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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Zone Policeman 88, by Harry A. Franck
+
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+Title: Zone Policeman 88
+       [Panama Canal]
+
+Author: Harry A. Franck
+
+Release Date: December, 2003 [EBook #4786]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 19, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ZONE POLICEMAN 88 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks 
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+Afoot in 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
+"Thousand Stairs" to the red-roofed Administration Building, the
+broad panorama of Panama and her bay; below, the city of closely
+packed roofs and three-topped plazas compressed in a scallop of
+the sun-gleaming Pacific, with its peaked and wooded islands to
+far Taboga tilting motionless away to the curve of the earth;
+behind, the low, irregular jungled hills stretching hazily off
+into South America. On the third-story landing I paused to wipe
+the light sweat from forehead and hatband, then pushed open the
+screen door of the passageway that leads to police headquarters.
+
+"Emm--What military service have you had?" asked "the Captain,"
+looking up from the letter I had presented and swinging half round
+in his swivel-chair to fix his clear eyes upon me.
+
+"None."
+
+"No?" he said slowly, in a wondering voice; and so long grew the
+silence, and so plainly did there spread across "the Captain's"
+face the unspoken question, "Well, then what the devil are you
+applying here for?" that I felt all at once the stern necessity of
+putting in a word for myself or lose the day entirely.
+
+"But I speak Spanish and--"
+
+"Ah!" cried "the Captain," with the rising inflection of awakened
+interest, "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 broad flat desk, then out the wide-open window and
+across the shimmering roofs of Ancon to the far green ridges of
+the youthful Republic, ablaze with the unbroken tropical sunshine.
+The whirr of a telephone bell broke in upon his meditation. In
+sharp, clear-cut phrases he answered the questions that came to
+him over the wire, hung up the receiver, and pushed the apparatus
+away from him with a forceful gesture.
+
+"Inspector:" he called suddenly; but a moment having passed
+without response, he went on in his sharp-cut tones, "How do you
+think you would like police work?"
+
+"I believe I should."
+
+"The Captain" shuffled for a moment one of several stacks of
+unfolded letters 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
+human nature 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
+I got," I put in, recalling the warning of the writer of my letter
+of introduction that, "You may get assigned to some dinky little
+station and never see anything of the Zone,"--"I'm better at
+moving around than sitting still. I notice you have policemen on
+your trains, or perhaps in 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
+Indian erectness and noticeably careful grooming rose to his feet,
+"Here's one of 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 his good and our own."
+
+"Ever done police duty?" began the Inspector, when "the Captain"
+had returned to the corner office.
+
+"No."
+
+"Military ser--"
+
+"Nor that either."
+
+"Well, we usually require it," mused the Inspector slowly,
+flashing his diamond 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 you in 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
+to reach a copy of the "Canal Zone Laws"; "If you have nothing
+else on hand you might run these over; and the 'Police Rules and
+Regulations,'" he added, handing me a small, flat volume bound in
+light brown imitation leather.
+
+I sat down in an arm-chair against the wall and fell to reading,
+amid the clickity-click of typewriters, telephone calls even from
+far-off Colon on the Atlantic, and the constant going and coming
+of a negro orderly in shiningly ironed khaki uniform. By and by
+the Inspector drifted into the main office, where his voice
+blended for some time with that of "the Captain," At length he
+came back bearing a copy of the 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
+account of 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 the
+Inspector;" Mr.---, give him transportation to Culebra and back,
+and an order for physical examination.
+
+"You might fill out this application blank," he added, handing me
+a long legal sheet, "then in case you are appointed that much will
+be done."
+
+The document began with the usual, "Name----, Birthplace----, and
+so on." There followed the information that the appointee "must be
+at least five feet eight; weigh one hundred and forty, chest at
+least thirty-four inches--" Then suddenly near the bottom of the
+back of the sheet my eyes caught the startling words;--"Unless you
+are sure you are a man of physical appearance far above the
+average do not fill out this application."
+
+I was suddenly aware of a sinking feeling in the pit of my
+stomach; the blank all but slipped from my nerveless fingers. Then
+all at once there came back to me the words of some chance
+acquaintance of some far-off time and place, words which were the
+only memory that remained to me of the speaker, except that he had
+lived long and gathered much experience, "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 the other fellow think so." I sat
+down at a desk and filled out the application in my most self-
+confident flourish.
+
+"Go to Culebra to-morrow," said the Inspector, as I bade the room
+good-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
+stairs that leads down and across the gully to the heart of Ancon,
+but by a short-cut that took me quickly into a foreign land. The
+graveled highway at the foot of the hill I might not have guessed
+was an international boundary had I not chanced to notice the
+instant change from the trim, screened Zone buildings, each in its
+green lawn, to the featureless architecture of a city where grass
+is all but unknown; for the formalities of crossing this frontier
+are the same as those of crossing any village street. It was my
+first entrance into the land of the panamenos, technically known
+on the Zone as "Spigoties," and familiarly, with a tinge of
+despite, as "Spigs"; because the first Americans to arrive in the
+land found a few natives and cabmen who claimed to "Speaga dee
+Eng-leesh."
+
+To Americans direct from the States Panama city ranks still as
+rather a miserable dawdling village. But that is due chiefly to
+lack of perspective. Against the background of Central America it
+seemed almost a great, certainly a flourishing, city. Even to-day
+there are many who complain of its unpleasant odors; to those who
+have lived in other tropical cities its scent is like the perfumes
+of Araby; and none but those can in any degree realize what "Tio
+Sam" has done for the place.
+
+Toward sunset I passed through a gateway with scores of fellow-
+countrymen, all as composedly at home as in the heart of their
+native land. Across the platform stood a train distinctively
+American in every feature, a bilious-yellow train divided by the
+baggage car into two sections, of which the five second-class
+coaches behind the engine, with their wooden benches, were densely
+packed in every available space with workmen and laborer's wives,
+from Spaniards to ebony negroes, with the average color decidedly
+dark. In the first-class cars at the Panama end were Americans,
+all but exclusively white Americans, with only here and there a
+"Spigoty" with his long greased hair, his finger rings, and his
+effeminate gestures, and even a negro or two. For though Uncle Sam
+may permit individual states to do so, he may not himself openly
+abjure before the world his assertion as to the equality of all
+men by enacting "Jim Crow" laws.
+
+We were soon off. Settled back in the ample seat of the first real
+train I had boarded in months, with the roar of its length over
+the smooth and solid road-bed, the deep-voiced, masculine whistle
+instead of the painful, puerile screech that had recently assailed
+my ear, I all but forgot I was in a foreign land. The fact was
+recalled by the passing of the train-guard,--an erect and self-
+possessed young American in "Texas" hat, khaki uniform, and
+leather leggings, striding along the aisle 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 had come rather with the
+hope of shouldering a shovel and descending into the canal with
+other workmen, that I might some day solemnly raise my right hand
+and boast, "I helped dig IT." But that was in the callow days
+before I had arrived and learned the awful gulf that separates the
+sacred 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 stalk with heavy, law-compelling tread ever since I had
+first stared speechless upon one of those noble beings on my first
+trip out into the world twenty-one years before?
+
+It was not without effort that I rose in time next morning to
+continue on the 6:37 from Corozal across another bit of the Zone.
+Exactly thus should one first see the Great Work, piece-meal,
+slowly; unless he will go home with it all in an undigested lump.
+The train rolled across a stretch of almost uninhabited country,
+with a vast plain of broken rock on the right, plunged
+unexpectedly through a short tunnel, and stopped at a station
+perched on the edge of a ridge above a small Zone town backed by
+some vast structure, above which here and there a huge crane
+loomed against the sky of dawn. Another mile and the collectors
+were announcing as brazenly as if they challenged the few "Spigs"
+on board to correct them, "Peter M'Gill! Peter M'Gill!" We were
+already moving on again before I had guessed that by this noise
+they designated none other than the famous Pedro Miguel. The sun
+rose suddenly as we swung sharply to the left and rumbled across a
+girderless bridge. Barely had I time to discover that we were
+crossing the great canal itself and to catch a brief glimpse of
+the jagged gulf in either direction, before the train had left it
+behind, as if the sight of the world-famous channel were not worth
+a pause, and was roaring on through a hilly country of perpetual
+summer. A peculiarly shaped reservoir sped past on the left, twice
+or thrice more the green horizon rose and fell, and at 7:30 we
+drew up at the base of Culebra, the Zone capital.
+
+On the screened veranda of a somewhat sooty and dismal building
+high up near the summit of the town, another and I were pacing
+anxiously back and forth when, well on in the morning, an abrupt
+and rather gloomy-faced American dashed into the building and one
+of the rooms thereof, snapping over his shoulder as he
+disappeared, "One of you!" The other had precedence. Then soon
+from behind the wooden shutters came a growl of "Next!" and two
+moments later I was standing in the reputed costume of Adam on the
+scales within. At about ten-second intervals a monosyllable fell
+from the lips of the morose American as he delved into my personal
+make-up from crown to toe with all the instrumental circumspection
+known to his secret-discovering profession. Then with a gruff
+"Dress!" he sat down at a table to scratch a few fantastic marks
+on the blank I had brought, and hand it to me as I caught up my
+last garment and turned to the door. But, alas--tight sealed! and
+all the day, though carrying the information in my pocket, I must
+live in complete ignorance of whether I had been found lacking an
+eye or a lung. For sooner would one have asked his future of the
+scowling Parques than venture to invoke a hint thereof from that
+furrow-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 an entire day before the evening train should
+carry me back to Corozal. I descended to the "observation
+platform." Here at last at my very feet was the famous "cut" known
+to the world by the name of Culebra; a mighty channel a furlong
+wide plunging sheer through "Snake Mountain," that rocky range of
+scrub-wooded hills; severing the continental divide. At first view
+the scene was bewildering. Only gradually did the eye gather
+details out of the mass. Before and beyond were pounding rock
+drills, belching locomotives, there arose the rattle and bump of
+long trains of flat-cars on many tracks, the crash of falling
+boulders, the snort of the straining steam-shovels heaping the
+cars high with earth and rock, everywhere were groups of little
+men, some working leisurely, some scrambling down into the rocky
+bed of the canal or dodging the clanging trains, all far below and
+stretching endless in either direction, while over all the scene
+hovered a veritable Pittsburg of smoke.
+
+All long-heralded sights--such is the nature of the world and man
+--are at 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 echoes to all corners of the earth. The long-
+fed imagination had led one to picture a towering mountain, a very
+Andes.
+
+But as I looked longer, noting how little by comparison were the
+trains I knew to be of regulation U. S. size, how literally tiny
+were the scores upon scores of men far down below who were doing
+this thing, its significance regained bit by bit its proper
+proportions. Train after train-load of the spoil of the "cut"
+ground away towards the Pacific; and here man had been digging
+steadily, if not always earnestly, since a year before I was born.
+The gigantic scene recalled to the mind the "industrial army" of
+which Carlyle was prone to preach, with the same discipline and
+organization as an army in the field; and every now and then, to
+bear out the figure, there burst forth the mighty cannonade, not
+of war, but of peace and progress in the form of earth-upheaving
+and house-rocking blasts of dynamite, tearing away the solid rock
+below at 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, yet larger than Culebra and with the name "Empire"
+in the station building; and nearly every rod of the way between
+had been lined with villages of negroes and all breeds and colors
+of canal workers. So on again along a broad macadamized highway
+that bent and rose through low bushy ridges, past an army encamped
+in wood and tin barracks on a hillside, with khaki uniformed
+soldiers ahorse and afoot enlivening all the roadway and the
+neighboring fields. Never a mile without its town--how different
+will all this be when the canal is finished and all this community
+is gone to Alaska or has scattered itself again over the face of
+the earth, and dense tropical solitude has settled down once more
+over the scene.
+
+Panama, they had said, is insupportably hot. Comparing it with
+other lands I knew I could not but smile at the notion. Again it
+was the lack of perspective. Sweat ran easily, yet so fresh the
+air and so refreshing the breeze sweeping incessantly across from
+the Atlantic that even the sweating was almost enjoyable. Hot!
+Yes, like June on the Canadian border--though not like July. It is
+hot in St. Louis on an August Sunday, with all the refreshment
+doors tight closed--to strangers; hot in the cotton-fields of
+Texas, but with these plutonic corners the heat of the Zone shows
+little rivalry.
+
+The way led round a cone-shaped hill crowned by another military
+camp with the Stars and Stripes flapping far above, until I came
+at last in sight of the renowned Chagres, seven miles above
+Culebra, to all appearances a meek and harmless little stream
+spanned by a huge new iron bridge and forbidden to come and play
+in the unfinished canal by a little dam of earth that a steam-
+shovel will some day eat up in a few hours. Here, where it ends
+and the flat country begins, I descended into the "cut," dry and
+waterless, with a stone-quarry bottom. A sharp climb out on the
+opposite side and I plunged into rampant jungle, half expecting
+snake-bites on my exposed ankles--another pre-conceived notion--
+and at length falling into a narrow jungle trail that pitched down
+through a dense-grown gully, came upon a fenced compound with
+several Zone buildings on the banks of the Chagres, down to which
+sloped a broad green lawn.
+
+Here dwells hale and ruddy "Old Fritz," for long years keeper of
+the fluviograph that measures and gives warning of the rampages of
+the Chagres. Fritz will talk to you in almost any tongue you may
+choose, as he can tell you of adventures in almost any land, all
+with a captivating accent and in the vocabulary of a man who has
+lived long among men and nature. Nor are Fritz' opinions those
+gleaned from other men or the printed page. So we fell to fanning
+ourselves this January afternoon on the screened and shaded
+veranda above the Chagres, and "Old Fritz," lighting his pipe,
+raised his slippered feet to the screen railing and, tossing away
+the charred remnant of a match, began:--
+
+"Vidout var dere iss no brogress. Ven all der vorld iss at peace,
+all der vorld goes to shleep."
+
+Police headquarters looked all but deserted on Friday morning.
+There had 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 the wall. A half-hour, perhaps, had I read when
+"Eddie"--I am not entitled, perhaps, to such familiarity, but the
+solemn title of "chief clerk" is far too stiff and formal for that
+soul of good-heartedness striving in vain to hide behind a bluff
+exterior--"Eddie," I say, blew a last cloud of smoke from his
+lungs to the ceiling, tossed aside the butt of his cigarette, 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 his opening 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
+Colon last night, and--"
+
+"Here's where I get my case nol prossed," I found myself
+whispering. In all probability that sealed document I had sent in
+the day before announced me as a physical wreck.
+
+"--and told me," continued "Eddie" in his sad, regretful tone, "to
+tell you we will take you on the force as a first-class policeman.
+It happens, however, that the department of Civil Administration
+is about to begin a census of the Zone, and they are looking for
+any men that can speak Spanish. If we take you on, therefore, the
+Captain would assign you to the census department until that work
+is done--it will probably take something over a month--and then
+you would be returned to regular police duty. The Chief says he'd
+rather have you learn the Isthmus on census than on police pay.
+
+"Or," went on "Eddie," just as I was about to break in with, "All
+right, that suits me,"--"or, if you prefer, the census department
+will enroll you as a regular enumerator and we'll take you on the
+force as soon as that job is over. The--er--pay," added "Eddie,"
+reaching for a cigarette but changing his mind, "of enumerators
+will be five dollars a day, 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
+behind which a smile seemed always to be lurking. On the Canal
+Zone, as in British colonies, one is frequently struck by the
+youthfulness of men in positions of importance.
+
+"I'll probably assign you to Empire district," the slender young
+man was saying, "there's everything up there and almost any
+language will sure be some help to us. This time we are taking a
+thorough, complete census of all the Zone clear back to the Zone
+line. Here's a sample card and list of instructions."
+
+In other words kind Uncle Sam was about to give me authority to
+enter every dwelling in the most cosmopolitan and thickly
+populated district of his Canal Zone, and to put questions to
+every dweller therein, note-book and pencil in hand; authority to
+ramble around a month or more in sunshine and jungle--and pay me
+for the privilege. There are really two methods of seeing the
+Canal Zone; as an employee or as a guest at the Tivoli, both of
+them at about five dollars a day--but at opposite ends of the
+thermometer.
+
+There remained a week-end between that Friday morning and the last
+day of January, set for the beginning of the census. Certainly I
+should not regret the arrival of the day when I should become an
+employee, with all the privileges and coupon-books thereunto
+appertained. For the Zone is no easy dwelling-place for the non-
+employee. Our worthy Uncle of the chin whiskers makes it quite
+plain that, while he may tolerate the mere visitor, he does not
+care to have him hanging around; makes it so plain, in fact, that
+a few weeks purely of sight-seeing on the Zone implies an
+adamantine financial backing. In his screened and full-provided
+towns, where the employee lives in such well-furnished comfort,
+the tourist might beat his knuckles bare and shake yellow gold in
+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 the employee's price--the very attitude in which he is
+received says openly that he is admitted only on suffrance--
+permitted to eat only because if he starved to death our Uncle
+would have the bother of burying him and his Zone Police the
+arduous toil of making out an accident report.
+
+Meanwhile I must change my dwelling-place. For the quartermaster
+of Corozal had need of all the rooms within his domain, need so
+imperative that seventeen bona fide and wrathy employees were even
+then bunking in the pool-room of Corozal hotel. Work on the Zone
+was moving steadily Pacificward and the accommodations refused to
+come with it--at least at the same degree of speed.
+
+Nor was I especially averse to the transfer. The room-mate with
+whom fate had cast me in House 81 was a pleasant enough fellow, a
+youth of unobjectionable personal manners even though his "eight-
+hour graft" was in the sooty seat of a steam-crane high above
+Miraflores locks. But he had one slight idiosyncrasy that might in
+time have grown annoying. On the night of our first acquaintance,
+after we had lain exchanging random experiences till the evening
+heat had begun a retreat before the gentle night breeze, I was
+awakened from the first doze by my companion sitting 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
+the electric light, "and when I get 'em I generally imagine my
+room-mate is a burglar trying to go through my junk and--"
+
+He reached under his pillow and brought to light a "Colt's" of 45
+caliber; then crossing the room he pointed to three large
+irregular splintered holes in the wall some three or four inches
+above me, and which I had not already seen simply because I had
+not chanced to look that way.
