwould have been to fall into a foreign land. As pay-day approachedthere came the duty of standing a half-hour at the station gate beforethe departure of each train to watch and discuss with the ponderous, smiling, dark-skinned chief of Panama's plain-clothes squad, or with avigilante the suspicious characters and known crooks of all colorsgoing out along the line. On the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth theI. C. C. Pay-car, that bank on wheels guarded by a squad of Z. P. , sprinkled its half-million a day along the Zone. Then plain-clothesduty was not merely to scan the embarking passengers but to ride outwith each train to one of the busy towns. There scores upon scores ofsoil-smeared workmen swarmed over all the landscape with longpaper-wrapped rolls of Panamanian silver in their hands, while flashilydressed touts and crooks of both sexes drifted out from Panama withevery train to worm their insidious way into wherever the scent of coinpromised another month free from labor. To add to those crowded timesthe chief dissipation of the West Indian during the few days followingpay-day that his earnings last is to ride aimlessly and joyously backand forth on the trains. 

There is one advantage, though some policemen call it by quite theopposite name, in being stationed at Ancon. When crime takes a holidayand do-nothing threatens tropical dementia, or a man tires of hisnative land and people a short stroll down the asphalt takes him intothe city of Panama. Barely across the street where his badge becomesmere metal, and he must take care not to arrest absent-mindedly thefirst violator of Zone laws--whom he is sure to come upon within thefirst block--he notes that the English tongue has suddenly almostdisappeared. On every hand, lightly sprinkled with many other dialects, sounds Spanish, the slovenly Spanish of Panama in which bueno is"hueno" and calle is "caye. " As he swings languidly to the right intoAvenida Central he grows gradually aware that there has settled downabout him a cold indifference, an atmosphere quite different from thaton his own side of the line. Those he addresses in the tongue of theland reply to his questions with their customary gestures and fixedphrases of courtesy. But no more; and a cold dead silence falls sharplyupon the last word, and at times, if the experience be comparativelynew, there seems to hover in the air something that reminds him thatway back fifty-six years ago there was a "massacre" of Americans inPanama city. For the Panamanian has little love for the United Statesor its people; which is the customary thanks any man or nation gets forlifting a dirty half-breed gamin from the gutter. 

Off in the vortex of the city lolls Panama's public market, whereChinamen are the chief sellers and flies the chief consumers. Myriadsof fruits in every stage of development and disintegration, haggledbits of meat, the hundred sights and sounds and smells one hurries pastsuggest that Panama may even have outdone Central America before UncleSam came with his garbage-cans and his switch. Further on, down at theold harbor, lingers a hint of the picturesqueness of Panama inpre-canal days. Clumsy boats, empty, or deep-laden with fruit from, orfreight to, the several islands that sprinkle the bay, splash and bumpagainst the little cement wharf. Aged wooden "windjammers" doze attheir moorings, everywhere are jabbering natives with that shiftyhalf-cast eye and frequent evidence of deep-rooted disease. Almostevery known race mingles in Panama city, even to Chinese coolies intheir umbrella hats and rolled up cotton trousers, delving in richmarket gardens on the edges of the town or dog-trotting through thestreets under two baskets dancing on the ends of a bamboo pole, tillone fancies oneself at times in Singapore or Shanghai. The black Zonelaborer, too, often prefers to live in Panama for the greater freedomit affords--there he doesn't have to clean his sink so often, marry his"wife, " or banish his chickens from the bedroom. Policemen with theirclubs swarm everywhere, for no particular reason than that the littlerepublic is forbidden to play at army, and with the presidentialelection approaching political henchmen must be kept good-humored. Nota few of these officers are West Indians who speak not a word ofSpanish--nor any other tongue, strictly speaking. 

Rubber-tired carriages roll constantly by along Uncle Sam's macadam, amid the jingling of their musical bells. Every one takes a carriage inPanama. Any man can afford ten cents even if he has no expense account;besides he runs no risk of being overcharged, which is a greateradvantage than the cost. All this may be different when Panama'selectric line, all the way from Balboa docks to Las Sabanas, isopened--but that's another year. Meanwhile the lolling in carriagescomes to be quite second nature. 

But like any tropical Spanish town Panama seethes only by night, especially Saturday and Sunday nights when the paternal Zone governmentallows its children to spend the evening in town. Then frequent trains, unknown during the week, begin with the setting of the sun to disgorgeAmericans of all grades and sizes through the clicking turnstiles intothe arms of gesticulating hackmen, some to squirm away afoot betweenthe carriages, all to be swallowed up within ten minutes in the greatsea of "colored" people. So that, large as may be each train-load, white American faces are so rare on Panama streets that oneinvoluntarily glances at each that passes in the throng. 

It is the "gum-shoe's" duty to know and be unknown in as many places aspossible. Wherefore on such nights, whatever his choice, he driftsearly down by the "Normandie" and on into the "Pana-zone" to see who isout, and why. In the latter emporium he adds a bottle of beer to hisexpense account, endures for a few moments the bawling above the screamof the piano of two Americans of Palestinian antecedents, admires somelocal hero, like "Baldy" for instance, who is credited with doing whatNapoleon could not do, and floats on, perhaps to screw up his courageand venture into the thinly-clad Teatro Apolo. He who knows where tolook, or was born under a lucky star, may even see on these merryevenings a big Marine from Bas Obispo or a burly soldier of the Tenthhowling some joyful song with six or seven little "Spig" policemenclimbing about on his frame. At such times everything but real blood, flows in Panama. Her history runs that way. On the day she won herindependence from Spain it is said the General in Chief cut his fingeron a wine glass. The day she won it from Colombia there was a Chinamankilled--but every one agrees that was due to the celestial's criminalcarelessness. 

Down at the quieter end of the city are "Las Bovedas, " that curvingsea-wall Phillip of Spain tried to make out from his palace walls, asmany another, regal and otherwise, has strained his eyes in vain to seewhere his good coin has gone. But the walls are there all right, thoughPhillip never saw them; crumbling a bit, yet still a sturdy barrier tothe sea. A broad cement and grass promenade runs atop, wide as anAmerican street. Thirty or forty feet below the low parapet sounds thedeep, time-mellowed voice of the Pacific, as there rolls higher andhigher up the rock ledges that great tide so different from thescarcely noticeable one at Colon. The summer breeze never dies down, never grows boisterous. On the landward side Panama lies mumbling toitself, down in the hollow between squats Chiriqui prison with itsAmerican warden, once a Zone policeman; while in the round stonewatch-towers on the curving parapets lean prison guards with fixedbayonets and incessantly blow the shrill tin whistles that is theuniversal Latin-American artifice for keeping policemen awake. On theway back to the city the elite--or befriended--may drop in at theUniversity Club at the end of the wall for a cooling libation. 

On Sunday night comes the band concert in the palm-ringed CathedralPlaza. There is one on Thursday, too, in Plaza Santa Ana, but that ispacked with all colors and considered "rather vulgah. " In the square bythe cathedral the aggregate color is far lighter. Pure African bloodhangs chiefly in the outskirts. Then the haughty aristocrats of Panama, proud of their own individual shade of color, may be seen in the samepromenade with American ladies--even a garrison widow or two--from outalong the line. Panamanian girls gaudily dressed and suggesting to thenostrils perambulating drug-stores shuttle back and forth with theirperfumed dandies. Above the throng pass the heads and shoulders ofunemotional, self-possessed Americans, erect and soldierly. SergeantJack of Ancon station was sure to be there in his faultless civiliangarb, a figure neat but not gaudy; and even busy Lieutenant Long wasknown to break away from his stacked-up duties and his blackstenographer and come to overtop all else in the square save thepalm-trees whispering together in the evening breeze between thenumbers. 

There is no favoritism in Zone police work. Every crime reportedreceives full investigation, be it only a Greek laborer losing a pairof trousers or--

There was the case that fell to me early in May, for instance. A boxbilled from New York to Peru had been broken open on Balboa dockand--one bottle of cognac stolen. Unfortunately the matter was turnedover to me so long after the perpetration of the dastardly crime thatthe possible culprits among the dock hands had wholly recovered fromthe probable consumption of the evidence. But I succeeded in gatheringmaterial for a splendid typewritten report of all I had not been ableto unearth, to file away among other priceless headquarters' archives. 

Not that the Z. P. Has not its big jobs. The force to a man distinctlyremembers that absorbing two months between the escape of wild blackFelix Paul and the day they dragged him back into the penitentiary. Noless fresh in memory are the expeditions against Maurice Pelote, orFrancois Barduc, the murderer of Miraflores. All Martinique negroes, beit noted; and of all things on this earth, including greased pigs, thehardest to catch is a Martinique criminal. After all, four or fivemurders on the Zone in three years is no startling record in such aswarm of nationalities. 

Cases large and small which it would be neither of interest nor politicto detail poured in during the following weeks. Among them was thecounterfeit case unearthed by some Shylock Holmes on the Panamanianforce, that called for a long perspiring hunt for the "plant" in oddcorners of the Zone. Then there was--, an ex-Z. P. Who lost his threeyears' savings on the train, for which reason I shadowed a well-knownAmerican--for it is a Z. P. Rule that no one is above suspicion--aboutPanama afoot and in carriages nearly all night, in true dime-novelfashion. There was the day that I was given a dangerous convict todeliver at Culebra Penitentiary. The criminal was about three feetlong, jet black, his worldly possessions comprising two more or lessgarments, one reaching as far down as his knees and the other as far upas the base of his neck. He had long been a familiar sight to "Zoners"among the swarm of bootblacks that infest the corner near the P. R. R. Station. He claimed to be eleven, and looked it. But having alreadyserved time for burglary and horse-stealing, his conviction forstealing a gold necklace from a negro washerwoman of San Miguel leftthe Chief Justice no choice but to send him to meditate a half-year atCulebra. There is no reform school on the Zone. The few American minorswho have been found guilty of misdoing have been banished to theirnative land. When the deputy warden had sufficiently recovered from theshock brought upon him by the sight of his new charge to give me areceipt for him, I raced for the noon train back to the city. 