+
+"There's the last three. But I'm tryin' to break myself of 'em,"
+he concluded, slipping the revolver back under his pillow and
+turning off the 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 now virtually on the force, I took up my residence in Corozal
+police station. 'T is a peaceful little building of the usual Zone
+type on a breezy knoll across the railroad, with a spreading tree
+and a little well-tended flower plot before it, and the broad
+world stretching away in all directions behind. Here lived
+Policeman T----and B---." First-class policemen" perhaps I should
+take care to specify, for in Zone parlance the unqualified noun
+implies African ancestry. But it seems easier to use an adjective
+of color when necessary. Among their regular duties was that of
+weighing down the rocking-chairs on the airy front veranda, whence
+each nook and cranny of Corozal was in sight, and of strolling
+across to greet the train-guard of the seven daily passengers;
+though the irregular ones that might burst upon them at any moment
+were not unlikely to resemble a Moro expedition in the
+Philippines. B--- and I shared the big main room; for T----, being
+the haughty station commander, occupied the parlor suite beside
+the office. That was all, except the black Trinidadian boy who sat
+on the wooden shelf that was his bed behind a huge padlocked door
+and gazed dreamily out through the bars--when he was not carrying
+a bundle to the train for his wardens or engaged in the janitor
+duties that kept Corozal station so spick and span. Oh! To be sure
+there were also a couple of negro policemen in the smaller room
+behind the thin wooden partition of our 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 on vacation. He would have thought so indeed could he have
+spent a day at Corozal and watched the unbroken deafening
+procession of dirt-trains scream by on their way to the Pacific,--
+straining Moguls dragging a furlong of "Lidgerwood flats," swaying
+"Oliver dumps" with their side chains clanking, a succession as
+incessant of "empties" grinding back again into the midst of the
+fray. On the tail of every train lounged an American conductor,
+dressed more like a miner, though his "front" and "hind" negro
+brakemen were as apt to be in silk ties and patent-leathers. To
+say nothing of the train-loads that go Atlanticward and to jungle
+"dumps" and to many an unnoticed "fill." Then when he had thus
+watched the day through it would have been of interest to go and
+chat with some of the "Old Timers" who live here beside the track
+and who have seen, or at least heard, this same endless stream of
+rock and earth race by six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for
+six years, as constant and heavily-laden to-day as in the
+beginning. He might discover, as not all his fellow-countrymen
+have as yet, that the little surgical 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 the
+States among the newspaper files at the Y. M. C. A. building.
+Uncle Sam surely makes life comfortable for his children wherever
+he takes hold. It is not enough that he shall clean up and set in
+order these tropical pest-holes; he will have the employee fancy
+himself completely at home. Here I sat in one of the dozen big
+airy recreation halls, well stocked with man's playthings, which
+the government has erected on the Zone; I, who two weeks before
+had been thankful for lodging on the earth floor of a Honduranean
+hut. The Y. M. C. A. is the chief social center on the Isthmus,
+the rendezvous and leisure-hour headquarters of the thousands that
+inhabit bachelor quarters--except the few of the purely barroom
+type. "Everybody's Association" it might perhaps more properly be
+called, for ladies find welcome and the laughter of children over
+the parlor games is rarely lacking. It is not the circumspect
+place that are many of its type in the States, but a real man's
+place where he can buy his cigarettes and smoke his pipe in peace,
+a place for men as men are, not as the fashion plates that mama's
+fond imagination pictures them. With all its excellences it would
+be unjust to complain that the Zone "Y. M." is a trifle "low-brow"
+in its tastes, that the books on its shelves are apt to be
+"popular" novels rather than reading matter, that its phonographs
+are most frequently screeching vaudeville noises while the Slezak
+and Homer disks lie tucked away far down near the bottom of the
+stack.
+
+With the new week I moved to Empire, the "Rules and Regulations"
+in a pocket and the most indispensable of my possessions under an
+arm. Once more we rumbled through Miraflores tunnel through a
+mole-hill, past her concrete light-house among the astonished
+palms, and her giant hose of water wiping away the rock hills,
+across the trestleless bridge with its photographic glimpse of the
+canal before and behind for the limber-necked, and again I found
+myself in the metropolis of the Canal Zone. At the quartermaster's
+office my "application for quarters" was duly 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 new home on the slope
+of a ridge overlooking the railway and its buildings below.
+
+It was the noon-hour. My two room-mates, therefore, were on hand
+for inspection, sprawlingly engrossed in a--quite innocent and
+legal--card game on a table littered with tobacco, pipes, matches,
+dog-eared wads of every species of literature from real estate
+pamphlets to locomotive journals, and a further mass of
+indiscriminate matter that none but a professional inventory man
+would attempt to classify. About the room was the usual clutter of
+all manner of things in the usual unarranged, "unwomaned" Zone
+way, which the negro janitor feels it neither his duty nor
+privilege to bring to order; while on and about my cot and bureau
+were helter-skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent
+employee, who had left for his six-weeks' vacation without hanging
+up his shirt--after the fashion of "Zoners." So when I had wiped
+away the dust that had been gathering thereon since the days of de
+Lesseps and chucked my odds and ends into a bureau drawer, I was
+settled,--a full-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 very
+dexterously dodged the necessity of lining the Zone with the
+offensive signs "Black" and "White." 'T would not be exactly the
+distinction desired 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 belong any of the darker shade, and all
+common laborers of whatever color, these receiving their wages in
+Panamanian silver. 'T is a deep and sharp-drawn line. The story
+runs that Liza Lawsome, not long arrived from Jamaica, entering
+the office of a Zone dentist, paused suddenly before the
+announcement:
+
+    Crownwork. Gold and Silver Fillings.
+    Extractions wholly without Pain.
+
+There was deep disappointment in face and voice as she sat down
+with a flounce 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 a locomotive that jerked dirt-trains out of the "cut" and
+straddled a steam-shovel that ate its way into Culebra range.
+Whence, of course, they were covered with the grease and grime
+incident to those occupations. Which did not make them any the
+less companionable--though it did promise a distinct increase in
+my laundry bill. When they had descended again to the labor-train
+and been snatched away to their appointed 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 any reasonable man
+could demand, his iron cot with springs and mattress
+unimpeachable--but just there the maternal generosity of the
+government ceases. He must furnish his own sheets and pillow--MUST
+because placards on the wall sternly warn him not to sleep on the
+bare mattress; and the New York Sunday edition that had served me
+thus far I had carelessly left behind at Corozal police station.
+To be sure there were sheets for sale in Empire, at the
+Commissary--where money has the purchasing-power of cobble-stones,
+and coupon-books come only to those who 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 my perplexity, for
+he turned to point to the bed of the absent "Mitch" and gurgled:
+
+"Jes' you make lub to dat man what got dat bed. Him got plenty ob
+sheets." Which proved a wise suggestion.
+
+Empire hotel sat a bit down the hill. There the "gold" ranks were
+again subdivided. The coatless ate and sweltered inside the great
+dining-room; the formal sat in haughty state in what was virtually
+a second-story veranda overlooking the railroad yards and a part
+of the town, where were tables of four, electric fans, and "Ben"
+to serve with butler formality. I found it worth while to climb
+the hill for my coat thrice a day. As yet I was jangling down a
+Panamanian dollar at each appearance, but the day was not far
+distant when I should receive the "recruits" hotel-book and soon
+grow as accustomed as the rest to having a coupon snatched from it
+by the yellow negro at the door. Uncle Sam's boarding scale on the
+Zone is widely varied. Three meals cost the non-employee $1.50,
+the "gold" employee $.90, the white European laborer $.40, and
+negroes in general $.30.
+
+That afternoon, when the sun had begun to bow its head on the
+thither side of the canal, I climbed to the newly labeled census
+office on the knoll behind the police station, from the piazza of
+which all native Empire lies within sweep of the eye. "The boss,"
+a smiling youth only well started on his third decade, whose
+regular duties were in the sanitary department, had already moved
+bed, bag, and baggage into the room that had been assigned the
+census, that he might be "always on the job."
+
+Not till eight that evening, however, did the force gather to look
+itself over. There was the commander-in-chief of the census
+bureau, sent down from Washington specifically for the task in
+hand, under whom as chairmen we settled down into a sort of
+director's meeting, a wholly informal, coatless, cigarette-smoking
+meeting in which even the chief himself did not feel it necessary
+to let his dignity weigh upon him. He had been sent down alone.
+Hence there had been great scrambling to gather together on the
+Zone men enough who spoke Spanish--and with no striking success.
+Most noticeable of my fellow-enumerators, being in uniform, were
+three Marines from Bas Obispo, fluent with the working Spanish
+they had picked up from Mindanao to Puerto Rico, and flush-cheeked
+with the prospect of a full month on "pass," to say nothing of the
+$4.40 a day that would be added to their daily military income of
+$.60. Then there were four of darker hue,--Panamanians and West
+Indians; and how rare are Spanish-speaking, Americans on the Zone
+was 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 were both satisfied, Barter because he did not
+like to sully himself by contact with foreigners, I because one
+need not travel clear to the Canal Zone to study the ways of
+Americans. As for the other seven, each was assigned his strip of
+land something over a mile wide and five long running back to the
+western boundary of the Zone. That region of wilderness known as
+"Beyond the Canal" was to be left for special treatment later. The
+Zone had been divided for census purposes into four sections, with
+headquarters and supervisor in Ancon, Empire, Gorgona, and
+Cristobal respectively. Our district, stretching from the
+trestleless bridge over the canal to a great tree near Bas Obispo,
+was easily the fat of the land, the most populous, most
+cosmopolitan, and embracing 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 and reflection;
+
+"When you have once signed on as an enumerator you cannot cease to
+exercise your functions as such without justifiable cause under
+penalty of $500 fine." Which warning was quickly followed by the
+hair-raising announcement:
+
+"If you set down the name of a fictitious person"--what can have
+given the good census department the notion of such a
+possibility?--"you will be fined $2,000 or sentenced to five
+years' imprisonment, or both."
+
+From there on the injunctions grew less nerve-racking: "You must
+use a medium soft black pencil (which will be furnished)"--law-
+breaking under such conditions would be absurdity--"use no ditto
+marks and"--here I could not but shudder as there passed before my
+eyes memories of college lecture rooms and all the strange marks
+that have come to mean something to me alone--" take pains to
+write legibly!"
+
+Then we arose and swarmed upstairs to an empty court-room, where
+Judge G---, throwing away his cigarette and removing his Iowa feet
+from the bar of justice, caused us each to raise a right hand and
+swear an oath as solemn as ever president on March fourth. An
+oath, I repeat, not merely to uphold and defend the constitution
+against all enemies, armed or armless, but furthermore "not to
+share with any one any of the information you gather as an
+enumerator, or show a census card, or keep a copy of same." Yet, I
+trust I can spin this simple yarn of my Canal Zone days without
+offense to Uncle Sam against the day when mayhap I shall have
+occasion to apply to him again for occupation. For that reason I
+shall take abundant care to give no information whatsoever in the
+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
+were many labor camps in our district and the hours bordering on
+midnight the only sure time to "catch 'em in." Up in House 47 I
+gathered together the legion paraphernalia of this new
+occupation,--some two hundred red cards a foot long and half as
+wide, a surveyor's field notebook for the preservation of
+miscellaneous information, tags for the tagging of canvassed
+buildings, tacks for the tacking of the same, the necessary tack-
+hammer, the medium soft black pencil, above all the awesome legal
+"Commission," impressively signed and sealed, wherein none other
+than our weighty nation's chief himself did expressly authorize me
+to search out, enter, and question ad libitum. All this swung over
+a shoulder in a white canvas sack, that carried memory back
+through the long years to my newsboy days, I descended to the
+town.
+
+"The boss" was ready. It was nearly eleven when we crossed the
+silent P. R. R. tracks and, plunging away into the night past
+great heaps of abandoned locomotives huddled dim and uncertain in
+the thin moonlight like ghosts of the French fiasco, dashed into a
+camp of the laborer's village of Cunette, pitched on the very edge
+of the now black and silent void of the canal. Eighteen thick-
+necked negroes in undershirts and trousers gazed up white-eyed
+from a suspended card game at the long camp 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
+Zone questionnaire was on.
+
+We had enrolled the group before a son of wisdom among them
+surmised that we were not, after all, plain-clothes men in quest
+of criminals; and his announcement brought visible relief. Twice
+as many blacks were sprawled in the two rows of double-sided,
+three-story bunks,--mere strips of canvas on gas-pipes that could
+be hung up like swinging shelves 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 with savage, animal-like grunts and
+murderous glares which instantly subsided to sheepish grins and
+voiceless astonishment at sight of a white face bending over them.
+Now and again open-mouthed guffaws of laughter greeted the mumbled
+admission of some powerful buck that he could not read, or did not
+know his age. But there was nothing even faintly resembling
+insolence, for these were all British West Indians without a
+corrupting "States nigger" among them. A half-hour after our
+arrival we had tagged the barracks and dived into the next camp,
+blacker and sleepier and more populous than the first. It was
+February morning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and
+stepped under the shower-bath that is always preliminary, on the
+Zone, to a night's repose.
+
+A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general destruction
+developed gradually into full consciousness at four-thirty. House
+47 was in riotous uproar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign
+invasion was pending; it was merely the houseful of engineers in
+their customary daily struggle to catch the labor-train and be
+away to work by daylight. When the hour's rampage had subsided I
+rose to switch off the light and turned in again.
+
+The rays of the impetuous Panama sun were spattering from them
+when I passed again the jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and
+machinery, reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by green
+jungle strands and tropical creepers. By day the arch-roofed
+labor-camps were silent and empty, but for a lonely janitor
+languidly mopping a floor. Before the buildings a black gang was
+dipping the canvas and gas-pipe bunks one by one into a great
+kettle of scalding water. But there are also "married quarters" at
+Cunette. A row of six government houses tops the ridge, with six
+families in each house, and--no, I dare not risk nomination to an
+ever expanding though unpopular club by stating how many in a
+family. I will venture merely to assert that when noon-time came I
+was not well started on the second house, yet carried away more
+than sixty filled-out cards.
+
+More than two days that single row of houses endured, varied by
+nights spent with "the boss" in the labor-camps of Lirio, Culebra
+way. Then one morning I tramped far out the highway to the old
+Scotchman's farm-house that bounds Empire on the north and began
+the long intricate journey through the private-owned town itself.
+It was like attending a congress of the nations, a museum
+exhibition of all the shapes and hues in which the human vegetable
+grows. Tenements and wobbly-kneed shanties swarming with exhibits
+monopolized the landscape; strange the room that did 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 and again
+descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste and ungraceful
+posture, burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes, hunting
+out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hidden away
+behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into
+dilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human being
+who fell in my way. West Indian negroes easily kept the lead of
+all other nationalities combined; negroes blacker than the
+obsidian cutlery of the Aztecs, blonde negroes with yellow hair
+and blue eyes whose race was betrayed only by eyelids and the dead
+whiteness of skin, and whom one 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 the five-foot bedroom behind, the former cluttered with
+a van-load of useless junk, dirty blankets, decrepit furniture,
+glittering gewgaws, a black baby squirming naked in a basket of
+rags with an Episcopal prayerbook under its pillow--relic of the
+old demon-scaring superstitions of Voodoo worship. Every inch of
+the walls was "decorated," after the artistic temperament of the
+race, with pages of illustrated magazines or newspapers, half-
+tones of all things conceivable with no small amount of text in
+sundry languages, many a page purely of advertising matter, the
+muscular, imbruted likeness of a certain black champion rarely
+missing, frequently with a Bible laid reverently beneath it.
+Outside, before each room, a tin fireplace for cooking
+precariously bestrided the veranda rail.
+
+Often a tumble-down hovel where three would seem a crowd yielded
+up more than a dozen inmates, many of whom, being at work, must be
+looked for later--the "back-calls" that is the bete-noire of the
+census enumerator. West Indians, however, are for the most part
+well acquainted with the affairs of friends and room-mates, and
+enrolment of the absent was often possible. Occasionally I ran
+into a den of impertinence that must be frowned down, notably a
+notorious swarming tenement over a lumber-yard. But on the whole
+the courtesy of British West Indians, even among themselves, was
+noteworthy. Of the two great divisions among them, Barbadians
+seemed more well-mannered than Jamaicans--or was it merely more
+subtle hypocrisy? Among them all the most unspoiled children of
+nature appeared to be those from the little island 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 the
+virtues I strive particularly to cultivate.
+
+But "perlite" or not, there can be no question of the astounding
+stupidity of the West Indian rank and file, a stupidity amusing if
+you are in an amusable mood, unendurable if you neglect to pack
+your patience among your bag of supplies in the morning. Tropical
+patience, too, is at best a frail child. The dry-season sun rarely
+even veiled his face, and there were those among the enumerators
+who complained of the taxing labor of all-day marching up and down
+streets and stairs and Zone hills beneath it; but to me, fresh
+from tramping over the mountains of Central America with twenty
+pounds on my shoulders, this was mere pastime. Heat had no terrors
+for the enumerated, however. Often in the hottest hour of the day
+I came upon negroes sleeping in tightly closed rooms, the sweat
+running off them in streams, yet apparently vastly enjoying the
+situation.
+
+Sunday came and I chose to continue, though virtually all the Zone
+was on holiday and even "the boss," after what I found later to be
+his invariable custom, had broken away from his card-littered
+dwelling-place on Saturday evening and hurried away to Panama,
+drawn thither and held till Monday morning--by some irresistible
+attraction. Sunday turns holiday completely on the Zone, even to
+hours of trains and hotels. The frequent passengers were packed
+from southern white end to northern black end with all nations in
+gladsome garb, bound Panamaward to see the lottery drawing and buy
+a ticket for the following Sunday, across the Isthmus to breezy
+Colon, or to one of a hundred varying spots and pastimes. Others
+in khaki breeches fresh from the government laundry in Cristobal
+and the ubiquitous leather leggings of the "Zoner" were off to
+ride out the day in the jungles; still others 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 their way to church. Yet
+with all this scattering there still remained a respectable
+percentage lounging on the screened verandas in pajamas and
+kimonas, "Old Timers" of four or five or even six years' standing
+who were convinced they had seen and heard, and smelt and tasted
+all that the Zone or tropical lands have to offer.
+
+Well on in the morning there was a general gathering of all the
+ditch-digging clans of Empire and vicinity in a broad field close
+under the eaves of the town, and soon there came drifting across
+to me at my labor, hoarse, frenzied screams; sounding strangely
+incongruous beneath the 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
+earth were entrapped in their bunks, under their dwelling-places
+in the shade, shaving, exchanging hair-cuts, washing workaday
+clothes, reminiscing over far-off homes and pre-migratory days, or
+merely loafing. The same cheery, friendly, quick-witted fellows
+they were as in their native land, even the few Italians and rare
+Portuguese scattered among them inoculated with their
+cheerfulness.
+
+Came sudden changes to camps of Martiniques, a sort of wild,
+untamed creature, who spoke a distressing imitation of French
+which even he did not for a moment claim to be such, but frankly
+dubbed patois. Restless-eyed black men who answered to their names
+only at the question "Cummun t'appelle?" and give their age only
+to those who open wide their mouths and cry, "Caje-vous?" Then on
+again to the no less strange, sing-song "English" of Jamaica, the
+whining tones of those whose island trees the conquesting
+Spaniards found bearded--"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 reward for denying myself a holiday
+were the "back-calls" in the town itself which I was able to check
+out of my field-book. Many a long-sought negro I roused from his
+holiday siesta, dashing past the tawdry calico curtains to pound
+him awake--mere auricular demonstration having only the effect of
+lulling him into deeper child-like slumber. The surest and often
+only effective means was to tickle the slumberer gently on the
+soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate instrument such as
+my tack-hammer, or a convenient broom-handle or flat-iron.
+Frequently I came upon young negro men of the age and type that in
+white skins would have been loafing on pool-room corners, reading
+to themselves in loud and 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 the West 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
+of Empire. I reached in due time the hodge-podge shops and stores
+of Railroad Avenue. Chinamen began to drift into the rolls, there
+appeared such names as Carmen Wah Chang, cooks and waitresses
+living in darksome back cupboards must be unearthed, negro
+shoemakers were caught at their stands on the sidewalks, shiny-
+haired bartenders gave up their biographies in nasal monosyllables
+amid the slop of "suds" and the scrape of celluloid froth-
+eradicators. Rare was the land that had not sent representatives
+to this great dirt-shoveling congress. A Syrian merchant gasped
+for breath and fell over his counter in delight to find that I,
+too, had been in his native Zakleh, five Punjabis all but died of
+pleasure when I mispronounced three words of their tongue.
+Occasionally there came startling contrast as I burst unexpectedly
+into the ancestral home of some educated native family that had
+withstood all the tides of time and change and still lived in the
+beloved "Emperador" of their forefathers. Anger was usually near
+the surface at my intrusion, but they quickly changed to their
+ingrown politeness and chatty sociability when addressed in their
+own tongue and treated in their 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 laundrymen
+divulged the secrets of their mysterious past between spurts of
+water at steaming shirt-bosoms; Chinese merchants, of whom there
+are hordes on the Zone, cueless, dressed and betailored till you
+must look at them twice to tell them from "gold" employees, the
+flag of the new republic flapping above their doors, the new
+president in their lapels, left off selling crucifixes and
+breastpin medallions of Christ to negro women, to answer my
+questions. One evening I stumbled into a nest of eleven Bengali
+peddlers with the bare floor of their single room as bed, table,
+and chairs; in one corner, surmounted by their little embroidered
+skull-caps, were stacked the bundles with which they pester Zone
+housewives, and in another their god wrapped in a dirty rag
+against profaning eyes.
+
+Many days had passed before I landed the first Zone resident I
+could not enroll unassisted. He was a heathen Chinee newly
+arrived, who spoke neither Spanish nor English. It was "Chinese
+Charlie" who helped me out. "Chinese Charlie" was a resident of
+the Zone before the days of de Lesseps and at our first meeting
+had insisted on being enrolled under that pseudonym, alleging it
+his real name. Upstairs above his store all was sepulchral silence
+when I mounted to investigate--and I came quickly and quietly down
+again; for the door had opened on the gaudy Oriental splendor of a
+joss-house where dwelt only grinning wooden idols not counted as
+Zone residents by the materialistic census officials. On the
+Isthmus as elsewhere "John" is a law-abiding citizen--within
+limits; never obsequious, nearly always friendly, ready to answer
+questions quite cheerily so long as he considers the matter any of
+your business, but closing infinitely tighter than the maltreated
+bivalve when he fancies you are prying too far.
+
+In time I reached the Commissary--the government department store
+--and enrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel,
+from steward to scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography;
+the police station on its knoll fell like the rest. I went to
+jail--and set down a large score of black men and a pair of
+European whites, back from a day's sweaty labor of road building,
+who lived now in unaccustomed cleanliness in the heart of the
+lower story of a fresh wooden building with 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 not only faces her
+streets but even her back yards are filled with shacks and
+inhabited boxes to be hunted out. On the hem of her tattered
+outskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandoned
+junk,--locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters
+"U. S." painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day
+investigator material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste);
+all now soon to be removed by a Chicago wrecking company.
+
+Then all the town must be done again--"back calls." By this time
+so wide and varied was my acquaintance in Empire that wenches
+withdrew a dripping 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 one missing inmate in a house of fifty. For
+the few laborers still uncaught I took to coming after dark. But
+West Indians rarely own lamps, not even the brass tax-numbers
+above the doors were visible, and as for a negro in the dark--
+
+Absurd rumors had begun early to circulate among the darker
+brethren. In all negrodom the conviction became general that this
+individual detailed catechising and house-branding was really a
+government scheme to get lists of persons due for deportation,
+either for lack of work as the canal neared completion or for
+looseness of marital relations. Hardly a tenement did I enter but
+laughing voices bandied back and forth and there echoed and
+reechoed through the building such remarks as:
+
+"Well, dey gon' sen' us home, Penelope," or "Yo an' Percival
+better hurry up an' git married, Ambrosia."
+
+Several dusky females regularly ran away whenever I approached;
+one at least I came a-seeking in vain nine times, and found her
+the tenth behind a garbage barrel. Many fancied the secret marks
+on the "enumerated" tag--date, and initials of the enumerator--
+were intimately concerned with their fate. So strong is the fear
+of the law imbued by the Zone Police that they dared not tear down
+the dreaded placard, but would sometimes sit staring at it for
+hours striving to penetrate its secret or exorcise away its power
+of evil, and now and then some bolder spirit ventured out--at
+midnight--with a pencil and put tails and extra flourishes on the
+penciled letters in the hope of disguising them against the fatal
+day.
+
+Except for the chaos of nationalities and types on the Zone,
+enumerating would have become more than monotonous. But the
+enumerated took care to break the monotony. There was the wealth
+of nomenclature for instance. What more striking than a shining-
+black waiter strutting proudly about under the name of Levi
+McCarthy? There was no necessity of asking Beresford Plantaganet
+if he were a British subject. Naturally the mother of Hazarmaneth
+Cumberbath Smith, baptized that very week, had to claw out the
+family Bible from among the bed-clothes and look up the name on
+the fly-leaf.
+
+To the enumerator, who must set down concise and exact answers to
+each of his questions, fifty or sixty daily scenes and replies
+something like these were delightful;
+
+Enumerator (sitting down on the edge of a barrel): "How many
+living in this 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
+his sure 'nough wife."
+
+"Can he read?"
+
+(Hesitatingly) "Er--a leetle, sir, not too much, sir." (Which
+generally means he can spell out a few words of one syllable and
+make some sort of 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, he jes' 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, good
+afternoon."
+
+"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 mother
+never 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 sweet
+mahster, 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
+is your 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
+ask him 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
+now living with Henry Brown, a light yellow negro.
+
+West Indian wit:
+
+A shop-sign in Empire: "Don't ask for credit. He is gone on
+vacation since 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 wife live commonly in peace and harmony. Dr. O----tells
+the following story, however:
+
+In his rounds he came upon a negro beating his wife and had him
+placed under arrest. The negro: "Why, boss, can't a man chastize
+his wife when she 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 it again, boss--on de Canal Zone."
+
+One morning in the heart of Empire a noise not unlike that of a
+rocky waterfall began to grow upon my ear. Louder and louder it
+swelled as I worked slowly forward. At last I discovered its
+source. In a lower room of a tenement an old white-haired Jamaican
+had fitted up a private school, to which the elite among the
+darker brethren sent their children, rather than patronize the
+common public schools Uncle Sam provides free to all Zone
+residents. The old man sat before some twenty wide-eyed children,
+one of whom stood slouch-shouldered, book in hand, in the center
+of the room, and at regular intervals of not more than twenty
+seconds he shouted high above all other noises of the
+neighborhood:
+
+"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,
+old negro woman, parchment-skinned and doddering, living alone in
+a stoop-shouldered shanty of boxes and tin cans. "Ah don' know how
+ol' ah is, mahster," was one of her replies, "but ah born six
+years befo' de cholera 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
+ashamed to say how long ah been here" (just why was not evident,
+unless she fancied she should long ago have made her fortune and
+left). "Is you a American? Well, de Americans sure have done one
+thing. Dey mak' dis country civilize. Why, chil', befo' dey come
+we have all de time here revolutions. Ah couldn't count to how
+many revolutions we had, an' ebery time dey steal all what we
+have. Dey even steal mah clothes. Ah sure glad fo' one de
+Americans come."
+
+It was during my Empire enumerating that I was startled one
+morning to burst suddenly from the tawdry, junk-jumbled rooms of
+negroes into a bare-floored, freshly scrubbed room containing some
+very clean cots, a small table and a hammock, and a general air of
+frankness and simplicity, with no attempt to disguise the
+commonplace. At the table sat a Spaniard in worn but newly washed
+working-clothes, book in hand. I sat down and, falling
+unconsciously into the "th" pronunciation of the Castilian, began
+blithely to reel off the questions that had grown so automatic.
+
+"Name?"-;-Federico Malero. "Check Number?"--"Can you read?" "A
+little." The barest suggestion of amusement in his voice caused me
+to look up quickly. "My library," he said, with the ghost of a
+weird smile, nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf
+made of pieces of dynamite boxes, "Mine and my room-mates." The
+shelf was filled with four--REAL Barcelona paper editions of
+Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and a half-dozen others accustomed
+to sit in the same company, all dog-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," and he turned again to his reading.
+
+I plunged into the jumble of negroes next door, putting my
+questions and setting down the answers without even hearing them,
+my thoughts still back in the clean, bare room behind, wondering
+whether I should not have been wiser after all to have ignored the
+sharp-drawn lines and the prejudices of my fellow-countrymen and
+joined the pick and shovel Zone 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. I recalled that EL UNICO,
+the anarchist Spanish weekly published in Miraflores contains some
+crystal-clear thinking set forth in a sharp-cut manner that shows
+a real inside knowledge of the "job" and the canal workers,
+however little one may agree with its philosophy and methods.
+
+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 myself chuckling at the picture, "Tom, the Rough-neck,"
+to whom all such as Federico Malero with his pick and shovel were
+mere "silver men," on whom "Tom" looked down from his high perch
+on his steam-shovel as far less 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 Maleros on the Zone indulge in at the
+pompous airs of some American ostensibly far 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 quite different from what I had hitherto pictured as an
+enlisted man.
+
+"Mac" was a half and half of Scotch and Italian. Naturally he was
+constantly effervescing, both verbally and temperamentally, his
+snapping black eyes were never still, life played across his
+excitable, sunny boyish face like cloud shadows on a mountain
+landscape, whoever would speak to him at any length must catch him
+in a vice-like grip and hold his attention by main force. He spoke
+with a funny little almost-foreign accent, was touching on forty,
+and was the youngest man at that age in the length and breadth of
+the Canal Zone.
+
+At first sight you would take "Mac" for a mere roustabout, like
+most who go a'soldiering. But before long you'd begin to wonder
+where he got his rich and fluent vocabulary and his warehouse of
+information. Then you'd run across the fact that he had once
+finished a course in a middle-western university--and forgotten
+it. The schools had left little of their blighting mark upon him,
+yet "pump" "Mac" on any subject from rapid-fire guns to grand
+opera and you'd get at least a reasonable answer. Though you
+wouldn't guess the knowledge was there unless you did pump for it,
+for "Mac" was not of the type of those who overwork the first
+person pronoun, not because of foolish diffidence but merely
+because it rarely occurred to him as a subject of conversation.
+Seventeen years in the marine corps--you were sure he was
+"jollying" when he first said it--had taken "Mac" to most places
+where warships go, from Pekin and "the Islands" to Cape Town and
+Buenos Ayres, and given him not merely an acquaintance with the
+world but--what is far more of an acquisition--the gift of getting
+acquainted in almost any stratum of the world in the briefest
+possible space of time.
+
+"Mac" spoke not only his English and Italian but a fluent
+"Islands" Spanish; he knew enough French to talk even to
+Martiniques, and he could moreover make two distinct sets of
+noises that were understood by Chinese and Japanese respectively.
+He was a man just reckless enough in all things to be generous and
+alive, yet never foolishly wasteful either of himself or his
+meager substance. "Mac" first rose to fame in the census
+department by appearing one afternoon at Empire police station
+dragging a "bush" native by the scruff of the neck with one hand,
+and carrying in the other the machete with which the bushman had
+tried to prove he was a Colombian and not subject to questioning
+by the agents of other powers.
+
+Renson--well, Renson was in some ways "Mac's" exact antithesis and
+in some his twin brother. He was one of those youths who believe
+in spending prodigally and in all possible haste what little
+nature has given them. Wherefore, though he was younger than "Mac"
+appeared to be, he already looked older than "Mac" was. In Zone
+parlance "he had already laid a good share of the road to Hell
+behind him." Yet such a cheery, likable chap was Renson, so large-
+hearted and unassuming--that was just why you felt an itching to
+seize him by the collar of his olive-drab shirt and shake him till
+his teeth rattled for tossing himself so wantonly to the infernal
+bow-wows.
+
+Renson's "bush" troubles were legion. Not only were there the
+seducing brown "Spigoty" women out in the wilderness to help him
+on his descending trail, but when and wherever fire-water of
+whatever nationality or degree of voltage showed its neck--and it
+is to be found even 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 good sense when the influence was turned off
+was demonstrated when he returned from cautiously reconnoitering a
+cottage far back in the wilds one dark night and reported as his
+reason for postponing the enumerating: "If you'd butt in on one o'
+them Martinique booze festivals they'd crown you with a bottle."
+
+Already one or two enumerators had gone back to private life--by
+request. Particularly sad was the case of our dainty, blue-blooded
+Panamanian. As with many Panamanians, and not a few of the self-
+exalted elsewhere, he was more burdened with blue corpuscles than
+with gray matter. At any rate--
+
+On our cards, after the query "Color?" was a small space, a very
+small space 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 his census. Early one afternoon our Panamanian
+helpmate burst upon one of his numerous aristocratic relatives in
+his royal thatched domains in the ancestral bush. When he had
+embraced him the customary fifteen times on the right side and the
+fifteen accustomed times on the left side, and had performed the
+eighty-five gestures of greeting required by the social manual of
+the bush, and asked the three hundred and sixty-five questions de
+rigueur regarding the honorable health of his honorable horde of
+offspring, and his eye had fallen again on the red cards in his
+hand, the fact struck him that the relative was of precisely the
+same shade of complexion as himself. Could he set him down as he
+had many a mere red-blooded person and thereby perhaps establish a
+precedent that might result in his own mortification? Yet could he
+stretch a shade--or several shades--and set him down as "white"?
+No, there was the oath of office, and the government that
+administered it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed. Long he
+sat in deepest meditation. Being a Panamanian, he could not of
+course know that Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census. Till at
+length, as the sun was firing the western jungle tree-tops, a
+scintillating idea rewarded his unwonted cogitation. He caught up
+the medium soft pencil and wrote in aristocratic hand down across
+the sheet where other information is supposed to find place:
+
+"Color;--A very light mixture," and taking his leave with the
+requisite seventy-five gestures and genuflexions, he drifted
+Empireward with the dozen cards the day had yielded.
+
+Which is why I was shocked next morning by the disrespectful
+report of Renson that "my friend the boss had tied a can to the
+Spig's tail," and our dainty and lamented comrade went back to the
+more fitting blue-blood occupation of swinging a cane in the
+lobbies of Panama's famous hostelries.
+
+But what mattered such small losses? Had not "Scotty" been engaged
+to fill the breach--or all of them, one or two breaches more or
+less made small difference to "Scotty." He was a cozy little
+barrel of a man, born in "Doombahrton," and for some years past
+had been dispensing good old Dumbarton English in Panama's
+proudest educational institution. But Panama's school vacation is
+during her "summer," her dry season from February to April. What
+more natural then than that "Scotty" should have concluded to pass
+his vacation taking census, for obviously--"a mon must pick up a
+wee bit o' change wherever he can."
+
+I seemed to have been appointed to a purely sight-seeing job. One
+February noon I reported at the office to find that passes to
+Gatun had been issued to five of us, "Scotty," "Mac," Renson, and
+Barter among the number. The task in the "town by the dam site" it
+seemed, was proving too heavy for the regular enumerators of that
+district.
+
+We left by the 2:10 train. Cascadas and Bas Obispo rolled away
+behind us, across the canal I caught a glimpse of the wilderness
+surrounding the abode of "Old Fritz," then we entered a to me
+unknown land. I could easily have fancied myself a tourist,
+especially so at Matachin when "Mac" solemnly attempted to
+"spring" on me the old tourist hoax of suicided Chinamen as the
+derivation of the town's name. Through Gorgona, 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 and San Pablo
+were withering and wasting away, "'Orca L'garto," or the Hanged
+Alligator was barely more than a memory, Tabernilla a mere heap of
+lumber being tumbled on flatcars bound for new service further
+Pacificward. Of Frijoles there remained barely enough to shudder
+at, with the collector's nasal bawl of "Free Holys!" and
+everywhere the irrepressible tropical greenery was already rushing
+back to engulf the pigmy works of man. It seemed criminally
+wasteful to have built these entire towns with all the detail and
+machinery of a well governed and fully furnished city from police
+station to salt cellars only to tear them down again and utterly
+wipe them out four or five years after their founding. A
+forerunner of what, in a few brief years, will have happened 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
+vast region will be flooded and come to be Gatun Lake. Villages
+that were old when Pizarro began his swine-herding will be wiped
+out, even this splendid double-tracked railroad goes the way of
+the rest, for on February fifteenth, a bare few days away, it was
+to be abandoned and where we were now racing northwestward through
+brilliant sunshine and Atlantic breezes would soon be the bottom
+of a lake over which great ocean steamers will glide, while far
+below will be tall palm-trees and the spreading mangoes, the
+banana, king of weeds, gigantic ferns and--well, who shall say
+what will become of the brilliant parrots, the monkeys and the
+jaguars?
+
+For nearly an hour we had not a glimpse of the canal, lost in the
+jungle 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 Gatun climbing up a hillside on its edge and scattering over
+several more. To the left I caught my first sight of the world-
+famous locks and dam, and at 3:30 we descended at the stone
+station, first mile-post of permanency, for being out of reach of
+the coming flood it is built to stay 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
+clans from all districts, whence we climbed to the broad porch of
+the administration building above. There before me, for the first
+time in--well, many months, spread the Atlantic, the Caribbean
+perhaps I should say, seeming very near, so near I almost fancied
+I could have thrown a stone to where it began and stretched away
+up to the bluish horizon, while the entrance to the canal where
+soon great ships will enter poked its way inland to the locks
+beside us. Across the tree-tops of the flat jungle, also seeming
+close at hand though the railroad takes seven miles--and thirty-
+five cents if you are no employee--to reach it, was Colon, the
+tops of whose low buildings were plainly visible above the
+vegetation. Not many "Zoners," I reflected, catch their first view
+of Colon from the veranda of the Administration Building at Gatun.
+
+We had arrived with time to spare. Fully an hour we loafed and
+yarned and smoked before a whistle blew and long lines of little
+figures began to come up out of the depths and zigzag across the
+landscape until soon a 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 sides of the veranda, its tail serpentining
+off down the hillside and away nearly to the edge of the mammoth
+locks. Packs of the yellow cards of Cristobal district in hand--a
+relief to eyes that had been staring for days at the pink ones of
+Empire--we lined up like birds of prey just beyond the windows. As
+the first laborer passed this, one--nay, several of us pounced
+upon him, for all plans we had laid to line up and take turns were
+thus quickly overthrown and wild competition soon reigned. From
+then on each dived in to snatch his prey and, dragging him to the
+nearest free space, began in some language or other: "Where d'ye
+live?"