Thereon I sat down beside Pol--First-Class Policeman X----, surprisedto find him off duty and in civilian clothes. There was a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and not until the train was racing past RioGrande reservoir did he turn to confide to me the followingextraordinary occurrence:

"Last night I dreamed old Judge ---- had my father and my mother upbefore him. On the stand he asked my mother her age--and the funny partof it is my mother has been dead over ten years. She turned around andwrote on the wall with a piece of chalk '1859, ' the year she was born. Then my father was called and he wrote '1853. ' That's all there was tothe dream. But take it from me I know what it means. Now just add 'emtogether, and multiply by five--because I could see five people in thecourt-room--divide by two--father and mother--and I get--, " he drew outa crumpled "arrest" form covered with penciled figures, "--9280. Andthere--" his voice dropped low, "--is your winning number for nextSunday. "

So certain was this, that First-Class X---- had bribed anotherpoliceman to take his eight-hour shift, dressed in his vacation best, bought a ticket to Panama and return, with real money at touristprices, and would spend the blazing afternoon seeking among the scoresof vendors in the city for lottery ticket 9280. And if he did not findit there he certainly paid his fare all the way to Colon and back tocontinue his search. I believe he at length found and acquired thewhole ticket, for the customary sum of $2. 50. But there must have beena slip in the arithmetic, or mother's chalk; for the winning numberthat Sunday was 8895. 

Frequent as are these melancholy errors, scores of "Zoners" clingfaithfully to their arithmetical superstitions. Many a man spends hisrecreation hours working out the winning numbers by some secret recipeof his own. There are men on the Z. P. Who, if you can get them startedon the subject of lottery tickets, will keep it up until you run away, showing you the infallibility of their various systems, believing thedrawing to be honest, yet oblivious to the fact that both the one andthe other cannot be true. Dreams are held in special favor. It isprobably safe to assert that one-half the numbers over 1, 000 and under10, 000 that appear in Zone dreams are snapped up next day in lotterytickets. Many have systems of figuring out the all-important numberfrom the figures on engines and cars. More than one Zone housewife hasslipped into the kitchen to find the roast burning and her West Indiancook hiding hastily behind her ample skirt a long list of the figureson every freight-car that has passed that morning, from which by someAntillian miscalculation and the murmuring of certain invocations shewas to find the magic number that would bring her cooking days to anend. 

Yet there is sometimes method in their madness. Did not "Joe" who sleptin the next room to me at Gatun "hit Duque for two pieces"--which is tosay he had $3, 000 to sprinkle along with his police salary? Yetpersonally the only really appealing "system" was that of Cristobal. Upon his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he picked out a numberat random, took out a yearly subscription to it, and thought no moreabout it than one does of a newspaper delivered at the door eachmorning--until one Monday during this month of May, after he hadsquandered something over $500, on worthless bits of paper, he strolledinto the lottery office and was handed an inconspicuous little bagcontaining $7, 500 in yellow gold. 

Like all Z. P. "rookies" (recruits) I had been warned early to bewarethe "sympathy dodge. " But experience is the only real teacher. Oneafternoon I bestraddled a crazy, stilt-legged Jamaican horse to go outinto the bush beyond the Panama line to fetch and deliver a citizen ofthat sovereign republic who was wanted on the Zone for horse-stealing. At the town of Sabanas, where those Panamanians who have bagged themost loot since American occupation have their "summer" homes, --giddy, brick-painted monstrosities among the great trees, deep green foliageand brilliant flower-beds (pause a moment and think of brilliant redhouses in the tropics; it will make you better acquainted with the"Spig") I dropped in at the police station for ice-water andinformation. I found it in charge of a negro policeman who knewnothing, and had forgotten that. When, therefore, it also chanced thatan officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animalsstopped before the gate with a coachman of Panama, it fell upon me toassume command. The horse was the usual emaciated rat of an animalindigenous to Panama City. When overhauled, the driver was beating theanimal uphill on his way to Old Panama to bring back a party oftourists visiting the ruins. How he expected the decrepit beast tocarry four more persons was a mystery. When the harness was liftedthere was disclosed the expected half-dozen large raw sores. We tiedthe animal in the shade near hay and water and adjourned to the station. 

The coachman, a weary, unshaven Spaniard whose red eyelids showed lackof sleep, was weeping copiously. He claimed to be a madrileno--whichwas evident; that he had been a coachman in Spain and Panama all hislife without ever before having been arrested--which was possible. Hewas merely one of many drivers for a livery-stable owner in Panama. Ordered to go for the tourists, he had called his employer's attentionto the danger of crossing Zone territory with a horse in thatcondition; but the owner had ordered him to cover up the sores withpads and harness and drive along. 

It was a very sad case. Here was a poor, honest coachman struggling tosupport a wife and I don't recall how many children, but any numbersounds quite reasonable in Panama, who was about to be punished for thefault of another. The paradox of honest and coachman did not strike meuntil later. He was certainly telling the truth--you come to recognizeit readily in all ordinary cases after a few weeks in plain clothes. The real culprit was, of course, the employer. My righteous wrathdemanded that he and not his poor serf be punished. I could not releasethe driver. But I would see that the truth was brought out in courtnext morning and a warrant sworn out against the owner. With showeringtears and rib-shaking sobs the coachman promised to tell the judge thewhole story. I went through him, and locking him up with assurances ofmy deepest sympathy and full assistance, stilted on toward the littlevillage of shacks scattered out of sight among the hills, and valleysacross the border. 

Coachman, witnesses, and arresting officer, to say nothing of horse, carriage, and sores were on hand when court opened next morning. As Iexpected, the judge failed to ask the poor fellow a single questionthat would bring out the complicity of his employer; did not in factdiscover there was an employer. I asked to be sworn, and gave the trueversion of the case. The judge listened earnestly. When I had ended, herecalled the coachman. The latter expressed his astonishment that Ishould have made any such statements. He denied them in toto. Hisemployer had nothing whatever to do with the case. The fault wasentirely his, and no one else was in the remotest degree connected withthe matter. 

"Five dollars!" snapped the judge. 

The coachman paid, hitched up the rat of a horse, and wabbled away intoPanama. 

Police business, taking me down into "the Grove" that night, I foundthe driver, clean-shaven and better dressed, waiting for fares beforethe principal house of that section. 

"What kind of a game--, " I began. 

"Senor, " he cried, and tears again seemed on the point of falling, "every word I told you was true. But of course I couldn't testifyagainst the patron. He'd discharge me and blackmail me, and you know Ihave a wife and innumerable children to support. Come on over and havea drink. "

This justice business, one soon learns, is of the same infallible stuffas the rest of life. After all it is only the personal opinion of thejudge between two persons swearing on oath to diametrically opposedstatements; and for all the impressiveness of deep furrowed brows I didnot find that the average judge had any more power of reading humannature than the average of the rest of us. I well remember the morningwhen a meek little Panamanian was testifying in his own behalf, inSpanish of course, when the judge broke in without even asking for atranslation of the testimony:

"That'll do! Because of your gestures I believe you are trying to buncothis court. You are lying--tell him that, " this to the negrointerpreter; and he therewith sentenced the witness to jail. 

As if any Panamanian could talk earnestly of anything without wavinghis arms about him. 

The telephone-bell rang one afternoon. It was always doing that, twenty-four hours a day; but this time it sounded especially sharp andinsistent. In the adjoining room, over the "blotter, " snapped the bruskstereotyped nasal reply:

"Ancon! Bingham talking!"

The instrument buzzed a moment and the deskman looked up to say:

"'Andy' and a nigger just fell over into Pedro Miguel locks. They'resending in his body. The nigger lit on his head and hurt his leg. "

His body! How uncanny it sounded! "Andy, " that bunch of muscles who hadmade such short work of the circus wrestler in Gatun and whom I hadseen not twenty-four hours before bubbling with life was now a "body. "Things happen quickly on the Zone, and he whom the fates have picked togo generally shows no hesitation in his exit. But at least a man whodies for the I. C. C. Has the affairs he left behind him attended to ina thorough manner. In ten minutes to a half-hour one of the Z. P. Is onthe ground taking note of every detail of the accident. A special trainor engine rushes the body to the morgue in Ancon hospital grounds. Acoroner's jury is soon meeting under the chairmanship of a policeman, long reports of everything concerning the victim or the accident aresoon flowing Administration-ward. The police accident report isdetailed and in triplicate. There is sure to be in the "personal files"at Culebra a history of the deceased and the names of his nearestrelative or friend both on the Isthmus and in the States; for everyemployee must make out his biography at the time of his engagement. There are men whose regular duty it is to list and take care of hispossessions down to the last lead pencil, and to forward them to thelegal heirs. A year's pay goes to his family--were as much required ofevery employer and his the burden of proving the accident the fault ofthe employee, how the safety appliances in factories would multiply. There is a man attached to Ancon hospital whose unenviable duty it isto write a letter of condolence to the relatives in the States. 