+
+That was the overwhelming problem,--in what language to address
+each victim. Barter, speaking only his nasal New Jersey, took to
+picking out negroes, and even then often turned away in disgust
+when he landed a Martinique or a Haytian. West Indian "English"
+alternated with a black patois that smelt at times faintly of
+French, muscular, bullet-headed negroes appeared slowly and
+laboriously counting their money in their hats, eagle-nosed
+Spaniards under the boina of the Pyrenees, Spaniards from Castile
+speaking like a gatling-gun in action, now and again even a
+snappy-eyed Andalusian with his s-less slurred speech, slow,
+laborious Gallegos, Italians and Portuguese in numbers, Colombians
+of nondescript color, a Slovak who spoke some German, a man from
+Palestine with a mixture of French and Arabic noises I could guess
+at, and scattered here and there among the others a Turk who
+jabbered the lingua franca of Mediterranean ports. I "got" all who
+fell into my hands. Once I dragged forth a Hindu, and shuddered
+with fear of a first failure. But he knew a bit of a strange
+English and I found I recalled six or seven words of my forgotten
+Hindustanee.
+
+Then suddenly a flood of Greeks broke upon us, growing deeper with
+every moment. Above the pandemonium my companions were howling
+hoarsely and imploringly for the interpreter, while clutching
+their trembling victim by the slack of his labor-stained shirt
+lest he escape un-enrolled. The interpreter, in accordance with a
+well-known law of physics and the limitations of human nature,
+could not be in sixteen places at once. I crowded close, caught
+his words, memorized the few questions, and there was I with my
+"Poomaynes?" "Poseeton?" and "Padremaynos?" enrolling Greeks
+unassisted, not only that but haughtily acting as interpreter for
+my fellows--not only without having studied the tongue of Achilles
+but never even having graced a Greek letter fraternity.
+
+Quick tropical twilight descended, and still the labor-smeared
+line wound away out of sight into the darkness, still workmen of
+every shade and tongue jingled their brass-checks timidly on the
+edge of the pay-window, from behind which came roaring noises that
+the Americans within fancied Spaniards, or Greeks, or Roumanians
+must understand because they were not English noises; still we
+pounced upon the paid as upon 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 up
+between a thumb and forefinger and dropping us over the veranda
+railing. For our attack lacked somewhat in gentle courtesy,
+notably so that of "the Rowdy." He was a chestless youth of the
+type that has grown so painfully prevalent in our land since the
+soft-hearted abolishment of the beech-rod of revered memory; of
+that all too familiar type whose proofs of manhood are cigarettes
+and impudence and discordant noise, and whose national superiority
+is demonstrated by the maltreating of all other races. But the
+enrolled were all, black, white, or mixed, far more gentlemen than
+we. Some, of brief Zone experience, were sheepish with fear and
+the wonder as to what new mandate this incomprehensible U. S. was
+perpetrating to match its strange sanitary laws that forbade a man
+even to be uncleanly in his habits, after the good old sacred
+right of his ancestors to remotest ages. Then, too, there was a
+Zone policeman in dressy, new-starched khaki treading with
+dangling club and the icy-eye of public appearance, waiting all
+too eagerly for some one to "start something." But the great
+percentage of the maltreated multitude were "Old Timers," men of
+four or five years of digging who had learned to know this strange
+creature, the American, and the world, too; who smiled indulgently
+down upon our yelping and yanking like a St. Bernard above the
+snapping puppy he well knows cannot seriously bite him.
+
+Dense black night had fallen. Here and there lanterns were hung,
+under one of which we dragged each captive. The last passenger
+back to Empire roared away into the jungle night; still we
+scribbled on, "backed" a yellow card and dived again into the
+muscular whirlpool to emerge dragging forth by the collar a Greek,
+a Pole, or a West Indian. It was like business competition, in
+which I had an unfair advantage, being able to understand any
+jargon in evidence. When at last the pay-windows came down with a
+bang and an American curse, and the serpentining tail squirmed for
+a time in distress and died away, as a snake's tail dies after
+sundown, I turned in more than a hundred cards. To-morrow the tail
+would revive to form the nucleus of a new serpent, and we should
+return by the afternoon train to the lock city, and so on for
+several days to come.
+
+It was after nine of a black pay-day night. We were hungry. "The
+Rowdy," familiar with the lay of the land, volunteered to lead the
+foraging expedition. We stumbled down the hill and away along the
+railroad. A faint rumbling that grew to a confused roar fell on
+our ears. We climbed a bank into a wild conglomeration of wood and
+tin architecture, nationalities, colors, and noises, and across a
+dark, bottomless gully from the high street we had reached lights
+flashed amid a very ocean of uproar. "The Rowdy," as if to make
+the campaign as real as possible, led us racing down into the
+black abyss, whence we charged up the further slope and came
+sweating and breathless into the rampant rough and tumble of pay-
+day night in New Gatun, the time and place that is the vortex of
+trouble on the Isthmus. Merely a short street of one of the half-
+dozen Zone towns in which liquor licenses are granted, lined with
+a few saloons and pool-rooms; but such a singing, howling,
+swarming multitude as is rivaled almost nowhere else, except it be
+on Broadway at the passing of the old year. But this mob,
+moreover, was fully seventy percent black, and rather largely
+French--and when black and French and strong drink mix, trouble
+sprouts like jungle seeds. Now and then Policeman G----drifted by
+through the uproar, holding his "sap" loosely as for ready use and
+often half consciously hitching the heavy No. 38 "Colt" under his
+khaki jacket a bit nearer the grasp of his right hand. I little
+knew how familiar every corner of this scene would one day be to
+me.
+
+A Chinese grocer sold us bread and cheese. Down on the further
+corner of the hubbub we entered a Spanish saloon and spread
+ourselves over the "white" bar, adding beer to our humble
+collation. Beyond the lattice-work that is the "color line" in
+Zone dispensaries, West Indians were dancing wild, crowded "hoe-
+downs" and "shuffles" amid much howling and more liquidation; on
+our side a few Spanish laborers quietly sipped their liquor. The
+Marines of course were "busted." The rest of us scraped up a few
+odd "Spigoty" dimes. The Spanish bar-tender--who is never the
+"tough" his American counterpart strives to show himself--but
+merely a cheery good-fellow--drifted into our conversation, and
+when we found I had slept in his native village he would have it
+that we accept a round of Valdepenas. Which must have been potent,
+for it moved "Scotty" to unbutton an inner pocket and set up an
+entire bottle of amontillado. So midnight was no great space off
+when we turned out again into the howling night and, having helped
+Renson to reach a sleeping-place, scattered to the bachelor
+quarters that had been found for us and lay down for the few hours
+that remained before the 5:51 should carry us back to Empire.
+
+At last I had crossed all the Isthmus and heard the wash of the
+Caribbean at my feet. It was the Sunday following our Gatun days,
+and nearly a month since my landing on the Zone. The morning train
+from Empire left me at the lake-side city for a run over locks and
+dam which the working days had not allowed, and there being no
+other train for hours I set off along the railroad to walk the
+seven miles to Colon. On either side lay hot, rampant jungle, low
+and almost swampy. It was noon when 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
+of waves at the very edge of its windows, and a far-reaching view
+of the Caribbean where the ceaseless Zone breeze is born. There
+stands the famous statue of Columbus protecting the Indian maid,
+crude humor in bronze; for Columbus brought Indian maids anything
+but protection. Near at hand in the joyous tropical sunshine lay a
+great steamer that in another week would be back in New York tying
+up in sleet and ice. A western 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
+than between Ancon and Panama. A khaki-clad Zone policeman patrols
+one sidewalk, a black one in the sweltering dark blue uniform and
+heavy wintry helmet of the Republic of Panama lounges on the other
+side of a certain street; on one side are the "enumerated" tags of
+the census, on the other none. Cross the street and you feel at
+once a foreigner. It is distinctly unlawful to sell liquor on
+Sunday or to gamble at any time on the Canal Zone; it is therefore
+with something approaching a shock that one finds everything "wide
+open" and raging just across the street.
+
+I wandered out past "Highball's" merry-go-round, where huge negro
+bucks were laughing and playing and riding away their month's pay
+on the wooden horses like the children they are, and so on to the
+edge of the sea. Unlike Panama, Colon is flat and square-blocked,
+as it is considerably darker in complexion with its large mixture
+of negroes from the Caribbean shores and islands. Uncle Sam seems
+to have taken the city's fine beach away from her. But then, she
+probably never took any other advantage of it than to turn it into
+a garbage heap as bad as once was Bottle Alley. On one end is a
+cement swimming pool with the announcement, "Only for gold
+employees of the I. C. C. or P. R. R. and guests of Washington
+Hotel." It is merely a softer way of saying, "Only white 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" where the negroes must be content with second-hand
+breezes. Some of the costs of the canal are here,--sturdy black
+men in a sort of bed-tick pajamas sitting 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 hopelessly ruined in body early
+in life for helping to dig a ditch for a foreign power that,
+however well it may treat you materially, cares not a whistle-
+blast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotives rusting
+away in the jungle.
+
+Under the beautiful royal palms beyond, all bent inland in the
+constant breeze are park benches where one can sit with the
+Atlantic spreading away to infinity before, breaking with its
+ages-old, mysterious roll on the shore just as it did before the
+European's white sails first broke the gleaming skyline. Out to
+sea runs the growing breakwater from Toro Point, the great
+wireless tower, yet just across the bay on a little jutting,
+dense-grown tongue of land is the jungle hut of a jungle family as
+utterly untouched by civilization as was the verdant valley of
+Typee on the day Melville and Toby came stumbling down into it
+from the hills above.
+
+But meanwhile I was not getting the long hours of unbroken sleep
+the heavy mental toil of enumeration requires. Free government
+bachelor quarters makes strange bed-fellows--or at least room-
+fellows. Quartermasters, like justice, are hopelessly blind or I
+might have been assigned quarters upon the financial knoll where
+habits and hours were a bit more in keeping with my own. But a
+bachelor is a bachelor on the Zone, and though he be clerk to his
+highness "the Colonel" himself he may find himself carelessly
+tossed into a "rough-neck" brotherhood.
+
+House 47 was distinctly an abode of "rough-necks." A "rough-neck,"
+it may be essential to explain to those who never ate at the same
+table with one, is a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed,
+cast-iron fellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, rock-tearing
+steam-shovel all day, wrestle the night through with various
+starred Hennessey and its rivals, and continue that round
+indefinitely without once failing to turn up to straddle his beam
+in the morning. He seems to have been created 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 way branched
+off from yours for a few hours, when bed-time or a mood for quiet
+musing comes. He is a man you are glad to meet in a saloon--if you
+are in a mood to be there--or tearing away at the cliffs of
+Culebra; but there are other places where he does not seem exactly
+to fit into the landscape.
+
+House 47, I say, was a house of "rough-necks." That fact became
+particularly evident soon after supper, when the seven phonographs
+were striking up their seven kinds of ragtime on seven sides of
+us; and it was the small hours before the poker games, carried on
+in much the same spirit 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 was four-thirty; and a jarring
+chorus of alarm-clocks wrought new upheaval.
+
+Then there was each individual annoyance. Let me barely mention
+two or three. Of my room-mates, "Mitch" had sat at a locomotive
+throttle fourteen years in the States and Mexico, besides the four
+years he had been hauling dirt out of the "cut." Youthful ambition
+"Mitch" had left behind, for though he could still look forward to
+forty, railroad rules had so changed in the States during his
+absence that he would have had to learn his trade over again to be
+able to "run" there. Moreover four years on the Zone does not make
+a man look forward with pleasure to a States winter. So "Mitch,"
+like many another "Zoner," was planning to buy with the savings of
+his $210 a month "when the job is done" a chunk of land on some
+sunny slope of a southern state and settle down for an easy
+descent through old age. There was nothing objectionable about
+"Mitch"--except perhaps his preference for late-hour poker. But he
+had a way of stopping with one leg out of his trousers when at
+last all the house had calmed down and cots were ceasing to creak,
+to make some such wholly irrelevant remark as; "By----, that----
+dispatcher give me 609 to-day and she wouldn't pull a greased
+string out of a knot-hole"--and thereby always hung a tale that
+was sure to range over half the track mileage of the States and
+wander off somewhere into the sandy cactus wilderness of Chihuahua
+at least before "Mitch" succeeded in getting out of the other
+trouser leg.
+
+The cot directly across from my own groaned--occasionally--under
+the coarse-grained bulk of Tom. Tom was a "rough-neck" par
+excellence, so much so that even in a houseful of them he was
+known as "Tom the Rough-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 with his head down just before the
+estoque; and when he neglected to button his undershirt--a not
+infrequent oversight--he displayed the hairy chest of a mammoth
+gorilla.
+
+Tom's philosophy of getting through life was exactly the same as
+his philosophy of getting through a rocky hillside with his steam-
+shovel. When it came to argument Tom was invariably right; not
+that he was over-supplied with logic, but because he possessed a
+voice and the bellows to work it that could rise to the roar of
+his own steam-shovel on those weeks when he chose to enter the
+shovel competition, and would have utterly overthrown, drowned
+out, and annihilated James Stewart Mill himself.
+
+Tom always should have had money, for your "rough-neck" on the
+Zone has decidedly the advantage over the white-collared college
+graduate when the 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
+and about his cot. Then it turned out that he was not dead, but in
+Ancon hospital taking the Keeley cure; and one summer evening he
+blew in again, his "cure" effected--with a bottle in his coat
+pocket and two inside his vest. So the next day there was Tom
+celebrating his recovery all over House 47 and when next morning
+he did finally go back to his shovel there were scattered about
+the room six empty quart bottles each labeled "whiskey." Luckily
+Tom ran a shovel instead of a passenger train and could claw away
+at his hillside as savagely as he chose without 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,"
+for instance. "Shorty" was a jolly, ugly open-handed, four-eyed
+little snipe of a roughneck machinist who had lost "in the line of
+duty" two fingers highly useful in his trade. In consequence he
+was now, after the generous fashion of the I.C.C., on full pay for
+a year without work, providing he did not leave the Zone. And
+while "Shorty," like the great majority of us, was a very
+tolerable member of society under the ordinary 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 is really only one unfailing one. That is slid in glass
+receptacles across a yellow varnished counter down on Railroad
+Avenue opposite Empire Machine Shops. So it happened that "Shorty"
+was gradually winning the title of a thirty-third degree "booze-
+fighter," and passengers on any afternoon train who took the
+trouble to glance in at a wide-open door just Atlanticward of the
+station might have beheld him with his back to the track and one
+foot slightly raised and resting lightly and with the nonchalance
+of long practice on a gas-pipe that had missed its legitimate
+mission. In fact "Shorty" had come to that point where he would
+rather be caught in church than found dead without a bottle on
+him, and arriving home overflowing with joy about midnight slept
+away most of the day in 47 that he might spend as much of the
+night as the early closing laws of the Zone permitted at the
+amusement headquarters of Empire.
+
+With these few hints of the life that raged beneath the roof of 47
+it may perhaps be comprehensible, without going into detail, why I
+came to contemplate a change of quarters. I detest a kicker. I
+have small use for any but the man who will take his allotted
+share with the rest of the world without either whining or
+snarling. Yet when an official government census enumerator falls
+asleep on the edge of a tenement washtub with a question dead on
+his lips, or solemnly sets down a crow-black Jamaican as "white,"
+it is Uncle Sam who is suffering and time for correction.
+
+But it is one thing for a Canal Zone employee to resolve to move,
+and quite another to carry out that resolution. Nero was a meek,
+unassertive, submissive, tractable little chap, keenly sensible to
+the sufferings of his fellows, compared with a Zone quartermaster.
+So the first time I ventured to push open the screen door next to
+the post office I was grateful to escape unmaimed. But at last,
+when I had done a whole month's penance in 47, I resorted to
+strategy. On March first I entered the dreaded precinct shielded
+behind "the boss" with his contagious smile, and the musical
+quartermaster of Empire was overthrown and defeated, and I marched
+forth clutching in one hand a new "assignment to quarters."
+
+That night I moved. The new, or more properly the older, room was
+in House 35, a one-story building of the old French type, many of
+which the Americans revamped upon taking possession of the
+Isthmian junk-heap, across and a bit down the graveled street. It
+was a single room, with no roommate to question, which I might
+decorate and otherwise embellish according to my own personal
+idiosyncrasies. At the back, with a door between, dwelt the
+superintendent of the Zone telephone 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 absurdly
+commonplace. Commonplace? Not a bit of it. He was a champion, an
+artist in his specialty. How can I have used that word in
+connection with his incomparable performance? Or attempt to give a
+hint of life on the Canal Zone without mentioning the most
+conspicuous factor in it?
+
+He lived in the next room south, a half-inch wooden partition
+reaching half-way to the ceiling between his pillow and mine. By
+day he lay on his back in the right hand seat of a locomotive cab
+with his hand on the throttle and the soles of his shoes on the
+boiler plate--he was just long enough to fit into that position
+without wrinkling. During the early evening he lay on his back in
+a stout Mission rocking-chair on the front porch of House 35,
+Empire, C.Z. And about 8 P. M. daily he retired within to lie on
+his back on a regulation I.C.C. metal cot--they are stoutly built
+--one pine half-inch from my own. Obviously twenty-four hours a day
+of such onerous occupation had left some slight effects on his
+figure. His shape was strikingly similar to that of a push-ball.
+Had he fallen down at the top of Ancon or Balboa hill it would
+have been an even bet whether he would have rolled down sidewise
+or endwise--if his general type of build and specifications will
+permit any such distinction.
+
+When I first came upon him, reposing serenely in the porch
+rocking-chair on the cushion that upholstered his spinal column, I
+was pleased. Clearly he was no "rough-neck"--he couldn't have been
+and kept his figure. There was no question but that he was
+perfectly harmless; his stories ought to prove cheerful and laugh-
+provoking and kindly. His very presence seemed to promise to raise
+several degrees the merriment in that corner of House 85.
+
+It did. Toward eight, as I have hinted, he transferred from
+rocking-chair to cot. He was not afflicted with troublesome
+nerves. At times he was an entire minute in falling asleep.
+Usually, however, his time was something under the half; and he
+slept with the innocent, undisturbed sleep of a babe for at least
+twelve unbroken hours, unless the necessity of getting across the
+"cut" to his engine absolutely prohibited. Just there was the
+trouble. His first gentle, slumberous breath sounded like a small
+boy sliding down the sheet-iron roof of 35. His second resembled a
+force of carpenters tearing out the half-grown partitions. His
+third--but mere words are an absurdity. At times the noises from
+his gorilla-like throat softened down till one merely fancied
+himself in the hog-corral of a Chicago stockyards; at others we
+prayed that we might at once be transferred there. A thousand
+times during the night we were certain he was on the very point of
+choking to death, and sat up in bed praying he wouldn't, and
+offering our month's salary to charity if he would; and through
+all our fatiguing anguish he snorted undisturbedly on. In House 35
+he was known as "the Sloth." It was a gentle and kindly title.
+
+There were a few inexperienced inmates who had not yet utterly
+given up hope. The long hours of the night were spent in solemn
+conference. Pounding on the walls with hammers, chairs, and shoe-
+heels was like singing a lullaby. One genius invented a species of
+foghorn which proved very effective--in waking up all Empire east
+of the tracks, except "the Sloth." Some took to dropping their
+heavier and more dispensable possessions over the partition. One
+memorable night a fellow-sufferer cast over a young dry-goods box
+which, bouncing from the snorer's figure to the floor, caused him
+to lose a beat--one; and the feat is still one of the proud
+memories of 35. On Sundays when all the rest of the world was up
+and shaved and breakfasted and off on the 8:39 of a brilliant,
+sunny day to Panama, "the Sloth" would be still imperturbably
+snorting and choking in the depths of his cot. And in the evening,
+as the train roamed back through the fresh cool jungle dusk and
+deposited us at Empire station, and we crossed the wooden bridge
+before the hotel and began to climb the graveled path behind,
+hoping against hope that we might find crape on that door, from
+the night ahead would break on our cars a sound as of a
+hippopotamus struggling wildly against going down for the third
+and last time.
+
+Most annoying of all, "the Sloth" was not even a bona fide
+bachelor. He proudly announced that, though he was a model of
+marital virtue, he had not lived with his wife in many years. I
+never heard a man who knew him by night ask why. It was close upon
+criminal negligence on the part of the I.C.C. to overlook its
+opportunity in this matter. There were so many, many uninhabited
+hilltops on the Zone where a private Sloth-dwelling might have
+been slapped together from the remains of falling towns at Gatun
+end; near it a grandstand might even have been erected and
+admission charged. Or at least the daily climb to it would have
+helped to reduce a push-ball figure, and thereby have improved the
+general appearance of the Canal Zone force.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+One morning early in March "the boss" and I crossed the suspension
+bridge over the canal. A handcar and six husky negroes awaited us,
+and we were soon bumping away over temporary spurs through the
+jungle, to strike at length the "relocation" opposite the giant
+tree near Bas Obispo that marked the northern limit of our
+district.
+
+The P.R.R., you will recall, has been operating across the Isthmus
+since 1855. When the United States took over the Zone in 1904 it
+built a new double-tracked line of five-foot gauge for nearly the
+whole forty-seven miles. Much of this, however, runs through
+territory soon to be covered by Gatun Lake, nearly all the rest of
+it is on the wrong side of the canal. An almost entirely new line,
+therefore, is being built through the virgin jungle on the South
+American side of the canal, which is to be the permanent line and
+is known in Zone parlance as the "relocation." This is forty-nine
+miles in length from Panama to Colon, and is single track only, as
+freight traffic especially is expected, very naturally, to be
+lighter after the canal is opened. Already that portion from the
+Chagres to the Atlantic had been put in use--on February
+fifteenth, to be exact; and the time was not far off when the
+section within our district--from Gamboa to Pedro Miguel--would
+also be in operation.
+
+That portion runs through the wilderness a mile or more back from
+the canal, through jungled hills so dense with vegetation one
+could only make one's way through it with the ubiquitous machete
+of the native jungle-dweller, except where tiny trails appear that
+lead to squatters' thatched huts thrown together of tin, dynamite
+and dry-goods boxes and jungle reeds in little scattered patches
+of clearing. Some of these hills 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 of earth more or less is of
+slight importance. All else is virtually impenetrable jungle.
+Travelers by rail across the Isthmus, as no doubt many ships'
+passengers will be in the years to come while their steamer is
+being slowly raised and lowered to and from the eighty-five-foot
+lake, 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 they return to the present line at Pedro Miguel station. But
+in compensation they will see some wondrous jungle scenery,--a
+tangled tropical wilderness with great masses of bush flowers of
+brilliant hues, gigantic ferns, countless palm and banana trees,
+wonderfully slender arrow-straight trees rising smooth and
+branchless more than a hundred feet to end in an immense bouquet
+of brilliant purplish-hue blossoms.
+
+"The boss" barely noticed these things. One quickly grows
+accustomed to them. Why, Americans who have been down on the Zone
+for a year don't know there's a palm-tree on the Isthmus--or at
+least they do not remember there were no palm-trees in Keokuk,
+Iowa, when they left there.
+
+Along this new-graveled line, still unused except by work-trains,
+we rode in our six negro-power car, dropping off in the gravel
+each time we caught sight of any species of human being. Every
+little way was a gang, averaging some thirty men, distinct in
+nationality,--Antiguans shoveling gravel, Martiniques snarling and
+quarreling as they wallowed thigh-deep in swamps and pools, a
+company of Greeks unloading train-loads of ties, Spaniards
+leisurely but steadily grading and surfacing, track bands of
+"Spigoties" chopping away the aggressive jungle 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-boy dozing under the bit of shelter he had rigged up of
+jungle ferns, frightening many a black laborer speechless as we
+pounced upon him emerging from his "soldiering" in the jungle;
+occasionally even a native bushman on his way to market from his
+palm-thatched home generations old back in the bush, who has
+scarcely noticed yet that the canal is being dug, fell into our
+hands and was inexorably set down in spite of all protest unless
+he could prove beyond question that he had already been "taken" or
+lived beyond the Zone line.
+
+Thus we scribbled incessantly on, even through the noon hour,
+dragging gangs one by one away from their tasks, shaking laborers
+out of the brief after-lunch siesta in a patch of shade. "The
+boss" was hampered by having only two languages where ten were
+needed. In the early afternoon 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 of the rainy season, a sudden
+tropical downpour that ran in rivulets down across the pink card-
+boards and my victims. Yet strange to note, the writing of the
+medium soft pencil remained as clear and unsmudged as in the
+driest weather, and so clean a rain was it that it did not even
+soil my white cotton shirt. I continued unheeding, only to note
+with surprise a few minutes later that the sun was shining on the
+dense green jungle about me as brilliantly as ever and that I was
+dry again as when I had set out in the morning.
+
+"The boss" returned, and when I had eaten the crackers and the
+bottle of pink lemonade he brought, we pushed on toward the
+Pacific. Till at length in mid-afternoon we came to the top of the
+descent to Pedro Miguel and knew that the end of our district was
+at hand. So powerful was the breeze from the Atlantic that our six
+man-power engine sweated profusely as they toiled against it, even
+on the downgrade of the return to Empire.
+
+To "Scotty" had been assigned my Empire "recalls" and I had been
+given a 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. But there is the temporary bridge over the canal which
+few engineers venture to "snake her across" at any great speed,
+and the enumerator housed in Empire need not even be a graduate
+"hobo" to be able to drop off there a bit after seven in the
+morning and prance away up the chamois path into the town.
+
+Wherever on the Zone you espy a town of two-story skeleton
+screened buildings scattered over hills, with winding gravel roads
+and trees and flowers 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 the best-intentioned factory town. There are
+hints that the builders have heard somewhere of the science of
+landscape gardening. At times these same houses are deceiving, for
+all I. C. C. buildings bear a strong family resemblance, and it is
+only at the door that you know whether it is 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
+accustomed paraphernalia of I. C. C. hotel and commissary,
+hospital and police station, all ruled over and held in check by
+the famous "Colonel" in command of the latter. Moreover Paraiso
+will some day come again into her own, when the "relocation" opens
+and brings her back on the main line, while proud Culebra and
+haughty Empire, stranded on a railless shore of the canal, will
+wither and waste away and even their broad macadamed roads will
+sink beneath a second-growth jungle.
+
+Renson had come to lend assistance. He set to work among the negro
+cabins, the upper gallery seats of Paraiso's amphitheater of
+hills, for Renson had been a free agent for more than a month now
+and was not exactly in a condition to interview American
+housewives. My own task began down at the row of inhabited box-
+cars, and so on through shacks and tenements with many Spanish
+laborers' wives. Then toward noon the labor-train screamed in,
+with two "gold" coaches and many open cattle-cars with long
+benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six hundred men in the
+six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood through a
+suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused and shrieked
+away again.
+
+Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds
+of sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-
+mell around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough
+and tumble food--yet so different from the old French catch as
+catch can days when each man owned his black pot and toiled all
+through the noon-hour to cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We
+jotted them down at express speed, with changes of tongue so
+abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and in the place where
+our minds should have been sounded only a confused chaotic uproar
+like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot dictionary. Then
+suddenly I landed a Russian! It was the final straw. I like to
+speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting to
+talk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating "French" of
+Martinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I
+will NOT run the risk of talking Russian. It was the second and
+last case during my census days when I was forced to call for
+interpretative assistance.
+
+At best we caught only a small percentage at each table before the
+crowd had wolfed and melted away. An odd half dozen more, perhaps,
+we found stretched out in the shade under the mess-hall and
+neighboring quarters before the imperative screech of the labor-
+train whistle ended a scene that must be several times repeated,
+and now left us silent and alone, 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 of words in the back of our heads
+had each climbed again to its proper shelf.
+
+Speaking of white bachelor quarters, therein lay the enumerator's
+greatest problem. The Spaniard or the Jamaican is in nine cases
+out of ten fluently familiar with his companion's antecedents and
+pedigree. He can generally furnish all the information the census
+department calls for. But it is quite otherwise with the American
+bachelor. He may know his room-mate's exact degree of skill at
+poker, he probably knows his private opinion of "the Colonel," he
+is sure to know his degree of enmity to the prohibition movement;
+but he is not at all certain to know his name and rarely indeed
+has he the shadow of a notion when and in 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 off into the
+jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for him for a
+week. Especially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage of
+"Zoners," with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating
+wherever the job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of
+our past in our own heads only. No wanderer of experience would
+dream of asking his fellow where he came from. The answer would be
+too apt to be, "from the last place." So difficult did this matter
+become that I gave up rushing for the bus to Pedro Miguel each
+evening and the even more distressing necessity of catching that
+premature 6:30 train each morning in Empire and, packing a sheet
+and pillow and tooth-brush, moved down to Paraiso that I might
+spend the first half of the night in quest of these elusive bits
+of bachelor information.
+
+Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued unabated. I had my first
+experience enumerating "gold" married quarters--white American
+families; just enough for experience and not enough to suffer
+severely. The enrolling of West Indians was pleasanter. The wives
+of locomotive engineers and steam-shovel cranemen were not
+infrequently supercilious ladies who resented being disturbed
+during their "social functions" and lacked the training in
+politeness of Jamaican "mammies." Living in Paradise now under a
+paternal all-providing government, they seemed to have forgotten
+the rolling-pin days of the past. It was here in Paraiso that I
+first encountered that strange, that wondrous strange custom of
+lying about one's age. Negro women never did. What more absurd,
+uncalled-for piece of dishonesty! Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs.
+Jones next door will succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit
+of information? Little does she know the long prison sentence at
+"hard labor" that stares me in the face for any such slip; to say
+nothing of my naturally incommunicative disposition. Or is she
+ashamed to let ME know the truth?--unaware that all such
+information goes in at my ears and down my pencil to the pink card
+before me like a message over the wires, leaving no more trace
+behind. Surely she must know that I care not a pencil-point
+whether she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor remember which one
+minute after her screen door has slammed behind me--unless she has
+caused me to glance up in wonder at her silvering temples of
+thirty-five when she simpers "twenty-two"--and to set her down as
+forty to be on the safe side. Oh now, please, ladies, do not
+understand me as accusing the American wives of Paraiso in general
+of this weakness. The large majority were quite pleasant, frank,
+and overflowing with cheery good sense. But the percentage who
+were not was far larger than I, who am 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
+one would have cited as an example of the best type of American,
+gave all data concerning himself in an unimpeachable manner. His
+wife was absent. When the question of her age arose he gave it,
+with the slightest catch in his voice, as twenty. Now that might
+be all very well. Men of thirty-two are occasionally so fortunate
+as to marry girls of twenty. But a moment later the gentleman in
+question finds himself announcing that his wife has been living on
+the Zone with him since 1907; and that she was born in New
+England! Thus is he tripped over his own clothes-line. For New
+England girls do not marry at fifteen; mother would not let them
+even if they would.
+
+I, too, had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescript
+cabins on the upper rim of Paraiso that seem on the very verge of
+pitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the
+jar of the next explosion, when one sunny mid-afternoon I caught
+sight of Renson dejectedly trudging down across what might be
+called the "Maiden" of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge-hall.
+I took leave of my ebony hostess and descended. Renson's troubles
+were indeed disheartening. Back in the jungled fringe of the town
+he had fallen into a swarm of Martiniques, and Renson's French
+being nothing more than an unstudied mixture of English and
+Spanish, he had not gathered much information. Moreover negro
+women from the French isles are enough to frighten any virtuous
+young Marine.
+
+"What's the sense o' me tryin' to chew the fat in French?" asked
+Renson, with tears in his voice. "I ain't in no condition to work
+at this census business any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed
+before three in the morning this week"--in his air was open
+suggestion that it was some one else's fault--"Some day I'll be
+gettin' in bad, too. This mornin' a fool nigger woman asked me if
+I didn't want her black pickaninny I was enumeratin', thinkin' it
+was a good joke. You know how these bush kids is runnin' around
+all over the country before a white man'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 by the 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
+had he been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he
+returned to the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out of
+cigarettes. I slipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes
+grew--for Renson was as tractable as a child, rightly treated--and
+set him to taking Jamaican tenements in the center of town, while
+I struck off into the jungled Martinique hills myself.
+
+There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a
+close. My first pay-day had already come and gone and I had
+strolled up the gravel walk one noon-day to the Disembursing
+Office with my yellow pay certificate duly initialed by the
+examiner of accounts, and was handed my first four twenty-dollar
+gold pieces--for hotel and commissary books sadly reduce a good
+paycheck. Already one evening I had entered the census office to
+find "the boss" just peeling off his sweat-dripping undershirt and
+dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a day mule-back on the
+thither side of the canal; an utterly fruitless day, for not only
+had he failed during eight hours of plunging through the
+wilderness to find a single hut not already decorated with the
+"enumerated" tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands on when
+the noon-hour overhauled him far from the ministrations of "Ben"
+and the breeze-swept veranda of Empire hotel.
+
+It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson's linguistic
+troubles that "the boss" came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy
+mule. In his eagerness to "clean up" the territory we fell to
+corraling negroes everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying
+their supplies at the commissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside
+trees, anywhere and everywhere, until at last in his excitement
+"the boss" let his medium soft pencil slip by the column for color
+and dashed down the abbreviation for "mixed" after the question,
+"Married or Single?" Which may have been near enough the truth of
+the case, but suggested it was time to quit. So we marked Paraiso
+"finished except for recalls" and returned to Empire.
+
+One by one our fellow-enumerators had dropped by the wayside, some
+by mutual agreement, some without any agreement whatever. Renson
+was now relieved from census duty, to his great joy, there
+remained but four of us,--"the boss" and "Mac" in the office,
+"Scotty" and I outside. A deep conference ensued and, as if I had
+not had good luck enough already, it was decided that we two
+should go through the "cut" itself. It was like offering us a
+salary to view all the Great Work in detail, for virtually all the
+excavation of any importance on the Zone lay within the confines
+of our district.
+
+So one day "Scotty" and I descended at the girderless railroad
+bridge and, taking each one side of the canal, set out to canvass
+its every nook and cranny. The canal as it then stood was about
+the width of two city blocks, an immense chasm piled and tumbled
+with broken rock and earth, in the center a ditch already filled
+with grimy water, on either side 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 by their fingernails
+all along its edge, and ahead in the abysmal, smoky distance the
+great channel gashed through Culebra mountain.
+
+The different levels varied from ten to twenty feet one above the
+other, each with a railroad on it, back and forth along which
+incessantly rumbled and screeched dirt-trains full or empty,
+halting before the steam-shovels, that shivered and spouted thick
+black smoke as they ate away the rocky hills and cast them in
+great giant handsful on the train of one-sided flat-cars that
+moved forward bit by bit at the flourish of the conductor's yellow
+flag. Steam-shovels that seemed human in all except their mammoth
+fearless strength tore up the solid rock with snorts of rage and
+the panting of industry, now and then flinging some troublesome,
+stubborn boulder angrily upon the cars. Yet they could be dainty
+as human fingers too, could pick up a railroad spike or push a
+rock gently an inch further across the car. Each was run by two
+white Americans, or at least what would prove such when they
+reached the shower-bath in their quarters--the craneman far out on
+the shovel arm, the engineer within the machine itself with a
+labyrinth of levers demanding his unbroken attention. Then there
+was of course a gang of negroes, firemen and the like, attached to
+each shovel.
+
+All the day through I climbed and scrambled back and forth between
+the different levels, dodging from one track to another and along
+the rocky floor of the canal, needing eyes and ears both in front
+and behind, not merely for trains but for a hundred hidden and
+unknown dangers to keep the nerves taut. Now and then a palatial
+motorcar, like some rail-road breed of taxi, sped by with its
+musical insistent jingling bells, usually with one of the
+countless parties of government guests or tourists in spotless
+white which the dry season brings. Dirt-trains kept the right of
+way, however, for the Work always comes first at Panama. Or it
+might be the famous "yellow car" itself with members of the
+Commission. Once it came all but empty and there dropped off
+inconspicuously a man in baggy duck trousers, a black alpaca coat
+of many wrinkles; and an unassuming straw hat, a white-haired man
+with blue--almost babyish blue-eyes, a cigarette dangling from his
+lips as he strolled about with restless yet quiet energy. There
+has been no flash and glitter of military uniforms on the Zone
+since the French sailed for home, but every one knew "the Colonel"
+for all that, the soldier who has never "seen service," who has
+never heard the shrapnel scream by overhead, yet to whom the world
+owes more thanks than six conquering generals rolled into one.
+
+Scores of "trypod" and "Star" drills, whole battalions of
+deafening machines run by compressed air brought from miles away,
+are pounding and grinding and jamming holes in the living rock.
+After them will presently come nonchalantly strolling along gangs
+of the ubiquitous black "powder-men" and carelessly throw down
+boxes of dynamite and pound 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 mighty explosions that twelve times a week
+set the porch chairs of every I.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
+must bellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire
+gamut of sound-waves surrounds and enfolds me, and with it all the
+powerful Atlantic breeze sweeps deafeningly through the channel.
+Down in the bottom of the canal if one step behind anything that
+shuts off the breeze it is tropically hot; yet up on the edge of
+the chasm above, the trees are always nodding and bowing before
+the ceaseless wind from off the Caribbean. Scores of "switcheros"
+drowse under their sheet-iron wigwams, erected not so much as
+protection from the sun, for the drowsers are mostly negroes and
+immune to that, as from young rocks that the dynamite blasts
+frequently toss a quarter-mile. Then over it all hang heavy clouds
+of soft-coal dust from trains and shovels, shifting down upon the
+black, white and mixed, and the enumerator alike; a dirty, noisy,
+perilous, enjoyable job.