And so the "Kangaroos" or the "Red Men" or whatever his lodge was filedbehind the I. C. C. Casket to the church in Ancon, and "Andy" was laidaway under another of the simple white iron crosses that thicklypopulate many a Zone hillside, and he was charged up to the big debitcolumn of the costs of the canal. On the cross is his new number; forofficially a "Zoner" is always a number; that of the brass-check hewears as a watch-charm alive, that at the head of his grave when hiscanal-digging is over. 

Late one unoccupied afternoon I picked up the path behind theAdministration Building and, skirting a Zone residence, began to climbthat famous oblong mound that dominates the Pacific end of thelandscape from every direction, --Ancon Hill. For a way a fairly steepand stony path lead through thick undergrowth. Then this ceased, and afar steeper trail zigzagged up the face of the bare mountain, coveredonly with thin dead grass. The setting sun cast its shadow obliquelyacross the summit when I reached it, --a long ridge, with groves oftrees, running off abruptly toward the sea. On the opposite side UncleSam was cutting away a whole side of the hill. But the five o'clockwhistle had blown, and whole armies of little workmen swarmed acrossall the landscape far below, and silence soon settled down save for thedredges at Balboa that chug on through the night. But for myself thehill was wholly unpeopled. A sturdy ocean breeze swept steadily acrossit. The sinking sun set the jungle afire in a spot that would havestartled those who do not know that it rises in the Pacific at Panama, crude, glaring colors glowed, fading to gentler and more delicatetints, then the evening shadow that had climbed the hill with me spreadlike a great black veil over all the world. 

But the moon nearing its full followed almost on the heels of thesetting sun and, casting its half-day over a scene rich in nature andhistory, invited the eye to swing clear round the hazy circle. Belowlay Panama dully rumbling with night traffic. Silent Ancon, stillbetter lighted, cuddled upon the lower skirts of the hill itself. Thenbeyond, the curving bay, half seen, half guessed, with its longpromontory dying away into the hazy moonlit distance, lighted up hereand there by bush fires in the jungled hills. Some way out winked thecluster of lights that marked Las Sabanas. In front, the placidPacific, the "South Sea" of the Spaniards, spread dimly away into thevoid of night, its several islands seen only by the darker darknessthat marked where they lay. 

On the other side of the hill the rumble of cranes and night labor cameup from Balboa dock. There, began the canal, which the eye could followaway into the dim hilly inland distance--and come upon a great clusterof lights that was Corozal, then another group that was Miraflores, close followed by those of Pedro Miguel; and yet further, rising tosuch height as to be almost indistinguishable from the lower stars thelights of the negro cabins of upper Paraiso twinkled dimly above abroad glow that was Paraiso itself. There the vista ended. For atParaiso the canal turns to the left for its plunge through Culebrahill, and all that follows, --Empire, Cascadas, and far Gatun, wasvisible only in the imagination. 

If only the film of time might roll back and there pass again beforeour eyes all that has come to pass within sight of Ancon hilltop. Across the bay there, where now are only jungle-tangled ruins, Pizarroset out with his handful of vagabonds to conquer South America; thereold Buccaneer Morgan laid his bloody hand. Back in the hills there mendied by scores trying to carry a ship across the Isthmus, the Spanishviceroys passed with their rich trains, there on some unknown knollBalboa reached four hundred years ago the climax of a career that beganwith stowing away in a cask and ended under the headsman's ax--no endof it, down to the "Forty-niners" going hopefully out and returningfilled with gold or disease, or leaving their bones here in the junglebefore they really were "Forty-niners"; on down to the railroad dayswith men wading in swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying downto die. Then if a bit of the future, too, could for a moment beunveiled, and one might watch the first ship glide majestically andsilently into the canal and away into the jungle like some amphibiousmonster. 

It was along in those days that we were looking for a "murderousassaulter. " At a Saturday night dance in a native shack back inMiraflores bush the usual riot had broken out about midnight and arevolver had come into play. As a result there was a Peruvian mulattoup in Ancon hospital who had been shot through the mouth, the bulletbeing somewhere in his neck. It became my frequent duty, among other Z. P. 's, to take suspects up the hill for possible identification. 

One morning I strolled into the station and fell to laughing. The earlytrain had brought in on suspicion a Spanish laborer of twenty ortwenty-two; a pretty, girlish chap with huge blue eyes over which hunglong black lashes like those painted on Nurnberg dolls. No one with ashadow of faith in human nature left would have believed him capable ofany crime; any one at all acquainted with Spaniards must have known hecould not shoot a hare, would in fact be afraid to fire off a gun. 

The fear in his big blue eyes struggled with his ingenuous, girlishsmile as I marched him through the long hall full of white beds anddarker inmates. The Peruvian sat bolstered up in his cot, a stoical, revengeful glare on his reddish-brown swollen face. He gazed a longminute at the boy's face, across which flitted the flush of fear andembarrassment, at the big doll's eyes, then shook a raised forefingerslowly back and forth before his nose--the negative of Spanish-speakingpeoples. Then he groaned, spat in a tin-can beside him, and called forpaper and pencil. In the note-book I handed him he wrote in atrociouslyspelled Spanish:

"The man that came to the dance with this man is the man that shot mewith a bullet. "

The blue-eyed boy promised to point out his companion of that night. Wetook the 10:55 and reached Pedro Miguel during the noon hour. Down in abox-car camp between the railroad and the canal the boy called for"Jose" and there presented himself immediately a tall, studious, solemn-faced Spaniard of spare frame, about forty, dressed in overallsand working shirt. Here was even less a criminal type than the boy. 

"Senor, " I asked, "did you go to the dance in Miraflores last Saturdaynight 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 havinguttered a sound. He opened it a second time, then sat suddenly down onthe low edge of the box-car porch. A more genuinely astonished man Ihave never seen. No actor could have approached it. Still, whatever myown conviction, it was my business to bring him before his accuser. After a time he recovered sufficiently to ask permission to change hisclothes, and disappeared in one of the resident box-cars. The boy wasalready being fed in another. Had my prisoners been of almost any oneof the other seventy-one nationalities I should not have thought ofletting them out of my sight. But the Zone Spaniard's respect for lawis proverbial. 

"Jose! Pinched Jose!" cried his American boss, when I explained that hewould find himself a man short that afternoon. "You people are surebarking up the wrong tree this time. Why, Jose has been my engineer forover two years, and the steadiest man on the Zone. He writes for someSpanish paper and tells 'em the truth over there so straight that therest of 'em down here, the anarchists and all that bunch, are aching toget him into trouble. But they'll never get anything on Jose. Have himtell you about it in Spanish if you sabe the lingo. "

But Jose was a gallego, whence instead of the voluble flood ofprotesting words one expects from a Spaniard on such an occasion, hewrapped himself in a stoical silence. Not until we were on our way tothe railroad station did I get him to talk. Then he explained in quiet, unflowery, gestureless language. 

He had come to the Canal Zone chiefly to gather literary material. Notbeing a man of wealth, however, nor one satisfied with superficialobservation, he had sought employment at his trade as stationaryengineer. Besides laying in a stock for more important writing he hopedto do in the future, he was Zone correspondent of "El Liberal" ofMadrid and other Spanish cities. In the social life of hisfellow-countrymen on the Isthmus he had taken no part, whatever. He wastoo busy. He did not drink. He could not dance; he saw no sense insquandering time in such frivolities. But ever since his arrival he hadbeen promising himself to attend one of these wild Saturday-nightdebauches in the edge of the jungle that he might use a description ofit in some later work. So he had coaxed his one personal friend, theboy, to go with him. It was virtually the one thing besides work thathe had ever done on the Zone. They had stayed two hours, and had leftthe moment the trouble began. Yet here he was arrested. 

I bade him cheer up, to consider the trip to Ancon merely an afternoonexcursion on government pass. He remained downcast. 

"But think of the experience!" I cried. "Now you can tell exactly howit feels to be arrested--first-hand literary material. "

But he was not philosopher enough to look at it from that point ofview. To his Spanish mind arrest, even in innocence, was a disgrace forwhich no amount of "material" could compensate. It is a common failing. How many of us set out into the world for experience, yet growl withrage or sit downcast and silent all the way from Pedro Miguel to Panamaif one such experience gives us a rough half-hour, or robs us of tenminutes sleep. 

At the hospital the Peruvian gurgled and spat, beckoned for paper andwrote:

"This is the man. "

"What man?" I asked. 

"The man who came with that man, " he scribbled, nodding his heavy facetoward the blue-eyed boy. 

"But is this the man that shot you?" I demanded. 

"The man who came with that man is the one, " he scrawled. 

"Well, then this is the man that shot you?" I cried. 

But he would not answer definitely to that, but sat a long time glaringout of his swollen, vindictive countenance propped up in his pillows atthe tall, solemn correspondent. By and by he motioned again for paper. 

"I think so. I am not sure, " he miswrote. 

I did NOT think so, and as the sum total of his descriptions of hisassailant during the past several days amounted to "a tall man, rathershort, with a face and two eyes"--he was very insistent about the eyes, which is the reason the doll-eyed boy had fallen into the drag-net--Ipermitted myself to accept my own opinion as evidence. The Peruvian wasin all likelihood in no condition to recognize a man from a loup-garouby the time the fracas started. Much ardent water had flowed thatnight. I took the suspects down to Ancon station and let them cool offin porch rocking-chairs. Then I gave them passes back to Pedro Miguelfor the evening train. The doll-eyed boy smiled girlishly upon me as hedescended the steps, but the correspondent strode slowly away with thedowncast, cheerless countenance of a man who has been hurt beyondrecovery. 