+
+Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or three gangs working
+together at the same task. Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing
+gangs, dynamite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with
+shovel and pick and crowbar, gangs down on the floor of the canal,
+gangs far up the steep walls of cut rock, gangs stretching away in
+either direction till those far off look like upright bands of the
+leaf-cutting ants of Panamanian jungles; gangs nearly all,
+whatever their nationality, in the blue shirts and khaki trousers
+of the Zone commissary, giving a peculiar color scheme to all the
+scene.
+
+Now and then the boss is a stony-eyed American with a black cigar
+clamped between his teeth. More often he is of the same
+nationality as the workers, quite likely from the same town, who
+jabbers a little imitation English. Which is one of the reasons
+why a force of "time inspectors" is constantly dodging in and out
+over the job, time-book and pencil in hand, lest some fellow-
+townsman of the boss be earning his $1.50 a day under the shade of
+a tree back in the jungle. Here are Basques in their boinas,
+preferring their native "Euscarra" to Spanish; French "niggers"
+and English "niggers" whom it is to the interest of peace and
+order to keep as far apart as possible; occasionally a few
+sunburned blond men in a shovel gang, but they prove to be Teutons
+or Scandinavians; laborers of every color and degree--except
+American laborers, more than conspicuous by their absence. For the
+American negro is an untractable creature in large numbers, and
+the caste system that forbids white Americans from engaging in
+common labor side by side with negroes is to be expected in an
+enterprise of which the leaders are not only military men but
+largely southerners, however many may be shivering in the streets
+of Chicago or roaming hungrily through the byways of St. Louis. It
+is well so, perhaps. None of us who feels an affection for the
+Zone would wish to see its atmosphere lowered from what it is to
+the brutal depths of our railroad construction camps in the
+States.
+
+The attention of certain state legislatures might advantageously
+be called to the Zone Spaniard's drinking-cup. It is really a tin
+can on the end of a long stick, cover and all. The top is punched
+sieve-like that the water may enter as it is dipped in the bucket
+with which the water-boy strains along. In the bottom is a single
+small hole out of which spurts into the drinker's mouth a little
+stream of water as he holds it high above his head, as once he
+drank wine from his leather bota in far-off Spain. Many a Spanish
+gang comes entirely from the same town, notably Salamanca or
+Avila. I set them to staring and chattering by some simple remark
+about their birthplace: "Fine view from the Paseo del Rastro, eh?"
+"Does the puente romano still cross the river?" But I had soon to
+cease such personalities, for picks and shovels lay idle as long
+as I remained in sight and Uncle Sam was the loser.
+
+So many were the gangs that I advanced barely a half-mile during
+this first day and, lost in my work, forgot the hour until it was
+suddenly recalled by the insistent, strident tooting of whistles
+that forewarns the setting-off of the dynamite charges from the
+little red electric boxes 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, I worked my way gradually
+forward, while all the world about me was upheaving and spouting
+and belching forth to the heavens, as if I had been caught in the
+crater of a volcano as it suddenly erupted without warning. The
+history of Panama is strewn with "dynamite stories." Even the
+French had theirs in their sixteen per cent, of the excavation of
+Culebra; in American annals there is one for every week. Three
+days before, one of my Empire friends set off one afternoon for a
+stroll through the "cut" he had not seen for a year. In a retired
+spot he came upon 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 those apprehensive, over-cautious
+fellows so rare on the Zone. Without so much as taking his leave
+he set off at a run. Some two car-lengths beyond an explosion
+pitched him forward and all but lifted him off his feet. When he
+looked back the negroes had left. Indeed neither of them has
+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.
+One day he encountered a Jamaican carrying a box of dynamite on
+his head and, according to his custom, shouted:
+
+"Hey, boy! Had your census taken yet?"
+
+"What dat, boss?" cried the Jamaican with wide-open eyes, as he
+threw the 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
+into the "cut," burying under untold tons of earth and rock steam-
+shovels and railroads, "Star" and "trypod" drills, and all else in
+sight--except the "rough-necks," who are far too fast on their
+feet to be buried against their will. One by one I dragged shovel
+gangs away to a distance where my shouting could be heard, one by
+one I commanded drillmen to shut off their deafening machines, all
+day I dodged switching, snorting trains, clambered by steep rocky
+paths, or ladders from one level to another, howling above the
+roar of the "cut" the time-worn questions, straining my ear to
+catch the answer. Many a negro did not know the meaning of the
+word "census," and must have it explained to him in words of one
+syllable. Many a time I climbed to some lofty rock ledge lined
+with drills and, gesticulating like a semaphore in signal
+practice, caught at last the wandering attention of a negro, to
+shout sore-throated above the incessant pounding of machines 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 all
+seriousness. Why should not one census, like one baptism, suffice
+for a life-time? It was fortunate that enumerators were not
+accustomed to carry deadly weapons.
+
+Quick changes from negro to Spanish gangs demonstrated beyond all
+future question how much more native intelligence has the white
+man. Rarely did I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice, still
+less ask him to repeat the answer. His replies came back sharp and
+swift as a pelota from a cesta. West Indians not only must hear
+the question an average of three times but could seldom give the
+simplest information clearly enough to be intelligible, though
+ostensibly speaking English. A Spanish card one might fill out and
+be gone in less time than the negro could be roused from his
+racial torpor. Yet of the Spaniards on the Zone surely seventy per
+cent, were wholly illiterate, while the negroes from the British
+Weat Indies, thanks to their good fortune in being ruled over by
+the world's best colonist, could almost invariably read and write;
+many of those shoveling in the "cut" have been trained in
+trigonometry.
+
+Few are the "Zoners" now who do not consider the Spaniard the best
+workman ever imported in all the sixty-five years from the
+railroad surveying to the completion of the canal. The stocky,
+muscle-bound little fellows come no longer to America as
+conquistadores, but to shovel dirt. And yet more cheery, willing
+workers, more law-abiding subjects are scarcely to be found. It is
+unfortunate we could not have imported Spaniards for all the canal
+work; even they have naturally learned some "soldiering" from the
+example of lazy negroes who, where laborers 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 of
+Culebra's palm-crowned hill, steam-shovels approaching the summit
+in echelon, here and there an incipient earth and rock "slide"
+dribbling warningly down. He who still fancies the digging of the
+canal an ordinary task should have tramped with us through just
+our section, halting to speak to every man in it, climbing out of
+this man-made canon twice a day, a strenuous climb even near its
+ends, while at Culebra one looks up at all but unscalable mountain
+walls on either side.
+
+From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad that Americans are
+making light of catastrophies on the Isthmus, that they cover up
+their great disasters by a strict censorship of news. The latter
+is mere absurdity. As to catastrophies, a great "slide" or a
+premature dynamite explosion are serious disaster to Americans on
+the job just as they would be to Europeans. But whereas the
+continental European would sit down before the misfortune and
+weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on his hands, and
+pitches in to shovel the "slide" out again. He isn't belittling
+the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has got to be
+dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the
+Zone. Amid all the childish snarling of "Spigoties," the back-
+biting of Europe, the congressional wrangles, the Cabinet
+politics, the man on the job,--"the Colonel," the average
+American, the "rough-neck"--goes right on digging the canal day by
+day as if he had never heard a rumor of all this outside noise.
+
+Mighty is the job from one point of view; yet tiny from another.
+With all his enormous equipment, his peerless ingenuity, and his
+feverish activity all little man has succeeded in doing is to
+scratch a little surface wound in Mother Earth, cutting open a few
+superficial veins, of water, that trickle down the rocky face of
+the "cut."
+
+By March twelfth we had carried our task past and under Empire
+suspension bridge, and the end of the "cut" was almost in sight.
+That day 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." I slid down the face of government-made
+cliffs on the seat of my commissary breeches. I fought my way up
+again to stalk through long lines of men picking away at the dizzy
+edge of sheer precipices. I rolled down in the sand and rubble of
+what threatened to develop into "slides." I crawled under snorting
+steam-shovels to drag out besooted negroes--negroes so besooted I
+had to ask them their color--while dodging the gigantic swinging
+shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie" blasts and rocks of the
+size of drummers' trunks that spilled from it as it swung. I
+climbed up into the quivering monster itself to interrupt the
+engineer at his levers, to shout at the craneman on his beam. I
+sprang aboard every train that was not running at full speed,
+walking along the running-board into the cab; if not to "get" the
+engineer at least to gain new life from his private ice-water
+tank. I scrambled over tenders and quarter-miles of "Lidgerwood
+flats" piled high with broken rock and earth, to scream at the
+American conductor and his black brakemen, often to find myself,
+by the time I had set down one of them, carried entirely out of my
+district, to Pedro Miguel or beyond the Chagres, and have to "hit
+the grit" in "hobo" fashion and catch something back to the spot
+where I left off. In short I poked into every corner of the "cut"
+known to man, bawling in the November-first voice of a
+presidential candidate to everything in trousers:
+
+"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, I enrolled--just thirteen persons. It was then and there,
+though it still lacked an hour of noon, that I ceased to be a
+census enumerator. With slow and deliberate step I climbed out of
+the canal and across a pathed field 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 I
+enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were
+Jamaicans. Of the states Pennsylvania was best represented.
+Martinique negroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Panamanians were some
+eighty per cent illiterate; of some three hundred of the first
+only a half dozen even claimed to read and write; and non-wedlock
+was virtually universal among them.
+
+Rumor has it that there are seventy-two separate states and
+dependencies represented on the Isthmus. My own cards showed a few
+less. Most conspicuous absences, besides American negroes, were
+natives of Honduras, of four countries of South America, of most
+of Africa, and of entire Australia. That this was largely due to
+chance was shown by the fact that my fellow-enumerators found
+persons from all these countries.
+
+I had enrolled persons born in the following places: All the
+United States 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 Dutch Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and
+Chile, Cuba, Hayti and Santo Domingo, 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
+had worked 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's
+tellin' 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
+land after you were born?"
+
+"'Deed ah cahn't say, boss. T'ink it were one o' dem islands.
+Reckon ah's a subjec' o' de' worl', boss."
+
+Weeks afterward the population of Uncle Sam's ten by fifty-mile
+strip of tropics was found to have been on February first, 1912,
+62,810. No, anxious reader, I am not giving away inside
+information; the source of my remarks is the public prints. Of
+these about 25,000 were British subjects (West Indian negroes with
+very few exceptions). Of the entire population 37,428 were
+employed by the U. S. government. Of white Americans, of the
+Brahmin caste of the "gold" roll, there were employed on the Zone
+but 5,228,
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Police headquarters presented an unusual air of preoccupation next
+morning. In the corner office the telephone rang often and
+imperatively, several times erect figures in khaki and broad
+"Texas" hats flashed by the doorway, the drone of earnest
+conference sounded a few minutes, and the figures flashed as
+suddenly out again into the world. In the inner office I glanced
+once more in review through the "Rules and Regulations." The Zone,
+too, was now familiar ground, and as for the third requirement for
+a policeman--to know the Zone residents by sight--a strange face
+brought me a start of surprise, unless it beamed above the garb
+that shouted "tourist." Now all I needed was a few hours of
+conference and explanation on the duties, rights, and privileges
+of policemen; and that of course would come as soon as leisure
+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 out for."
+
+He thrust into my hands a slip of paper, from another direction
+there was tossed at me a new brass-check and "First-Class Private"
+police badge No. 88, and I was racing down through Ancon. In the
+meadow below the Tivoli I risked time to glance at the slip of
+paper. On it were the names of an ex-president and two ministers
+of a frowsy little South American republic during whose rule a
+former president and his henchmen had been brutally murdered by a
+popular uprising in the very capital itself.
+
+In the first-class coach I found Lieutenant Long, towering so far
+above all his surroundings as to have been easily recognized even
+had he not been in uniform. Beside him sat Corporal Castillo of
+the "plain-clothes" squad, a young man of forty, with a high
+forehead, a stubby black mustache, and a chin that was decisive
+without being aggressive.
+
+"Now here's the Captain's idea," explained the Lieutenant, as the
+train swung away around Ancon hill, "We'll have to take turns
+mounting guard over them, of course. I'll have to talk Spanish,
+and nobody'd have to look at Castillo more than once to know he
+was born up in some crack in the Andes."--Which was one of the
+Lieutenant's jokes, for the Corporal, though a Colombian, was as
+white, sharp-witted, and energetic as any American on the Zone.
+--"But no one to look at him would suspect that Fr--French, is
+it?"
+
+"Franck."
+
+"Oh, yes, that Franck could speak Spanish. We 'll do our best to
+inflate that impression, and when it comes your turn at guard-
+mount you can probably let several little things of interest drift
+in at your ears."
+
+"I left headquarters before the Captain had time to explain," I
+suggested.
+
+"Oh!" said the Lieutenant. "Well, here it is in a spectacle-case,
+as our friend Kipling would put it. We're on our way to Culebra
+Island. There are now in quarantine there three men who arrived
+yesterday from South 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 whose names you have there. Now we have a
+private inside hunch that the three already here have come up
+particularly and specifically to prepare for the funeral of the
+three who are arriving. Which is no hair off our brows, except
+it's up to us to see they don't pull off any little stunts of that
+kind on Zone territory."
+
+At least this police business was starting well; if this was a
+sample it would be a real job.
+
+The train had stopped and we were climbing the steps of Balboa
+police station; for without the co-operation of the "Admiral of
+the Pacific Fleet" we could not reach Culebra Island.
+
+"By the way, I suppose you're well armed?" asked the Lieutenant in
+his high querulous voice, as we drank a last round of ice-water
+preparatory to setting out again.
+
+"Em--I've got a fountain pen," I replied. "I haven't been a
+policeman twenty minutes yet, and I was appointed in a hurry."
+
+"Fine!" cried "the Admiral" sarcastically, snatching open the door
+of a closet beside the desk. "With a warm job like this on hand!
+You know what these South Americans are--" with a wink at the
+Lieutenant that was meant also for Castillo, who stood with his
+felt hat on the back of his head and a far-away look in his eyes.
+
+"Yah, mighty dangerous--around meal time," said the Corporal;
+though at the same time he drew from a hip pocket a worn leather
+holster containing a revolver, and examined it intently.
+
+Meanwhile "the Admiral" had handed me a massive No. 88 "Colt" with
+holster, a box of cartridges, and a belt that might easily have
+served as a horse's saddle-girth. When I had buckled it on under
+my coat the armament felt like a small boy clinging about my
+waist.
+
+We trooped on down a sort of railroad junction with a score of
+abandoned wooden houses. It was here I had first landed on the
+Zone one blazing Sunday nearly two months before and tramped away
+for some miles on a rusty sandy track along a canal already filled
+with water till a short jungle path led me into my first Zone
+town. Already that seemed ancient history.
+
+The police launch, manned by negro prisoners, with "the Admiral"
+in a cushioned arm-chair at the wheel, was soon scudding away
+across the sunlit harbor, the breakwater building of the spoil of
+Culebra "cut" on our left, ahead the cluster of small islands
+being torn to pieces for Uncle Sam's fortifications. The steamer
+being not yet sighted, we put in at Naos Island, where the bulky
+policeman in charge led us to dinner at the I. C. C. hotel, during
+which the noonday blasting on the Zone came dully across to us.
+Soon after we were landing at the cement sidewalk of the island--
+where I had been a prisoner for a day in January as my welcome to
+U. S. territory--and were being greeted by the pocket edition
+doctor and the bay-windowed German who had been my wardens on that
+occasion.
+
+We found the conspirators at a table in a corridor of the first-
+class quarantine station. In the words of Lieutenant Long "they
+fully looked the part," being of distinctly merciless cut of jib.
+They were roughly dressed and without collars, convincing proof of
+some nefarious design, for when the Latin-American entitled to
+wear them leaves off his white collar and his cane he must be
+desperate indeed.
+
+We "braced" them at once, marching down upon them as they were
+murmuring with heads together over a mass of typewritten sheets.
+The Corporal was delegated to inform them in his most urbane and
+hidalguezco Castilian that we were well acquainted with their
+errand and that we were come to frustrate by any legitimate means
+in our power the consummation of any such project on American
+territory. When the first paralyzed stare of astonishment that
+plans they had fancied locked in their own breasts were known to
+others had somewhat subsided, one of them assumed the
+spokesmanship. In just as courtly and superabundant language he
+replied that they were only too well aware of the inadvisability
+of carrying out any act against its sovereignty on U. S. soil;
+that so long as they were on American territory they would conduct
+themselves in a most circumspect and caballeroso manner--"but," he
+concluded, "in the most public street of Panama city the first
+time we 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 meant by that figure of speech.
+
+That was all very well, was our smiling and urbane reply, but to
+be on the safe side and merely as a matter of custom we were under
+the unfortunate necessity of requesting them to submit to the
+annoyance of having their baggage and persons examined with a view
+to discovering what weapons--
+
+"Como no senores? All the examination you desire." Which was
+exceedingly kind of them. Whereupon, when the Lieutenant had
+interpreted to me their permission, we fell upon them and amid
+countless expressions of mutual esteem gave them and their baggage
+such a "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 really intended to postpone their little affair until
+they reached Panama, or they had succeeded in concealing their
+weapons elsewhere.
+
+The doctor and his assistant were already being rowed out to the
+steamer that was to bring the victims. They were to be lodged in a
+room across the corridor from the conspirators, which corridor it
+would be our simple duty to patrol with a view to intercepting any
+exchange of stray lead. We fell to planning such division of the
+twenty-four hours as should give me the most talkative period. The
+Lieutenant took the trouble further to convince the trio of my
+total ignorance of Spanish by a distinct and elaborate
+explanation, in English, of the difference between the words
+"muchacho" and "muchacha." Then we wandered down past the grimy
+steerage station to the shore end of the little wharf to await the
+doctor and our proteges.
+
+The ocean breeze swept unhampered across the island; on its rocky
+shore sounded 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 us with another island, gradually drowning beneath its
+waters several rusty old hulls. A little rocky wooded isle to the
+left cut off the future entrance to the canal. Some miles away
+across the bay on the lower slope of a long hill drowsed the city
+of Panama in brilliant sunshine; and beyond, the hazy mountainous
+country stretched southwestward to be lost in the molten horizon.
+On a distant hill some Indian was burning off a patch of jungle to
+plant his corn.
+
+Meanwhile the Lieutenant and the Corporal had settled some
+Lombroso proposition and fallen to reciting poetry. The former,
+who was evidently a lover of melancholy, mouth-filling verse, was
+declaiming "The Raven" to the open sea. I listened in wonder. Was
+this then police talk? I had expected rough, untaught fellows
+whose conversation at best would be pornographic rather than
+poetic. My astonishment swelled to the bursting point when the
+Colombian not only caught up the poem where the Lieutenant left
+off but topped it off with that peerless translation 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 neighboring
+island. I tightened my horse belt and dragged the "Colt" around
+within easy reach; and a moment later the doctor and his bulking
+understudy stepped ashore--alone.
+
+"They didn't come," said the former; "they were not allowed to
+leave their 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
+been wantonly robbed of a long-promised holiday but who is
+determined not to make a scene over it. The Corporal seemed
+indifferent, and stood with the far-away look in his eyes as if he
+were already busy with some other plans or worries. But then, the
+Corporal was married. As for myself, I had somehow felt from the
+first that it was too good to be true. 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
+Hindu hair-cut. The water came spitting inboard now and then, and
+dejected silence reigned within the craft. But spirits gradually
+revived and before we could make out the details of the wharf the
+Corporal's hearty genuine laughter and the Lieutenant's rousing
+carcajada were again drifting across the water. At Balboa I
+unburdened myself of my shooting hardware and, catching the labor-
+train, was soon mounting the graveled walk to Ancon police
+station. In the second-story squad-room of the bungalow were eight
+beds. But there were more than enough policemen to go round, and
+the legal occupant of the bunk I fell asleep in returned from duty
+at midnight and I transferred to the still warm nest of a man on
+the "grave-yard" shift.
+
+"It's customary to put a man in uniform for a while first before
+assigning him to plain-clothes duty," the Inspector was saying
+next morning when I finished the oath of office that had been
+omitted in the haste of my appointment, "but we have waived that
+in your case because of the knowledge of the Zone the census must
+have given you."
+
+Thus casually was I robbed of the opportunity to display my manly
+form in uniform to tourists of trains and the Tivoli--tourists, I
+say, because the "Zoners" would never have noticed it. But we must
+all accept the decrees of fate.
+
+That was the full extent of the Inspector's remarks; no mention
+whatever of the sundry little points the recruit is anxious to be
+enlightened upon. In government jobs one learns those details by
+experience. For the time being there was nothing for me to do but
+to descend to the "gum-shoe" desk in Ancon station and sit in the
+swivel-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
+over in Panama that belongs up in Empire. Go over and tell the
+Chief you want Tal Fulano."
+
+I wormed my way through the fawning, neck-craning, many-shaded mob
+of political henchmen and obsequious petitioners into the sacred
+hushed precincts of Panama police headquarters. A paunched
+"Spigoty" with a shifty eye behind large bowed glasses, vainly
+striving to exude dignity and wisdom, received me with the oily
+smirk of the Panamanian office-holder who feels the painful
+necessity of keeping on outwardly good terms with all Americans. I
+flashed my badge and mentioned a name. A few moments later there
+was presented to me a sturdy, if somewhat flabby, young Spaniard
+carefully dressed and perfumed. We bowed like life-long
+acquaintances and, stepping down to the street, entered a cab. The
+prisoner, which he was now only in name, was a muscular fellow
+with whom I should have fared badly in personal combat. I was
+wholly unarmed, and in a foreign land. All those sundry little
+unexplained points of a policeman's duty were bubbling up within
+me. When the prisoner turned to remark it was a warm day should I
+warn him that anything he said would be used against him? When he
+ordered the driver to halt before the "Panazone" that he might
+speak to some friends should I fiercely countermand the order?
+What was my duty when the friends handed him some money and a
+package of cigars? Suppose he should start to follow his friends
+inside to have a drink--but he didn't. We drove languidly on down
+the avenue and up into Ancon, where I heaved a genuine sigh of
+relief as we crossed the unmarked street that made my badge good
+again. The prisoner was soon behind padlocks and the money and
+cigars in the station safe. These and him and the transfer card I
+took again with me into the foreign Republic in time for the
+evening train. But he seemed even more anxious than I to attract
+no attention, and once in Empire requested that we take the
+shortest and most inconspicuous route to the police station; and
+my responsibility was soon over.
+
+Many were the Z.P. facts I picked up during the next few days in
+the swivel-chair. The Zone Police force of 1912 consisted of a
+Chief of Police, an Assistant Chief, two Inspectors, four
+Lieutenants, eight sergeants, twenty corporals, one hundred and
+seventeen "first-class policemen," and one hundred and sixteen
+"policemen" (West Indian negroes without exception, though none
+but an American citizen could aspire to any white position); not
+to mention five clerks at headquarters, who are quite worth the
+mentioning. "Policemen" wore the same uniform as "first-class"
+officers, with khaki-covered helmet instead of "Texas" hat and
+canvas instead of leather leggings, drew one-half the pay of a
+white private, were not eligible for advancement, and with some
+few notable exceptions were noted for what they did know and the
+facility with which they could not learn. One Inspector was in
+charge of detective work and the other an overseer of the
+uniformed force. Each of the Lieutenants was in charge of one-
+fourth of the Zone with headquarters respectively at Ancon,
+Empire, Gorgona, and Cristobal, and the sub-stations within these
+districts in charge of sergeants, corporals, or experienced
+privates, according to importance.
+
+Years ago when things were yet in primeval chaos and the memorable
+sixth of February of 1904 was still well above the western horizon
+there was gathered together for the protection of the newly-born
+Canal Strip a band of "bad men" from our ferocious Southwest,
+warranted to feed on criminals each breakfast time, and in command
+of a man-eating rough-rider. But somehow the bad men seemed unable
+to transplant to this new and richer soil the banefulness that had
+thrived so successfully in the land of sage-brush and cactus. The
+gourmandizing promised to be chiefly at the criminal tables; and
+before long it was noted that the noxious gentlemen were gradually
+drifting back to their native sand dunes, and the rough-riding
+gave way to a more orderly style of horsemanship. Then bit by bit
+some men--just men without any qualifying adjective whatever--
+began to get mixed up in the matter; one after another army
+lieutenants were detailed to help the thing along, until by and by
+they got the right army lieutenant and the right men and the Z. P.
+grew to what it is to-day,--not the love, perhaps, but the 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
+broad and general high-way of being appointed in Washington and
+shipped down like a nice fresh vegetable in the original package
+and delivered just as it left the garden without the pollution of
+alien hands. Then there's the big, impressive, broad-shouldered
+fellow with some life and military service behind him, and the
+papers to prove it, who turns up on the Zone and can't help
+getting on if he takes the trouble to climb to headquarters. Or
+there are the special cases, like Marley for instance. Marley blew
+in one summer day from some uncharted point of the compass with
+nothing but his hat and a winning smile on his brassy features,
+and naturally soon drifted up the "Thousand Stairs." But Marley
+wasn't exactly of that manly build that takes "the Chief" and "the
+Captain" by storm; and there were suggestions on his young-old
+face that he had seen perhaps a trifle too much of life. So he
+wiped the sweat from his brow several times at the third-story
+landing only to find as often that the expected vacancy was not
+yet. Meanwhile the tropical days slipped idly by and Marley's
+"standin" with the owners of I. C. C. hotel-books began to strain
+and threaten to break away, and everything sort of gave up the
+ghost and died. Everything, that is, except the winning smile.
+'Til one afternoon with only that asset left Marley met the
+department head on the grass-bordered path in front of the
+Episcopal chapel, just where the long descent ends and a man
+begins to regain his tractable mood, and said Marley:
+
+"Say, looka here, Chief. It's a question of eats with me. We can't
+put this thing off much longer or--"
+
+Which is why that evening's train carried Marley, with a police
+badge and the little flat volume bound in imitation leather in his
+pocket, out to some substation commander along the line for the
+corporal in charge to break in and hammer down into that finished
+product, a Zone Policeman.
+
+Incidentally Marley also illustrated some months later one of the
+special ways of getting off the force. It was still simpler. Going
+"on pass" to Colon to spend a little evening, Marley neglected to
+leave his No. 38 behind in the squad-room, according to Z. P.
+rules. Which was careless of him. For when his spirits reached
+that stage where he recognized what sport it would be to see the
+"Spigoty" policemen of Bottle 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 be found on the rolls of the Z. P.
+But all this is sadly anticipating.
+
+Obviously, you will say, a force recruited from such dissimilar
+sources must be a thing of wide and sundry experience. And
+obviously you are right. Could a man catch up the Z. P. by the
+slack of the khaki riding breeches and shake out their stories as
+a giant in need of carfare might shake out their loose change,
+then might he retire to some sunny hillside of his own and build
+him a sound-proof house with a swimming pool and a revolving
+bookcase and a stable of riding horses, and cause to be erected on
+the front lawn a kneeling-place where publishers might come and
+bow down and beat their foreheads on the pavement.
+
+There are men in the Z. P. who in former years have played horse
+with the startled markets of great American cities; men whose
+voices will boom forth in the pulpit and whisper sage councils in
+the professional in years to come; men whom doting parents have
+sent to Harvard--on whom it failed to take, except on their
+clothes--men who have gone down into the Valley of the Shadow of
+Death and crawled on hands and knees through the brackish red brook
+that runs at the bottom and come out again smiling on the brink
+above. Careers more varied than Mexican sombreros one might hear
+in any Z. P. squad-room--were not the Z. P. so much more given to
+action than to autobiography.
+
+They bore little resemblance to what I had expected. My mental
+picture of an American policeman was that conglomerate average one
+unconsciously imbibes from a distant view of our city forces, and
+by comparison with foreign,--a heavy-footed, discourteous, half-
+fanatical, half-irreligious clubber whose wits are as slow as his
+judgment is honest. Instead of which I found the Z. P. composed
+almost without exception of good-hearted, well set up young
+Americans almost all of military training. I had anticipated, from
+other experiences, a constant bickering and a general striving to
+make life unendurable for a new-comer. Instead I was constantly
+surprised at the good fellowship that existed throughout the
+force. There were of course some healthy rivalries; there were no
+angels among them--or I should have fled the Isthmus much earlier;
+but for the most part the Z. P. resembled nothing so much as a big
+happy family. Above all I had expected early to make the
+acquaintance of "graft," that shifty-eyed monster which we who
+have lived in large American cities think of as sitting down to
+dinner with the force in every mess-hall. Graft? Why a Zone
+Policeman could not ride on a P. R. R. train in full uniform when
+off duty without paying his fare, though he was expected to make
+arrests if necessary and stop behind with his prisoner. Compared
+indeed with almost any other spot on the broad earth's surface
+"graft" eats slim meals on the Canal Zone.
+
+The average Zone Policeman would arrest his own brother--which is
+after all about the supreme test of good policehood. He is not a
+man who likes 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
+the jungle. He is of those who genuinely and frankly have no
+desire to become rich, and "successful," a lack of ambition that
+formal society cannot understand and fancies a weakness.
+
+I had still another police surprise during these swivel-chair
+days. I discovered there was on the Zone a yellow tailor who made
+Beau Brummel uniforms at $7.50, compared with which the $5 ready-
+made ones were mere clothes. All my life long I had been laboring
+under the delusion that a uniform is merely a uniform. But one
+lives and learns.
+
+There are few left, I suppose, who have not heard that gray-
+bearded story of the American in the Philippines who called his
+native servant and commanded:
+
+"Juan, va fetch the caballo from the prado and--and--oh, saddle
+and bridle 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 but
+strikingly typical. An American boss who had been much annoyed by
+unforeseen absences of his workmen pounced upon one of his
+Spaniards one morning crying:
+
+"When you know por la noche that you're not going to trabaja por
+la manana 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 a par with that in other U. S. possessions. Of the seven of us
+assigned to plain-clothes duty on this strip of seventy-two
+nationalities there was a Colombian, a gentleman of Swedish birth,
+a Chinaman from Martinique, and a Greek, all of whom spoke
+English, Spanish, and at least one other language. Of the three
+native Americans two spoke only their mother tongue. In the entire
+white uniformed force I met only Lieutenant Long and the Corporal
+in charge of Miraflores who could seriously be said to speak
+Spanish, though I am informed there were one or two others.
+
+This was not for a moment any fault of the Z. P. It comes back to
+our government and beyond that to the American people. With all
+our expanding over the surface of the earth in the past fourteen
+years there still hangs over us that old provincial back-woods
+bogie, "English is good enough for me." We have only to recall
+what England does for those of her colonial servants who want
+seriously to study the language of some portion of her subjects to
+have something very like the blush of shame creep up the back of
+our necks. Child's task as is the learning of a foreign language,
+provincial old Uncle Sam just flat-foots along in the same old
+way, expecting to govern and judge and lead along the path of
+civilization his foreign colonies by bellowing at them in his own
+nasal drawl and treating their tongue as if it were some purely
+animal sound. He is well personified by Corporal----, late of the
+Z. P. The Corporal had served three years in the Philippines and
+five 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 that
+trouble? If you have t' have any interpretin' done all you got t'
+do is t' call in a nigger."
+
+Uncle Sam not merely lends his servants no assistance to learn the
+tongues of his colonies, but should one of his subjects appear
+bearing that extraordinary accomplishment he gives him no
+preference whatever, no better position, not a copper cent more
+salary; and if things get to a pass where a linguist must be hired
+he gives the job to the first citizen that comes along who can
+make a noise that is evidently not English, or more likely still
+to some foreigner who talks English like a mouthful of Hungarian
+goulash. It is not the least of the reasons why foreign nations do
+not take us as seriously as they ought, why our colonials do not
+love us and, what is of far greater importance, do not advance
+under our rule as they should.
+
+Meanwhile there had gradually been reaching me "through the proper
+channels," as everything does on the Zone even to our ice-water,
+the various coupon-books and the like indispensable to Zone life
+and the proper pursuit of plain-clothes duty. Distressing as are
+statistics the full comprehension of what might follow requires
+the enumeration of the odds and ends I was soon carrying about
+with me.
+
+A brass-check; police badge; I. C. C. hotel coupon-book;
+Commissary coupon-book; "120-Trip Ticket" (a booklet containing
+blank passes between 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 a mile for use when traveling on personal business)
+"24-Trip Ticket" (a free courtesy pass to all "gold" employees
+allowing one monthly round trip excursion over any portion of the
+line) Freight-train pass for the P. R. R.; Dirt-train and
+locomotive pass for the Pacific division; ditto for the Central
+division; likewise for the Atlantic division; (in short about
+everything on wheels was free to the "gum-shoe" except the "yellow
+car") Passes admitting to docks and steamers at either end of the
+Zone; note-book; pencil or pen; report cards and envelopes (one of
+which the plain-clothes man must fill out and forward to
+headquarters "via train-guard" wherever night may overtake him--
+"the gum-shoe's day's work," as the idle uniformed man facetiously
+dubs it).
+
+Furthermore the man out of uniform is popularly supposed never to
+venture forth among the populace without:
+
+Belt, holster, cartridges, and the No. 38 "Colt" that reminds you
+of a drowning man trying to drag you down; handcuffs; police
+whistle; blackjack (officially he never carries this;
+theoretically there is not one on the Isthmus. But the "gum-shoe"
+naturally cannot twirl a police club, and it is not always policy
+to shoot every refractory prisoner). Then if he chances to be
+addicted to the weed there is the cigarette-case and matches; a
+watch is frequently convenient; and incidentally a few articles of
+clothing are more or less indispensable even in the dry season.
+Now and again, too, a bit of money does not come amiss. For though
+the Canal Zone is a Utopia where man lives by work-coupons alone,
+the detective can never know at what moment his all-embracing
+duties may carry him away into the foreign land of Panama; and
+even were that possibility not always staring him in the face, in
+the words of "Gorgona Red," "You've got t' have money fer yer
+booze, ain't ye?"
+
+Which seems also to be Uncle Sam's view of the matter. Far and
+away more important than any of the plain-clothes equipment thus
+far mentioned is the "expense account." It is unlike the others in
+that it is not visible and tangible but a mere condition, a
+pleasant sensation like the consciousness of a good appetite or a
+youthful fullness of life. The only reality is a form signed by
+the czar of the Zone himself tucked away among I. C. C. financial
+archives. That authorizes the man assigned to special duty in
+plain clothes to be reimbursed money expended 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 full limit is not unlikely
+to cause flames of light, thunderous rumblings, and other natural
+phenomena in the vicinity of Empire and Culebra. But please note
+further; these expenditures may be only "for cab or boat hire,
+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 not
+required personally to consume it each month. It is designed
+rather to win the esteem of bar-tenders, loosen the tongues of
+suspects, libate the thirsty stool-pigeon, and prime other
+accepted sources of information. But beware! Exceeding care in
+filling out the account of such expenditures at the month's end.
+Carelessness leads a hunted life on the Canal Zone. Take, for
+instance, the slight error of my friend--who, having made such
+expenditure in Colon, by a slip of the pen, or to be nice, of the
+typewriter, sent in among three score and ten items the following:
+
+    Feb. 4/ 2 bots beer; Cristobal........50c
+
+and in the course of time found said voucher again on his desk
+with a marginal note of mild-eyed wonder and more than idle
+curiosity, in the handwriting 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, and receiving frequent assurances that I should be quite
+busy enough once I got started. Opposite sat Lieutenant Long
+pouring choice bits of sub-station orders into the 'phone:
+
+"Don't you believe it. That was no accident. He didn't lose
+everything he had in every pocket rolling around drunk in the
+street. He's been systematically frisked. Sabe frisked? Get on the
+job and look into it."
+
+For the Lieutenant was one of those scarce and enviable beings who
+can live with his subordinates as man to man, yet never find an
+ounce of his authority missing when authority is needed.
+
+Now and then a Z. P. story whiled away the time. There was the sad
+case of Corporal-----in charge of-----station. Early one Sunday
+afternoon the Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the
+railroad. Naturally the day was hot. The Corporal sent a policeman
+to arrest the inhuman wretch for cruelty to animals. When he had
+left the culprit weeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the
+goat, tied in the shade under the police station.
+
+"Poor little beast," said the sympathetic Corporal, as he set
+before it a generous pan of ice-water fresh from the police
+station tank. The goat took one long, eager, grateful draught,
+turned over on its back, curled up like the sensitive-plants of
+Panama jungles when a finger touches them, and departed this vale
+of tears. But Corporal-----was an artist of the first rank. Not
+only did he "get away with it" under the very frowning battlements
+of the judge, but sent the Spaniard up for ten days on the charge
+against him. Z. P.'s who tell the story assert that the Spaniard
+did not so much mind the sentence as the fact that the Corporal
+got his goat.
+
+Then there was "the Mystery of the Knocked-out Niggers." Day after
+day there came reports from a spot out along the line that some
+negro laborer strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner
+suddenly lay down, threw a fit, and went into a comatose state
+from which he recovered only after a day or two in Ancon or Colon
+hospitals. The doctors gave it up in despair. As a last resort the
+case was turned over to a Z. P. sleuth. He chose him a hiding-
+place as near as possible to the locality of the strange
+manifestation. For half the morning he sweltered and swore without
+having seen or heard the slightest thing of interest to an old
+"Zoner." A dirt-train rumbled by now and then. He strove to amuse
+himself by watching the innocent games of two little Spanish
+switch-boys not far away. They were enjoying themselves, as
+guileless childhood will, between their duties of letting a train
+in and out of the switch. Well on in the second half of the
+morning another diminutive Iberian, a water-boy, brought his
+compatriots a pail of water and carried off the empty bucket. The
+boys hung over the edge of the pail a sort of wire hook, the
+handle of their home-made drinking-can, no doubt, and went on
+playing.