There were strangely contrasted days in the "gum-shoe's" calendar. Twoexamples taken almost at random will give the idea. On May twentieth Ilolled all day in a porch rocker at Ancon station, reading a novel. Along in the afternoon Corporal Castillo drifted in. For a time hestood leaning against the desk-rail, his felt hat pushed far back onhis head, his eyes fixed on some point in the interior of China. Thensuddenly he snatched up a sheet of I. C. C. Stationery, dropped down ata typewriter, and wrote at express speed a letter in Spanish. Next hegrasped a telephone and, in the words of the deskman, "spit Spig intothe 'phone" for several minutes. That over he caught up an envelope, sealed the letter and addressed it. An instant later the station was inan uproar looking for a stamp. One was found, the Corporal stuck it onthe letter, fell suddenly motionless and stared for a long time atvacancy. Then a new thought struck him. He jerked open a drawer of the"gum-shoe" desk, flung the letter inside--where I found it accidentallyone day some weeks afterward--and dropping into the swivel-chair laidhis feet on the "gum-shoe" blotter and a moment later seemed to havefallen asleep. 

By all of which signs those of us who knew him began to suspect thatthe Corporal had something on his mind. Not a few considered him thebest detective on the force; at least he was different enough from aprinter's ink detective to be a real one. But naturally the strain ofheading a detective bureau for weeks was beginning to wear upon him. 

"Damn it!" said the Corporal suddenly, opening his eyes, "I can't be insix places at once. You'll have to handle these cases, " and he drewfrom a pocket and handed me three typewritten sheets, then drifted awayinto the dusk. I looked them over and returned to the porch rocker andthe last chapters of the novel. 

A meek touch on the leg awoke me at four next morning. I looked up tosee dimly a black face under a khaki helmet bent over me whispering, "It de time, sah, " and fade noiselessly away. It was the frontierpoliceman carrying out his orders of the night before. For once therewas not a carriage in sight. I stumbled sleepily down into Panama andfor some distance along Avenida Central before I was able to hail anall night hawk chasing a worn little wreck of a horse along themacadam. I spread my lanky form over the worn cushions and we spavinedalong the graveled boundary line, past the Chinese cemetery where Johncan preserve and burn joss to his ancestors to the end of time, outthrough East Balboa just awakening to life, and reached Balboa docks asday was breaking. I was not long there, and the equine caricatureambled the three miles back to town in what seemed reasonable time, considering. As we turned again into Avenida Central my watch told methere was time and to spare to catch the morning passenger. I was not alittle surprised therefore to hear just then two sharp rings on thestation gong. I dived headlong into the station and brought up againsta locked gate, caught a glimpse of two or three ladies weeping and thetail of the passenger disappearing under the bridge. Americans haveintroduced the untropical idea of starting their trains on time, to thedisgust of the "Spig" in general and the occasional discomfiture ofAmericans. I dashed wildly out through the station, across Panama'smain street, down a rugged lane to the first steps descending to thetrack, and tumbled joyously onto a slowly moving train--to discoverthat it was the Balboa labor-train and that the Colon passenger wasalready half-way to Diablo Hill. 

A Panama policeman of dusky hue, leaning against a gate-post, eyed medrowsily as I slowly climbed the steps, mopping my brow and staring atmy watch. 

"What time does that 6:35 train leave?" I demanded. 

"Yo, senor, " he said with ministerial dignity, shifting slowly to theother shoulder, "no tengo conocimiento de esas cosas" (I have noknowledge of those things). 

He probably did not know there is a railroad from Panama to Colon. Ithas only been in operation since 1855. 

Later I found the fault lay with my brass watch. 

With a perspiration up for all day I set out along the track. HoundingDiablo Hill the realization that I was hungry came upon mesimultaneously with the thought that unless I got through the door ofCorozal hotel by 7:30 I was likely to remain so. Breakfast over, Icaught the morning supply-train to Miraflores, there to dash throughthe locks for a five-minute interview. I walked to Pedro Miguel and, descending from the embankment of the main line, "nailed" a dirt-trainreturning empty and stood up for a breezy ride down through the "cut. "It was the same old smoky, toilsome place, a perceptible bit lower. Asin the case of a small boy only those can see its growth who have beenaway for a time. The train stopped with a jerk at the foot of Culebra. I walked a half-mile and caught a loaded dirt-train to Cascadas. Thematter there to be investigated required ten minutes. That over, I "gotin touch" at the nearest telephone, and the Corporal's voice called formy immediate presence at headquarters. There chanced to be passingthrough Cascadas at that moment a Panama-bound freight, the caboose ofwhich caught me up on the fly; and forty minutes later I was racing upthe long stairs. 

There I learned among other things that a man I was anxious to have aword with was coming in on the noon train, but would be unavailableafter arrival. I sprang into a cab and was soon rolling away again, past the Chinese cemetery. At the commissary crossing in East Balboa wewere held up by an empty dirt-train returning from the dump. I tossed acoin at the cabman and scrambled aboard. The train raced throughCorozal, down the grade and around the curve at unslacking speed. Idropped off in front of Miraflores police station, keeping my feet, thanks to practice and good luck, and dashing up through the village, dragged myself breathlessly aboard the passenger train as its head andshoulders had already disappeared in the tunnel. 

The ticket-collector pointed out my man to me in the first passengercoach, the "ladies' car"--he is a school-teacher and tobacco smokedistresses him--and by the time we pulled into Panama I had the desiredinformation. Dinner was not to be thought of; I had barely time to dashthrough the second-class gate and back along the track to Balboalabor-train. From the docks a sand-train carried me to Pedro Miguel. 

There was a craneman in Bas Obispo "cut" whose testimony was wanted. Ireached him by two short walks and a ride. His statements suggested theadvisability of questioning his room-mate, a towerman in Mirafloresfreight-yards. Luck would have it that my chauffeur friend ---- wasjust then passing with an I. C. C. Motor-car and only a photographerfor a New York weekly aboard. I found room to squeeze in. The car racedaway through the "cut, " up the declivity, and dropped me at the foot ofthe tower. The room-mate referred me to a locomotive engineer and, being a towerman, gave me the exact location of his engine. I found itat the foot of Cucaracha slide with a train nearly loaded. By the timethe engineer had added his whit of information, we were swinging aroundtoward the Pacific dump. I dropped off and, climbing up the flank ofAncon hill, descended through the hospital grounds. 

Where the royal palms are finest and there opens out the broadest viewof Panama, Ancon, and the bay, I gave myself five minutes' pause, afterwhich a carriage bore me to a shop near Cathedral Plaza wheresecond-hand goods are bought--and no questions asked. On the way backto Ancon station I visited two similar establishments. 

I had been lolling in the swivel-chair a full ten minutes, perhaps, when the telephone rang. It was "the Captain" calling for me. When Ireached the third-story back he handed me extradition papers to theSecretary of Foreign Affairs in Panama. A half-hour later, whollyoutstripping the manana idea, I had signed a receipt for the Jap inquestion and transferred him from Panama to Ancon jail. Whereupon Idescended to the evening passenger and rode to Pedro Miguel for fiveminutes' conversation, and caught the labor-train Panamaward. AtCorozal I stepped off for a word with the officer on the platform andthe labor-train plunged on again, after the fashion of labor-trains, spilling the last half of its disembarking passengers along the way. Ten minutes later the headlight of the last passenger swung around thecurve and carried me away to Panama. 

That might have done for the day, but I had gathered a momentum it washard to check. Not long after returning from the police mess to theswivel chair a slight omission in the day's program occurred to me. Icalled up Corozal police station. 

"What?" said a mashed-potato voice at the other end of the wire. 

"Who's talking?"

"Policeman Green, sah. "

"Station commander there?"

"No, sah. Station commander he gone just over to de Y. M. To playbilliards, sah. Dey one big match on to-night. "

Of course I could have "got" him there. But on second thoughts it wouldbe better to see him in person and clear up at the same time a littlematter in one of the labor camps, and not run the risk of causing theloss of the billiard championship. Besides Corozal is cooler to sleepin than Ancon. In a black starry night I set out along the invisiblerailroad for the first station. 

An hour later, everything settled to my satisfaction, I had discovereda vacant bed in Corozal bachelor quarters and was pulling off my coatpreparatory to the shower-bath and a well-earned night's repose. Suddenly I heard a peculiar noise in the adjoining room, much like thatof a seal coming to the surface after being long under water. Mycuriosity awakened, I sauntered a few feet along the veranda. Besideone of the cots stood a short, roly-poly little man, the lower third ofwhom showed rosy pink below his bell-shaped white nightie. As he turnedhis face toward the light to switch it off I swallowed the roof of mymouth and clawed at the clap-boarding for support. It was "the Sloth!"He had been transferred. I slipped hastily into my coat and, turning upthe collar, plunged out into the rain and the night and stumbledblindly away on weary legs towards Panama. 

CHAPTER IX

There were four of us that Sunday. "Bish" and I always went for anafternoon swim unless police or mess duties forbade. Then there wasBridgley, who had also once displayed his svelte form in a Z. P. Uniform to admiring tourists, but was now a pursuer of "soldiering"Hindus on Naos Island. I wish I could describe Bridgley for you. But ifyou never knew him ten pages would give you no clearer idea, and if youever did, the mere mention of the name Bridgley will be full and ampledescription. Still, if you must have some sort of a lay figure to hangyour imaginings on, think of a man who always reminds you of a slender, delicate porcelain vase of great antiquity that you know a strong windwould smash to fragments, --yet when you accidentally swat it off themantelpiece to the floor it bobs up without a crack. Then you growbolder and more curious and jump on it with both feet in yourhob-nailed boots, and to your astonishment it not only does not breakbut--

Well, Bridgley was one of us that Sunday afternoon; and then there was"the Admiral, " well-dressed as always, who turned up at the lastmoment; for which we were glad, as any one would be to have "theAdmiral" along. So we descended into Panama by the train-guardshort-cut and across the bridge that humps its back over the P. R. R. Like a cat in unsocial mood, and on through Caledonia out along thebeach sands past the old iron hulls about which Panamanian laborers arealways tinkering under the impression that they are working. This timewe walked. I don't recall now whether it was quarter-cracks, or theLieutenant hadn't slept well--no, it couldn't have been that, for theLieutenant never let his personal mishaps trample on his goodnature--or whether "Bish" had decided to try to reduce weight. At anyrate we were afoot, and thereby hangs the tale--or as much of a tale asthere is to tell. 

We tramped resolutely on along the hard curving beach past thedisheveled bath-houses before which ladies from the Zone gather in someforce of a Sunday afternoon. For this time we were really out for aswim rather than to display our figures. On past the light-brownbathers, and the chocolate-colored bathers, and the jet black batherswho seemed to consider that color covering enough, till we came to thebig silent saw-mill at the edge of the cocoanut grove that we had beeninvited long since to make a Z. P. Dressing-room. 

Before us spread the reposing, powerful, sun-shimmering Pacific. Acrossthe bay, clear as an etching, lay Panama backed by Ancon hill. Inregular cadence the ocean swept in with a hoarse, resistless roll onthe sands. 

We dived in, keeping an eye out for the sharks we knew never come sofar in and probably wouldn't bite if they did. The sun blazed downwhite hot from a cloudless sky. This time the Lieutenant and SergeantJack had not been able to come, but we arranged the races and jumps onthe sand for all that, and went into them with a will and--

A rain-drop fell. Nor was it long lonesome. Before we had finished thehundred-yard dash we were in the midst of ---- it was undeniablyraining. Half a moment later "bucketsful" would have been a weaksimile. All the pent up four months of an extra long rainy seasonseemed to have been loosed without warning. The blanket of waterblotted out Panama and Ancon hill across the bay, blotted out thedistant American bathers, then the light-brown ones, then thechocolate-tinted, then even the jet black ones close at hand. 

We remained under water for a time to keep dry. But the rain whippedour faces as with thousands of stinging lashes. We crawled out anddashed blindly up the bank toward the saw-mill, the rain beating on ourall but bare skins, feeling as it might to stand naked in Mirafloreslocks and let the sand pour down upon us from sixty feet above. When atlast we stumbled under cover and up the stairs to where our clothinghung, it was as if a weight of many tons had been lifted from ourshoulders. 

The saw-mill was without side-walls; consisted only of a sheet-ironroof and floors, on the former of which the storm pounded with a roarthat made only the sign language feasible. It was now as if we weresurrounded on all sides by solid walls of water and forever shut offfrom the outer world--if indeed that had survived. Sheets of waterslashed in further and further across the floor. We took to huddlingbehind beams and under saw-benches--the militant storm hunted us outand wetted us bit by bit. "The Admiral" and I tucked ourselves away onthe 45-degree eye-beams up under the roaring roof. The angry watergathered together in columns and swept in and up to soak us. 

At the end of an hour the downpour had increased some hundred per cent. It was as if an express train going at full speed had gradually doubledits rapidity. That was the day when little harmless streams torethemselves apart into great gorges and left their pathetic littlebridges alone and deserted out in the middle of the gulf. That was thefamous May twelfth, 1912, when Ancon recorded the greatest rainfall inher history, --7. 23 inches, virtually all within three hours. Three ofus were ready to surrender and swim home through it. But there was "theAdmiral" to consider. He was dressed clear to his scarf-pin--and Panamatailors tear horrible holes in a police salary. So we waited and dodgedand squirmed into closer holes for another hour; and grew steadilywetter. 

Then at length dusk began to fall, and instead of slacking with the daythe fury of the storm increased. It was then that "the Admiral"capitulated, seeing fate plainly in league with his tailor; andwigwagging the decision to us beside him, he led the way down thestairs and dived into the world awash. 

Wet? We had not taken the third step before we were streaming like firehose. There was nearly an hour of it, splashing knee-deep through whathad been when we came out little dry sandy hollows; steering by guess, for the eye could make out nothing fifty yards ahead, even before thecheese-thick darkness fell; bowed like nonogenarians under the burdenof water; staggering back and forth as the storm caught us crosswise orthe earth gave way under us. "The Admiral's" patent-leather shoes--butwhy go into painful details? Those who were in Panama on that memorableafternoon can picture it all for themselves, and the others will neverknow. The wall of water was as thick as ever when we fought our bowedand weary way up over the railroad bridge and, summoning up the laststrength, splurged tottering into "Angelini's. "

When our streaming had so far subsided that they recognised us forsolvent human beings, encouraging concoctions were set before us. Bridgley, fearing the after effects, acquired a further quart bottle ofprotection, and when we had gathered force for the last dash we plungedout once more toward our several goals. As the door of 111 slammedbehind me, the downpour suddenly slackened. As I paused before my roomto drain, it stopped raining. 

I supped on bread, beer, and cheese from over the frontier--we hadarrived thirty seconds too late for Ancon police mess. Then when I hadsaved what was salvable from the wreckage and reclad in such wardrobeas had luckily remained at home, I strolled over toward the policestation to put in a serene and quiet evening. 

But it has long since been established that troubles flock together. AsI crunched up the gravel walk between the hedge-rows, wild riot brokeon my ear. Ancon police station was in eruption. From the Lieutenant tothe newest uniformless "rookie" every member of the force was swarmingin and out of the building. The Zone and Panama telephones were ringingin their two opposing dialects, the deskman was shouting his ownpeculiar brand of Spanish into one receiver and bawling English at theother, all hands were diving into old clothes, the most apathetic ofthe force were girding up their loins with the adventurous fire of theold Moro-hunting days in their eyes, and all, some ahorse, more afoot, were dashing one by one out into the night and the jungle. 

It was several minutes before I could catch the news. At last it wasshouted at me over a telephone. Murder! A white Greek--who ever heardof a colored Greek?--with a white shirt on had shot a man at PedroMiguel at 6:35. Every road and bypath of escape to Panama was alreadyblocked, armed men would meet the assassin whatever way he might take. I went down to meet the evening train, resolved after that to strikeout into the night in the random hope of having my share in the chase. It had begun to rain again, but only moderately, as if it realized itcould never again equal the afternoon record. 

Then suddenly the excitement exploded. It was only a near-murder. TwoColombians had been shot, but would in all probability recover. Thenews reached me as I stood at the second-class gate scanning the facesof the great multicolored river of passengers that poured out into thecity. For two hours, one by one with crestfallen mien, the manhuntersleaked back into Ancon station and, the case having dwindled to one ofregular daily routine, by eleven we were all abed. 

In the morning the "Greek chase" fell to me. More detailed descriptionof the culprit had come in during the night, including the bit ofinformation that he was a bad man from the Isle of Crete. Thebelt-straining No. 38 oiled and loaded, I set off on an assignment thatwas at least a relief after pursuing stolen necklaces for negro women, or crowbars lost by the I. C. C. 

By nine I was climbing to Pedro Miguel police station on its knoll withthe young Greek who had exchanged hats with the assassin after thecrime. That afternoon a volunteer joined me. He was a friend of thewounded men, a Peruvian black as jade, but without a suggestion of thenegro in anything but his outward appearance. He was of the size andbuild of a Sampson in his prime, spoke a Spanish so clear-cut it seemedto belie his African blood, and had the restless vigor acquired in ayouth of tramping over the Andine ranges. 

I piled him into a cab and we rolled away to East Balboa, to climb uponan empty dirt-train and drop off as it raced through Miraflores, thesturdy legs of the Peruvian saving him where his practice would nothave. Up in the bush between Pedro Miguel and Paraiso we found a hutwhere the Greek had stopped for water and gone on up a gully. We setout to follow, mounting partly on hands and knees, partly draggingourselves by grass and bushes up what had been and would soon be againa torrential mountain stream. For hours we tore through the jungle, uphills steeper than the path of righteousness, following now a few faintfoot-prints or trampled bushes, now a hint from some native bushdweller. The rain outside vied with the sweat within as to which wouldfirst soak us through. To make things merrier I had not only to wear anarsenal but a coat atop to conceal it from the general public. 

To mention the holes I crawled into and the clues I followed during thenext few days would be more tiresome than a Puritan prayer. By day Iwas dashing back and forth through all Ancon district, by nightprowling about the grimier sections of Panama city. Almost daily I gotnear enough to sniff the prey. Now it was a Greek confectioner onAvenida Central who admitted that the fugitive had called on him duringthe night, now a Panamanian pesquisa whose stool-pigeon had seen himout in the bush, then the information that he had stopped to shave andotherwise alter his appearance in some shack half-way across the Zoneand afterward struck off for Panama by an unused route. The clues werependulum-like. They took me a half-dozen times at least out the windinghighway to Corozal, on to Miraflores and even further. The rainy seasonand the reign of umbrellas had come. It had been formally opened onthat memorable Sunday afternoon. There was still sunshine at times, butalways a wet season heaviness to the atmosphere; and the rains werealready giving the rolling jungle hills a tinge of new green. There wasnothing to be gained by hurrying. The fugitive was as likely to crawlforth from one place as another along the rambling road. Here I pausedto kill a lizard or to watch the clumsy march of one of the huge purpleand many-colored land-crabs, there to gaze away across a jungled valleysoft and fuzzy in the humid air like some Corot painting. 

I even sailed for San Francisco in the quest. For of course eachoutgoing ship must be searched. One day I had word that a "windjammer"was about to sail; and racing out to Balboa I was soon set aboard thefore and aft schooner Meteor far out in the bay. When I plunged downinto the cabin the peeled-headed German captain was seated at a tablebefore a heap of "Spig" dollars, paying off his black shore hands. Hesolemnly asserted he had no Greek aboard, and still more solemnly sworethat if he found one stowed away he would turn him over to the policein San Francisco--which was kind of him but would not have helpedmatters. There are several men running gaily about San Franciscostreets who would be very welcome in certain quarters on the Zone andsure of lodging and food for a long time to come. 

By this time the tug Bolivar had us in tow, the captain went racingover his ship like any of his crew, tugging at the ropes, and we weregliding out across Panama bay, past the little greening islands, thecurving panorama of the city and Ancon hill growing smaller and smallerbehind--bound for 'Frisco. What ho! the merry "windjammer" with herstowed sails and smell of tar awakened within me old memories, hungryand grimy for the most part. But this was no independent, self-respecting member of the Wind-wafted sisterhood. Far out in theoffing lay a steamer of the same line that was to TOW the Meteor to theGolden Gate! How is the breed of sailors fallen! The few laborersaboard would take an occasional wheel, pick oakum, and yarn theirunadventurous yarns. As we drew near, a boat was lowered to set meaboard the steamer, to the rail-crowding surprise of her passengers, who fancied they had hours since seen the last of Zone and "Zoners. "The captain asserted he had nothing aboard grown nearer Greece thanthree Irishmen, any one of whom--facetiousness seemed to be one of thecaptain's characteristics--I might have and welcome. A few momentslater I was back aboard the tug waving farewell to steamer and"windjammer" as they pushed away into the twilight sea, and the Bolivarturned shoreward. 

I received a "straight tip" one evening that the fugitive Greek washiding in a hovel on the Cruces trail. What part of the Cruces trail, the informant did not hint; but he described the hut in some detail. Sonext morning as the thick gray dawn of this tropical land was meltinginto day, I descended at Bas Obispo, through the canal to Gamboa andstruck off into the dense dripping jungle. The rainy season had greenedthings up and gone--temporarily, of course, for in a day or two itwould be on us again in all tropical fury. In the few days since thefirst rain the landscape had changed like a theater decoration, a greennot even to be imagined in the temperate zone. 

It turned out that the ancient village of Cruces was a mere two-milestroll from the canal, a thatch-roofed native town of some thirtydwellings on the rocky shore of an inner curve of the Chagres, wheretravelers from Balboa to the last "Forty-niner" disembarked from theirthirty-six mile ride up the river and struck on along the ten-mile roadthrough the jungle to Panama--the famous Cruces trail. Except for itsassociations the village was without interest--except some personalGreek interest. Sour looks were chiefly my portion, for the villagershave never taken kindly to Americans. 

I soon sought out the trail, here a mere path undulating through rank, wet-hot, locust singing jungle. Here in the tangled somber mystery ofthe wilderness grew every tropical thing; countless giant ferns, draping tangles of vines, the mango tree with its rounded dome ofleaves like the mosque of Omar done in greenery, the humble pineapplewith its unproportionate fruit, everywhere the banana, king ofvegetables, clothed in its own immense leaves, the frondy zapote, nowand then in a hollow a clump of yellowish-green bamboo, though notnumerous or nearly so large as in many another tropical land, above allelse the symmetrical Gothic fronds of the palm nodding in a breeze themore humble vegetation could not know. The constant music of insectlife sounded in my ears; everywhere were flowers of brilliant hue, masses of bush blossoms not unlike the lilac in appearance, but likeall down on the Isthmus, odorless--or rather with a pungent scent, likestrong catsup. 

Four months earlier I should have been chary of diving back into thePanamanian "bush" alone, above all on a criminal hunt. But it needsonly a little time on the Zone to make one laugh at the absurd storiesof danger from the bush native that are even yet appearing in many U. S. Papers. They are not over friendly to whites, it is true. But theywere all of that familiar languid Central American type, blinking at meapathetically out of the shade of their huts, crowding to one edge ofthe trail as I passed, eying me silently, a bit morosely, somewhatfrightened because their experience of Americans is of a discourteouscreature who shouts at them in a strange tongue and swears at thembecause they do not understand it. The moment they heard their owncustomary greetings they changed to children delighted to do anythingto oblige--even to the extent of dragging their indolent forms erect tolead the way a quarter-mile through the bush to some isolated shack. Far from contemplating any injury, all these wayward children of thejungle ask is to be let alone to drift through life in their own way. Still more absurd is the notion of danger from wild beasts--other thanthe tiny wild beast that burrows its painful way under the skin. 

So I pushed on, halting at many huts to make covert inquiries. It was ajoyous, brilliant day overhead. Down in the dense, rampant, singingjungle I sweated profusely--and enjoyed it. Choking for a drink in ahutless section, I took one of the crooked, tunnel-like trails to theleft in the direction of the Chagres. But it squirmed off through thickjungle, through banana groves and untended pineapple gardens to comeout at last at an astonished hut on a knoll, from which was not to beseen a sign of the river. I crawled through another strugglingside-trail further on and this time reached the stream, but at a banktoo sheer and bush-matted to descend. The third attempt brought me towhere the river made a graceful bend at my feet and I descended anabrupt jungle bank to drink and stroll a bit along the stony shore;then plunged in for a swim. It was just the right temperature, withdense jungle banks on either side like great green unscalable walls, the water clear and a bit over waist deep in the middle of the stream. Now and then around the one or the other bend came a cayuca, the nativedug-out made of the hollowed trunk of a tree, usually the cedro--thoughto a jungle native any tree is a "cedro" if he does not happen to thinkof its right name. Twenty to thirty feet long, sometimes piled highwith vegetables, sometimes with several natives seated Indian file inthe bottom, the gunwales a bare two or three inches above the water, they needed nice management, especially in the rapids below Cruces. Thelocomotive power, generally naked to the waist, stood up in the craftand climbed his polanca, or long pike pole, hand over hand, every nakedbrown muscle in play, moving in perfect rhythm and apparent ease evenup-stream against the powerful current. 

Soon after Chagres and trail parted company, the former to wind on upthrough the jungle hills to its birthplace in the land of Darien andwild Indians, the latter to strike for the Pacific. Over a mildly roughcountry it led, down into tangled ravines, up over dense forestedhillocks where the jungle had been fought back by Uncle Sam and on thebrows of which I halted to drink of the fresh breeze sweeping acrossfrom the Atlantic. All this time not a suggestion of anything Greek, though I managed by some simple strategy to cast a sweeping glance intoevery hovel along the way. 

Then came the real Cruces trail--the rest only follows the generaldirection. I fell upon it unexpectedly. It is still there as it waswhen the Peruvian viceroys and their glittering trains clattered alongit, surprisingly well preserved; a cobbled way some three feet wide ofthat rough and bumpy variety the Spaniard even to-day fancies a realroad, broken in places but still well marked, leading away southwardthrough the wilderness. 

Overhead were tall spreading trees laden with blossomless orchids. Under some of them was broad grassy shade; but the surrounding wall ofvegetation cut off all breeze. The way was intersected by many roads ofleaf-cutting ants, as level, wide and well-built in their proportion asthe old Roman highways, with such an industrious throng going andcoming upon them as one could find nowhere equaled, unless it be on theGrand Trunk Road of India. 

Then suddenly there appeared the hut that had been described to me. Isurrounded it and, hand upon the butt of my No. 38, closed in upon theplace, then rushed it with all forces. 

There was not a sign of human life in the vicinity. The door was tiedshut with a single strand of old rope, but there was no question thatthe fugitive might be hiding inside, for the reed walls had holes inthem large enough to drive a sheep through, and there was nothingwithin to hide behind. I thrust an arm through an opening and draggedthe large and heavy earthenware water-jar to me for a drink, and pushedon. 

Squatter's cabins were now appearing, as contrasted with the nativebushman's peaked hut; sleeping-places thrown together of tin cans, boxes and jungle rubbish, many negro shanties built of I. C. C. Scraps--all of which announced the vicinity of the canal. Any hut mightbe a hiding-place. I made ostensibly casual inquiries, interlardedbetween stories, at several of them, and at length established that theGreek had been there not long before, but was elsewhere now. Then aboutfour of the afternoon I burst out suddenly in sight of a broad modernhighway, and leaving the ancient route as it headed away toward OldPanama, I turned aside to the modern city. 

Then I was "called off the Greek chase"; and a couple of eveningslater, along with the evening train and the evening fog, the Inspector"blew in" from his forty-two days' vacation in the States, like abreath from far-off Broadway. Buffalo Bill had been duly opened andstarted on his season's way, the absent returned, and Corporal Castillosuddenly dwindled again to a mere corporal. 

As everything must have its flaws, perhaps the chief one that might becharged against the Z. P. Is "red tape. " Strictly speaking it is no Z. P. Fault at all, but a weakness of all government. One example willsuffice. 

During the month of May I was assigned the investigation of certainalleged conditions in Panama's restricted district. The then head ofthe plain-clothes division gave me carte blanche, but suggested that Ineed not spare my expense account in libating the variousestablishments until I "got acquainted" sufficiently with the inmatesto pick up indirectly the information desired. 

Which general line I followed and, the information having been gatheredand the report made up, I proceed to make out my expenditures of $45for the month to forward to Empire for reimbursement. Now it needs nodeep detective experience to know that in such cases you naturallybegin with, "Well, what you going to drink, girls?" and end by payingthe bill in a lump sum--a large lump sum--and go your way in peace. What more then could I do than set down such items as:

"May 12, Liquor, investigation, Panama--$6. 50?"

But here I began to feel the tangling strands. Was it not stated thatall applications for reimbursement required an exact itemized accountof each separate expenditure, with the price of each? It did. But inthe first place I did not know half the beverages consumed in thatinvestigation by sight, smell, or name. In the second place I cameostensibly as a "rounder"; it would perhaps have been advisable at theclose of each evening's entertainment to draw out note-book and penciland starting the round of the table announce:

"Now, girls, I'm a dee-tective. No, keep yer places, I ain't going topinch nobody. Anyhow I'm only a Zone detective. But I just want to askyou a few questions. Now, Mamie, what's that you're drinking? Ah! A ginricky. And just how much does that cost--here? And you, Flossie? Anabsinthe frappe? Ah! Very good. And what is the retail price of thatparticular drink?"--and so on ad nauseum. 

"Very true, " replied authority, "that would of course be impossible. But to be reimbursed you must set down in detail every item ofexpenditure, and its price. "

Reason and government red tape move in two parallel lines, with theusual meeting-place. 

Nor was that all. While the black Peruvian was on my staff I gave himmoney for food. It was not merely expected, it was definitely soordered. Yet when I set down:

"May 27, To Peruvian for food--$. 50. " authority threw up its hands inhorror. Did I not know that reimbursements were ONLY for "liquor andcigars, cab or boat hire, and meals away from home?" I did. But I alsoknew that superiors had ordered me to feed the Peruvian. "To be sure!"cried astounded authority. "But you set down such an expenditure asfollows:

"'May 27, Two bottles of beer, Pan. , investigation--$. 50. '

"And as you are allowed cab fare ONLY for yourself, when you take thePeruvian or any one else out to Balboa in a cab you set down the item:

"'May 26, Cab, Ancon to Balboa AND RETURN, investigation--$1. '"

The upshot of all which was, not feeling able with all my patriotism to"set up" $45 worth of mixed drinks for Uncle Sam, I was forced to openanother investigation and gather from all the Z. P. Authorities on thesubject, from Naos Island to Paraiso, the name and price of every knownbeverage. Then when I had fitted together a picture puzzle of thesethat summed up to the amount I had actually spent, I was called upon tosign a statement thereunder that "this is a true and exact account ofexpenditures during the month of May. So help me God. "

But then, as I have said before, these things are not Z. P. Faults, they are the faults of government since government began. 

It had become evident soon after the Inspector's return that unlesscrime began to pick up down at the Pacific end of the Zone, I shouldfind myself again banished to the foreign land of Gatun. For there hadbeen a distinct rise in the criminal commodity at that end during thepast weeks. The premonition soon fell true. 

"Take the 10:55 to Gatun, " said the Inspector one morning, withoutlooking up from his filing case, "Corporal Macey will tell you about itwhen you get there. "

CHAPTER X

"Why, the fact is, " said Corporal Macey, lighting his meerschaum pipeuntil the match burned down to his fingers, "several little burglarystunts have been pulling themselves off since the sergeant went onvacation. But the most aggrayvaatin' is this new one of twinty-twoquarts of good Canadian Club bein' maliciously extracted from St. Martin's saloon last night. "

From which important beginning I fell quickly back into the old lifeagain, derelicting about Gatun and vicinity by day, wandering thenights away in black, noisy New Gatun and along the winding back roadunder the cloud-scudding sky. Yet it was a different life. Gatun hadchanged. Even her concrete light-house was winking all night now upamong the I. C. C. Dwellings. The breeze from off the Caribbean washeavy and lifeless. The landscape looked wet and lush and rampant, of adeep-seated green, and instead of the china-blue skies the dull, leaden-gray heavens seemed to hang low and heavy overhead, like aportending fate. On the winding back road the jungle trees still stoodout against the night sky, at times, too, there was a moon, but only apale silver one that peered weakly here and there through the scuddinggray clouds. The air grew more thick and sultry day by day, the heatwas sticky, the weather dripping, with the sun only an irregularwhitish blotch in the sky. Through the open windows the heavy, dampnight came miasmically floating in, the very cigarettes mildewed in mypockets. Earth and air seemed heavy and toil-bowed by comparison withother days. The jungle still hummed busily, yet, it seemed, a bitmournfully as if preparing for production and unhilarious with the taskbefore it, like a woman first learning of her pregnancy. Life seemed tohang more heavily even on humanity; "Zoners" looked less gay andcarefree than in the sunny dry season, though still far more so than inthe north. One could not shake off a premonition of impending disasterin I know not what form--like that of Teufelsdroeck before he enteredthe "Center of Indifference. "

Dr. O---- of the Sanitary Department had gone up into the interioralong the Trinidad river to hunt mosquitoes. Why he went so far awayfor them in this season was hard to understand. There he was, however, and the order had come to bring him back to civilization. The executionthereof fell, of course, to my friend B----, who to the world at largeis merely Policeman No. ----, to the force "Admiral of the InlandFleet, " and in the general scheme of things is a luckier man thanVanderchild to have for his task in life the patrolling of Gatun Lake. B---- invited me to go along. There was nothing particular doing in thecriminal line around Gatun just then; moreover the doctor was known tobe well armed and there was no telling just how much resistance hemight offer a single policeman. I accepted. 

I was at the appointed rendezvous promptly at seven, a pocket filledwith commissary cigars. Strict truthfulness demands the admission thatit was really eight, however, when B---- came wandering down the muddysteps behind the railroad station, followed by a black prisoner with aten-gallon can of gasoline on his head. When that had been poured intothe tank, we were off across the ever-rising waters of Gatun Lake. ForGatun police launch is one of those peculiar motor-boats that startsthe same day you had planned to. 

It was such a day as could not have been bettered had it been made toorder, with a week to think out the details, --a dry-season day even tothe Atlantic breeze that goes with it, a sort of Indian summer of therainy season; though the heavy battalions of gray clouds that hung allaround the horizon as if awaiting the order to charge warned the Zoneto make merry while it might, for to-morrow it would surely rain--indeluges. The lake, much higher now than in my former Gatun days, waslicking at the 27-foot level that morning. Under the brilliant blue skyit looked like some vast unruffled mirror--which is no figure ofspeech, but plain fact. 

"Through a Forest in a Motor-boat" we might have dubbed the trip. Wehad soon crossed the unbroken expanse of the lake and were movingthrough a submerged forest. Splendid royal palms stood up to theirnecks in the water, corpulent, century-old giants of the jungle stoodon tip-toe with their jagged noses just above the surface, gaspingtheir last. Great mango-trees laden with fruit were descending into theflood. The lake was so mirror-like we could see the heads of drowningpalm-trees and the blue sky with its wisps of snow-white featheryclouds as plainly below as above, so mirror-like the protruding stumpof a palm looked like a piece of just double that length and exactlyequal ends floating upright like a water thermometer, so reflectivethat the broken end of a branch showing above the surface appeared tobe an acute angle of wood floating exactly at the angle in impossibleequilibrium. 

Our prisoner and crew were from "Bahbaydos"--only you can't pronounceit as he did, nor make the "a" broad enough, nor show the inside ofyour red throat clear back to the soft palate to contrast with theglistening black skin of your carefree, grinning face. Theoretically hewas being punished for assault and battery. But if this is punishmentto be sentenced to cruise around on Gatun Lake I wonder crime on theZone is so rare and unusual. This much I am sure, if I were in thatparticular "Badgyan's" shoes--no, he had none; but his tracks, say--theday my time ran out I should pick a quarrel with a Jamaican and leavehis countenance in such a condition that the judge could find nogrounds for a reasonable doubt in the matter. 

We were mounting the river Trinidad. River, yes, but we followed itonly because it had kept back the jungle and left a way free oftree-tops, not because there was not water enough anywhere, in anydirection, to float a boat of many times our draught. Turns so sharp werocked in our own wake; once we passed acres upon acres of big, cod-like fish floating dead upon the water among the branches and theforest rubbish. It seems the lake in rising spread over some poisonousmineral in the soil. But life there was none, except the rampant greendying plant life in every direction to the horizon. There were not evenbirds, other than now and then a stray snow-white slender one of theheron species that fled majestically away across the face of thenurtureless waters as we steamed--no, gasolined down upon it. Soonafter leaving Gatun we had passed a couple of jungle families on theirway to market in their cayucas laden with mounds of produce, --plumpmangoes with a maidenly blush on either cheek, fat yellow bananas, grass-green plantains, a duck or a chicken standing tied by one leg ontop of it all and gazing complacently around at the scene with the airof an experienced tourist. It was two hours later that we sighted thenext human being. He was a solitary old native paddling about at theentrance to the "grass-bird region" in a huge dugout as time-scarred ashimself. 

It was near here that weeks before I had turned with "Admiral" B---- upa little stream now forever gone to a knoll on which sat the thatchedshelter of a negro who had "taken to the bush" and refused to move evenwhen notified that he was living on U. S. Public domain. When we hadknocked from the trees a box of mangoes and turkey-red maranones, B----touched a match to the thatch roof and almost before we could regainthe launch the shack was pouring skyward in a column of smoke. Even thesquatter's old table and chair and a barrel of tumbled odds and endsentirely outside the hut--it had no walls--caught fire, and when, welost sight of the knoll only the blazing stumps of the four poles thathad supported the roof remained. 

B---- had burned whole villages in this lake territory, after theowners with legal claims had been paid condemnation damages. Long agothe natives had been warned to move, and the banks of the lake-to-bespecified. But many of these skeptical children of nature had takenthis as a vain "yanqui" boast and either refused to move until burnedout or had rebuilt their hovels on land that in a few months more wouldalso be flooded. 

The rescue expedition proceeded. Once we got caught in the top-mostbranches of a tree, released from which we pushed on along the sinuousriver that had no banks. It was not hot, even at noonday. We sweated abit in poling a thirty-foot boat out of a tree-top, but cooled againdirectly we were off. My kodak was far away at the other end of theZone. But then, on second thought it was better for once to enjoynature as it was without trying to carry it away. Kodaking is a speciesof covetousness, anyway, an attempt to bear away home with us and hoardfor our own the best we come upon in our travels. Whereas here, ofcourse, it was impossible. The greatest of artists could not havecarried away a tenth of that scene, a scene so fascinating that thoughwe had tossed into the bottom of the boat at the start a bundle offresh New York papers--and fresh New York papers are not often scorneddown on the Zone--they still lay in the bottom of the boat when thetrip ended. 

At length little thatched cottages began to appear on knolls along theway, and as we chugged our way around the tree-tops upon them theinhabitants slipped quickly into some clothes that were evidently keptfor just such emergencies. Then we began nearing higher land, so thatthe upper and then the lower branches of the forest stood out of water, then only the ends of the lower limbs dipped in the rising flood, downcast, as if they knew the sentence of death was upon them also. Forthough there was sunk already beneath the flood a forest greater thanten Fontainebleaus, the lake was steadily rising a full two inches aday. Where it touched that morning the 27-foot level, in a few monthsmore, says "the Colonel, " it will reach the 87-foot level and spreadover one hundred and sixty-four square miles of territory--and when"the Colonel" makes an assertion wise men hesitate to put their moneyon the other horse. Then will all this vast area with more green thanin all the state of Missouri disappear forever beneath the flood andman may dive down, down into the forest and see what the world was likein Noah's time, and fancy the sunken cities of Holland, for many afamous route, and villages older than the days of Pizarro will beforever wiped out by the rising waters--a scene to be beheld todaynowhere else, and in a few years not even here. At last we were reallyin a river, an overflowed river, to be sure, where it would have beenhard to find a landing-place or a bank among those tree trunksknee-deep in water. We had long since crossed the Zone line, but ourbadges were still valid. For it has pleased the Republic of Panama, ata whispered word from "Tio Sam, " to cede to the Z. P. Command over allGatun Lake and for three miles around it, as far as ever it may spread. 

Then all at once we were startled by a hearty hail from among the treesand I looked up to see Y----, of the Smithsonian, fully dressed, standing waist-deep in the water at the edge of the forest, waving aninsect trap in one hand. 

"What the devil are you doing there?" I gasped. 

"Doing? I'm taking a walk along the old Gatun-Chorrera trail, and Ifancy I 'll be about the last man to travel it. Come on up to camp. "

On a mango-shaped knoll thirty miles from Gatun that will also soon belake bottom, we found a native shack transformed into the headquartersof a scientific expedition. We sat down to a frontier lunch whichcalled for none of the excuses made for it by Y---- when he appeared inhis dripping full-dress and joined us without even bothering to changehis water-spurting shoes. In his boxes he had carefully stuck away sideby side an untold number of members of the mosquito family. Queervocation; but then, any vocation is good that gives an excuse to liveout in this wild tropical world. 

By one we had Dr. O---- aboard and were waving farewell to the camp. The return, of course, was not the equal of the outward trip; evennature cannot duplicate so perfect a thing. But two raging showers gaveus views of the drowning jungle under another aspect, and between themwe awakened vast rolling echoes across the silent flooded world byshooting at flocks of little birds with an army rifle that would havekilled an elephant. 

It is not hard to realize why the bush native does not love theAmerican. Put yourself in his breechclout. Suppose a throng ofunsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all theworld you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside worldwanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from somewhere younever heard of, to somewhere you did not know. Suppose a representativeof that unsympathetic government came snorting down upon you one day ina wild fearful invention they called a motor-boat, as you were lollingunder the thatch roof your grandfather built, and cried:

"Come on! Get out of here! We're going to burn your house and turn thiscountry into a lake. "

Flood the land which was your great-grand-father's, the spot where youused to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane whereyour mother's courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree under whichshe was wedded--if matters were ever carried to that ceremoniouslength. What though this foreign nation gave you a bag of peculiarpieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never seen a score ofsuch coins in your life and barely knew the use of them, beingacquainted with life only as it is picked from a mango-tree? Theforeigners had cried, "Take this money and go buy a farm somewhereelse, " and you looked around you and saw all the world you had everreally known the existence of sinking beneath the rising waters. Wherewould you go, think you, to buy that new farm? Even if you fled andfound another unknown land high and dry, or a town, what could you do, having not the remotest idea how to live in a town with only pieces ofmetal to get food out of instead of the mango-tree that had stoodbehind the house your grandfather built ever since you were born anddropped mangoes whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would besome peeved. 

It was midafternoon when the white bulk of Gatun locks rose on thehorizon. Then the lake opened out, the great dam, that is rather aconnecting link between two ranges of hills, spread across all thelandscape, and at four I raced up the muddy steps behind the station toa telephone. Five minutes later I was hurrying away across locks anddam to the marshland beyond the Spillway to inquire who, and wherefore, had attempted to burn up the I. C. C. Launch attached to dredge No. ----. 

My Canal Zone days were drawing rapidly to a close. I could haveremained longer without regret, but the world is wide and life isshort. Soon came the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back acrossthe Isthmus to clear up the last threads of my existence as a "Zoner. "Chiefly for old times' sake I dropped off at Empire. But it was not thesame Empire of the census. Almost all the old crowd was gone; one byone they had "kissed the Zone good-by. " "The boss" of those days hadnever returned, "smiling Johnny" had been transferred, even Ben had"done quit an' gone back to Bahbaydos. " The Zone is like a smallsection of life; as in other places where generations are short onecatches there a hint of what old age will be. It was like wanderingover the old campus when those who were freshmen in our day had hawkedtheir gowns and mortarboards and gone their way; I felt like a man inhis dotage with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation abouthim. 

I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far down below was the samestruggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the "cut" withits jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still stretching awayendless in either direction. Here as in the world at large generationsof us may come and pass away, but the tearing of the shovels at therocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains for the Pacific goesunbrokenly on, as the world and its work will continue without a pausewhen we are gone indeed. 

Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor willbe submerged and forever hidden from view. The swift growth of thetropics will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels, andpalm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will seemalmost a natural channel. Then blase travelers lolling in their deckchairs will gaze about them and snort:

"Huh! Is that all we got for nine years' work and half a billiondollars?" They will have forgotten the scrubbing of Panama and Colon, forgotten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of them down tothe last center table, they will not recall the rebuilding of theentire P. R. R. , nor scores of little items like $43, 000 a year merelyfor oil and negroes to pump it on the pestilent mosquito, the thousandand one little things so essential to the success of the enterprise yetthat leave not a trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of thecanal is the accomplishment of the United States in showing the nativeshow life can be lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet thelesson will not be learned, and on the heels of the last canal builderwill return all the old slovenliness and disease, and the native willsink back into just what he would have been had we never come. 

I caught a dirt-train to Balboa. There the very town at which I hadlanded on the Zone five months before was being razed to give place tothe permanent, reenforced-concrete city that is to be the canalheadquarters. Balboa police station was only a pile of lumber, with aband of negroes drilling away the very rock on which it had stood. Itook a last view of the Pacific and her islands to far Taboga, whereUncle Sam sends his recuperating children to enjoy the sea baths, hillclimbs, and unrivaled pine-apples. It was never my good fortune to getto Taboga. With thirty days' sick leave a year and countless ailmentsof which I might have been cured free of charge and with the best ofcare, I could not catch a thing. I had not even the luck of myfriend--who, by dint of cross-country runs in the jungle at noonday andsimilar industrious efforts, worked up at last a temperature of 99degrees and got his week at Taboga. I stuck immovable at 98. 6 degrees. 

Soon after five I had bidden Ancon farewell and set off on the lastride across the Isthmus. There was a memory tucked away in everycorner. Corozal hotel was still rattling with dishes, Paraiso peepedout from its lap of hills, Culebra with its penitentiary whereburglarizing negroes go, sunk away into the past. Railroad Avenue inEmpire was still lined with my "enumerated" tags; through an open doorI caught a glimpse of a familiar short figure, one foot resting lightlyand familiarly on a misapplied gas-pipe, the elbow crooked as ifsomething were held between the fingers. At Bas Obispo I strained myeyes in vain to make out a familiar face in the familiar uniform, therewas a glimpse of "Old Fritz" water-gauge as we rumbled across theChagres, and the train churned away into the heavy green uninhabitednight. 

Only once more was I aroused, as the lights of Gatun flashed up; thenwe rolled past the noisy glaring corner of New Gatun and on to Colon. In Cristobal police station I put badge and passes into a heavyenvelope and dropped them into the train-guard's box; then turned infor my last night on the Zone. For the steamer already had her fires upthat would bear me, and him who was the studious corporal ofMiraflores, away in the morning to South America. My police days wereended. 

Then a last hand to you all, oh, Z. P. May you live long and continueto do your duty frankly and unafraid. I found you men when I expectedonly policemen. I reckon my days among you time well spent and I leftyou regretting that I could stay no longer with you--and when I leaveany place with regret it must be possessed of some exceeding subtlecharm. But though the world is large, it is also small. 

 "So I'll meet you later on, In the place where you have gone, Where--"

Well, say at San Francisco in 1915, anyway, Hasta luego. 

THE END