+
+By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in the
+distance. Now and then as he advanced he sang a snatch of West
+Indian ballad. As he espied the "switcheros" a smile broke out on
+his features and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-
+pail. In a working species of Spanish he made some request of the
+boys, the while wiping his ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys
+protested. Evidently they had lived on the Zone so long they had
+developed a color line. The negro pleaded. The boys, sitting in
+the shade of their wigwam, still shook their heads. One of them
+was idly tapping the ground with a broom-handle that had lain
+beside him. The negro glanced up and down the track, snatched up
+the boys' drinking vessel, of which the wire hooked over the pail
+was not after all the handle, and stooped to dip up a can of
+water. The little fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing a useless
+protest, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the rail in
+front of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent the can of water some
+rods down the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on
+the thin air above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and
+after trying a 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
+split end protruded an inch of telegraph wire, which chanced also
+to be the same wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized
+bucket. Close in front of the innocent little fellows ran a "third
+rail!"
+
+Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended. There was
+thrust into my hands a typewritten-sheet and I caught the next
+thing on wheels out to Corozal for my first investigation. It was
+one of the most commonplace cases on the Zone. Two residents of my
+first dwelling-place on the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150
+in U. S. gold.
+
+Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. Every bachelor
+quarters on the Isthmus, completely screened in, is entered by two
+or three screen-doors, none of which is or can be locked. In the
+building are from twelve to twenty-four wide-open rooms of two or
+three occupants each, no three of whom know one another's full
+names or anything else, except that they are white Americans and
+ipso facto (so runs Zone philosophy) above dishonesty. The
+quarters are virtually abandoned during the day. Two negro
+janitors dawdle about the building, but they, too, leave it for
+two hours at mid-day. Moreover each of the forty-eight or more
+occupants probably has several friends or acquaintances or enemies
+who may drift in looking for him at any hour of the day or night.
+No negro janitor would venture to question a white American's
+errand in a house; Panama is below the Mason and Dixon line. In
+practice any white American is welcome in any bachelor quarters
+and even to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though he be a
+total stranger to all the community. Add to this that the negro
+tailor's runner often has permission to come while the owner is
+away for suits in need of pressing, that John Chinaman must come
+and claw the week's washing out from under the bed where the
+"rough-neck" kicked it on Saturday night, that there are a dozen
+other legitimate errands that bring persons of varying shades into
+the building, and above all that the bachelors themselves, after
+the open-hearted old American fashion, have the all but universal
+habit of tossing gold and silver, railroad watches 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 the character of your fellow
+bachelors--and in the vast majority of Zone cases it would be. But
+it is in no sense surprising that among the many thousands that
+swarm upon the Isthmus there should be some not averse to
+increasing their income by taking advantage of these guileless
+habits and bucolic conditions. There are suggestions that a few--
+not necessarily whites--make a profession of it. No wonder "our
+chief trouble 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 no small amount; compared with what it might have been
+under prevailing conditions it is little.
+
+As for detecting such felonies, police officers the world around
+know that theft of coin of the realm in not too great quantities
+is virtually as safe a profession as the ministry. The Z. P.
+plain-clothes man, like his fellows elsewhere, must usually be
+content in such cases with impressing on the victim his
+Sherlockian astuteness, gathering the available facts of the case,
+and return to typewrite his report thereof to be carefully filed
+away among headquarters archives. Which is exactly 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 I strolled into headquarters on Saturday, the sixteenth, and
+the Inspector 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
+when the Inspector chanced down the hill.
+
+"New Gatun is pretty bad on Saturday nights," he remarked. (All
+too well I remembered it.) "The first time a nigger starts
+anything run him in, and take all the witnesses in sight along."
+
+"That reminds me; I haven't been issued a gun or handcuffs yet," I
+hinted.
+
+"Hell's fire, no?" queried the Inspector. "Tell the station
+commander at Gatun to fix you up."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I scribbled myself a ticket and was soon rolling northward,
+greeting acquaintances at every station. The Zone is like Egypt;
+whoever moves must travel by the same route. At Pedro Miguel and
+Cascadas armies of locomotives--the "mules" of the man from
+Arkansas--stood steaming and panting in the twilight after their
+day's labor and the wild race homeward under hungry engineers. As
+far as Bas Obispo this busy, teeming Isthmus seemed a native land;
+beyond, was like entering into foreign exile. It is a common Zone
+experience that only the locality one lives in during his first
+weeks ever feels like "home."
+
+The route, too, was a new one. From Gorgona the train returned
+crab-wise through Matachin and across the sand dyke that still
+holds the Chagres out of the "cut," and halted at Gamboa cabin.
+Day was dying as we rumbled on across the iron bridge above the
+river and away into the fresh jungle night along the rock-
+ballasted "relocation." The stillness of this less inhabited half
+of the Zone settled down inside the car and out, the evening air
+of summer caressing almost roughly through the open windows. The
+train continued its steady way almost uninterruptedly, for though
+new villages were springing up to take the place of the old
+sinking into desuetude and the flood along with the abandoned
+line, there were but two where once were eight. We paused at the
+new Frijoles and the box-car town of Monte Lirio and, skirting on
+a higher level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick jungled
+and forested hills what is some day to be Gatun Lake, drew up at
+7:30 at Gatun.
+
+I wandered and inquired for some time in a black night--for the
+moon was on the graveyard shift that week--before I found Gatun
+police station 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-eyed negroes in the steel-barred room in the center of the
+building, the station was deserted. "Circus," said the desk-man
+briefly. When I mentioned the matter of weapons he merely repeated
+the word with the further information that only the station
+commander could issue them.
+
+There was nothing to do therefore but to ramble out armed with a
+lead pencil into a virtually unknown town riotous with liquor and
+negroes and the combination of Saturday night, circus time, and
+the aftermath of pay-day, and to strut back and forth in a way to
+suggest that I was a perambulating arsenal. But though I wandered
+a long two hours into every hole and corner where trouble might
+have its breeding-place, nothing but noise took place in my sight
+and hearing. I turned disgustedly away toward the tents pitched in
+a grassy valley between the two Gatuns. At least there was a faint
+hope that the equestrienne might assault the ring-master.
+
+I approached the tent flap with a slightly quickening pulse.
+World-wide and centuries old as is the experience, personally I
+was about to "spring my badge" for the first time. Suppose the
+doortender should refuse to honor it and force me to impress upon
+him the importance of the Z. P.--without a gun? Outwardly
+nonchalant I strolled in between the two ropes. Proprietor Shipp
+looked up from counting his winnings and opened his mouth to shout
+"ticket!" I flung back my coat, and with a nod and a half-wink of
+wisdom he fell back again to computing his lawful gains.
+
+By the way, are not you who read curious to know, even as I for
+long years wondered, where a detective wears his badge? Know then
+that long and profound investigation among the Z. P. seems to
+prove conclusively that as a general and all but invariable rule
+he wears it pinned to the lining 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 the baby's nursery; though
+as in the case of all rules this one too has its exceptions.
+
+Entertainments come rarely to Gatun. The one-ringed circus was
+packed with every grade of society from gaping Spanish laborers to
+haughty wives of dirt-train conductors, among whom it was not hard
+to distinguish in a far corner the uniformed sergeant in command
+of Gatun and the long lean corporal tied in a bow-line knot at the
+alleged wit of the versatile but solitary clown who changed his
+tongue every other moment from English to Spanish. But the end was
+already near; excitement was rising to the finale of the
+performance, a wrestling match between a circus man and "Andy" of
+Pedro Miguel locks. By the time I had found a leaning-place it was
+on--and the circus man of course was conquered, amid the gleeful
+howling of "rough-necks," who collected considerable sums of money
+and went off shouting into the black night, in quest of a place
+where it might be spent quickly. It would be strange indeed if
+among all the thousands of men in the prime of life who are
+digging the canal at least one could not be found who could
+subjugate any champion a wandering circus could carry among its
+properties. I took up again the random tramping in the dark
+unknown night; till it was two o'clock of a Sunday morning when at
+last I dropped my report-card in the train-guard box and climbed
+upstairs to the cot opposite "Davie," sleeping the silent,
+untroubled sleep of a babe.
+
+I was barely settled in Gatun when the train-guard handed me one
+of those frequent typewritten orders calling for the arrest of
+some straggler or deserter from the marine camp of the Tenth
+Infantry. That very morning I had seen "the boss" of census days
+off on his vacation to the States--from which he might not return
+--and here I was coldly and peremptorily called upon to go forth
+and arrest and deliver to Camp Elliott on its hill "Mac," the
+pride of the census, with a promise of $25 reward for the trouble.
+"Mac" desert? It was to laugh. But naturally after six weeks of
+unceasing repetition of that pink set of questions "Mac's" throat
+was a bit dry and he could scarcely be expected to return at once
+to the humdrum life of camp without spending a bit of that $5 a
+day in slaking a tropical thirst. Indeed I question whether any
+but the prudish will loudly blame "Mac" even because he spent it a
+bit too freely and brought up in Empire dispensary. Word of his
+presence there soon drifted down to the wily plain-clothes man of
+Empire district. But it was a hot noonday, the dispensary lies
+somewhat up hill, and the uniformless officer of the Zone
+metropolis is rather thickly built. Wherefore, stowing away this
+private bit of information under his hat, he told himself with a
+yawn, "Oh, I'll drag him in later in the day," and drifted down to
+a wide-open door on Railroad Avenue to spend a bit of the $25
+reward in off-setting the heat. Meanwhile "Mac," feeling somewhat
+recovered from his financial extravagance, came sauntering out of
+the dispensary and, seeing his curly-headed friend strolling a
+beat not far away, naturally cried out, "Hello, Eck!" And what
+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
+his own right eye and, he knew from melancholy experience that the
+$25 was no government generosity, but "Mac's" own involuntary
+contribution to his 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 in Bas Obispo with a half-hour to spare, and climbed to the
+flowered and many-roaded camp on its far-viewing hilltop that
+falls sheer away on the 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 life of 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 and shoulders through the screen of
+the guard-house where Renson pointed him out to me as he was being
+locked up again after a day of shoveling sand.
+
+The first days in Gatun called for little else than patrol duty,
+without fixed hours, interspersed with an occasional loaf on the
+second-story veranda of the police-station overlooking the giant
+locks; close at hand was the entrance to the canal, up which came
+slowly barges loaded with crushed stone from Porto Bello quarry
+twenty miles east along the coast or sand from Nombre de Dios,
+twice as distant, while further still, spread Limon Bay from which
+swept a never-ending breeze one could wipe dry on as on a towel.
+So long as he has in his pocket no typewritten report with the
+Inspector's scrawl across it, "For investigation and report," the
+plain-clothes man is virtually his own commander, with few duties
+beside trying to be in as many parts of his district at once as
+possible and the ubiquitous duty of "keeping in touch with
+headquarters." So I wandered and mingled with all the life of the
+vicinity, exactly as I should have done had I not been paid a
+salary to do so. By day one could watch the growth of the great
+locks, the gradual drowning of little green, new-made islands
+beneath the muddy still waters of Gatun Lake, tramp out along
+jungle-flanked country roads, through the Mindi hills, or down
+below the old railroad to where the cayucas that floated down the
+Chagres laden with fruit came to land on the ever advancing edge
+of the waters. With night things grew more compact. From twilight
+till after midnight I prowled in and out through New Gatun, spilled
+far and wide over its several hills, watching the antics of
+negroes, pausing to listen to their guitars and their boisterous
+merriment, with an eye and ear ever open for the unlawful. When I
+drifted into a saloon to see who might be spending the evening
+out, the bar-tender proved he had the advantage of me in
+acquaintance by crying: "Hello, Franck! What ye having?" and
+showing great solicitude that I get it. After which I took up the
+starlit tramp again, to run perhaps into some such perilous scene
+as on that third evening. A riot of contending voices rose from a
+building back in the center of a block, with now and then the
+sickening thump of a falling body. I approached noiselessly,
+likewise weaponless, peeped in and found--four negro bakers
+stripped to the waist industriously kneading to-morrow's bread and
+discussing in profoundest earnest the object of the Lord in
+creating mosquitoes. Beyond the native town, as an escape from all
+this, there was the back country road that wound for a mile
+through the fresh night and the droning jungle, yet instead of
+leading off into the wilderness of the interior swung around to
+American Gatun on its close-cropped hills.
+
+I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined among those ordered
+to report for target test. A fine piece of luck was this for a man
+who had scarcely fired a shot since, aged ten, he brought down
+with an air-gun an occasional sparrow at three cents a head. We
+took the afternoon train to Mt. Hope on the edge of Colon and
+trooped away to a little plain behind "Monkey Hill," the last
+resting-place of many a "Zoner." The Cristobal Lieutenant, father
+of Z. P., was in charge, and here again was that same Z. P.
+absence of false dignity and the genuine good-fellowship that
+makes the success of your neighbor as pleasing as your own.
+
+"Shall I borrow a gun, Lieutenant?" I asked when I found myself
+"on deck."
+
+"Well, you'll have to use your own judgment as to that," replied
+the Lieutenant, busy pasting stickers over holes in the target.
+
+The test was really very simple. All you had to do was to cling to
+one end 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 said bull's-eye, repeat that twice at growing distances,
+mortally wound ten times the image of a Martinique negro running
+back and forth across the field, and you had a perfect score.
+Only, simple as it was, none did it, not even old soldiers with
+two or three "hitches" in the army. So I had to be content with
+creeping in on the second page of a seven-page list of all the
+tested force from "the Chief" to the latest negro recruit.
+
+The next evening I drifted into the police station to find a group
+of laborers from the adjoining camps awaiting me on the veranda
+bench, because the desk-man "didn't sabe their lingo." They proved
+upon examination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their story
+short, sad, but by no means unusual. Upon returning from work one
+of the Italians had found the lock hinges of his ponderously
+padlocked tin trunk hanging limp and screwless, and his pay-day
+roll of some $30 missing from the crown of a hat stuffed with a
+shirt securely packed away in the deepest corner thereof. The Turk
+was similarly unable to account for the absence of his $33 savings
+safely locked the night before inside a pasteboard suitcase;
+unless the fact that, thanks to some sort of surgical operation,
+one entire side of the grip now swung open like a barn-door might
+prove to have something to do with the case. The $33 had been, for
+further safety's sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting a burglar
+with a wheelbarrow.
+
+The mysterious detective work began at once. Without so much as
+putting on a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious
+crime. It was the usual Zone type of laborers' barracks. A
+screened building of one huge room, it contained two double rows
+of three-tier "standee" canvas bunks on gas-pipes. Around the
+entire room, close under the sheet-iron roof, ran a wooden
+platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked high with the
+tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper suitcases
+containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more workmen
+around the rough table below.
+
+Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-
+camp during working hours. Practically the West Indian janitors to
+whom is left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not
+fallible. In the course of the second day I unearthed a second
+Turk who, having chanced the morning before to climb to the
+baggage shelf for his razor and soap preparatory to welcoming a
+fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had been mildly startled to step
+on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given length and proportions
+lying prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta. The latter
+explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his
+unconventional posture by asserting that he was the "mosquito
+man," and shortly thereafter went away from there without leaving
+either card or address.
+
+By all my library training in detective work the next move
+obviously was to find what color of cigarette ashes the Turk
+smoked. Instead I blundered upon the absurdly simple notion of
+trying to locate the negro of given length and proportions. The
+real "mosquito man"--one of that dark band that spends its Zone
+years with a wire hook and a screened bucket gathering evidence
+against the defenseless mosquito for the sanitary department to
+gloat over--was found not to fit the model even in hue. Moreover,
+"mosquito men" are not accustomed to carry their devotion to duty
+to the point of crawling under trunks in their quest.
+
+For a few days following, the hunt led me through all Gatun and
+vicinity. Now I found myself racing across the narrow plank
+bridges above the yawning gulf of the locks, with far below tiny
+men and toy trains, now in and out among the cathedral-like flying
+buttresses, under the giant arches past staring signs of "DANGER!"
+on every hand--as if one could not plainly hear its presence
+without the posting. I descended to the very floor of the locks,
+far below the earth, and tramped the long half-mile of the three
+flights between soaring concrete walls. Above me rose the great
+steel gates, standing ajar and giving one the impression of an
+opening in the Great Wall of China or of a sky-scraper about to be
+swung lightly aside. On them resounded the roar of the compressed-
+air riveters and all the way up the sheer faces, growing smaller
+and smaller as they neared the sky, were McClintic-Marshall men
+driving into place red-hot rivets, thrown at 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-
+tumbled Gatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for long
+centuries, eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun
+with its proud church and its checkered history, where Morgan and
+Peruvian viceroys and "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 portion of the highlands that, east and west,
+enclose the valley of the Chagres, its summit resembling the
+terminal yards of some great city. There was one day when I sought
+a negro brakeman attached to a given locomotive. I climbed to a
+yard-master's tower above the Spillway and the yard-master, taking
+up his powerful field-glasses, swept the horizon, or rather the
+dam, and discovered the engine for me as a mariner discovers an
+island at sea.
+
+"Er--would you be kind enough to tell us where we can find this
+Gatun dam we've heard so much about?" asked a party of four
+tourists, half and half as to sex, who had been wandering about on
+it for an hour or so with puzzled expressions of countenance. They
+addressed themselves to a busy civil engineer in leather leggings
+and rolled up shirt sleeves.
+
+"I'm sorry I haven't time to use the instrument," replied the
+engineer over his shoulder, while he wig-wagged his orders to his
+negro helpers scattered over the landscape, "but as nearly as I
+can tell with the naked eye, you are now standing in the exact
+center of it."
+
+The result of all this sweating and sight-seeing was that some
+days later there was gathered in a young Barbadian who had been
+living for months in and about Gatun without any visible source of
+income whatever--not even a wife. The Turk and the camp janitor
+identified him as the culprit. But the primer lesson the police
+recruit learns is that it is one thing to believe a man guilty and
+quite another to convince a judge--the most skeptical being known
+to zoology--of that perfectly apparent fact. With the suspect
+behind bars, therefore, I continued my underground activities,
+with the result that when at length I took the train at New Gatun
+one morning for the court-room in Cristobal I loaded into a
+second-class coach six witnesses aggregating five nationalities,
+ready to testify among other things to the interesting little
+point that the defendant had a long prison record in Barbados.
+
+When the echo of the black policeman's "Oye! Oye!" had died away
+and the little white-haired judge had taken his "bench," I made
+the discovery that I was present not in one, but in four
+capacities,--as arresting officer, complainant, interpreter, and
+to a large extent prosecuting attorney. To swear a Turk who spoke
+only Turkish through another Turk, who mangled a little Spanish,
+for a judge who would not recognize a non-American word from the
+voice of a steam-shovel, with a solemn "So Help Me God!" to clinch
+and strengthen it when the witness was a follower of the prophet
+of Medina--or nobody--was not without its possibilities of humor.
+The trial proceeded; the witnesses witnessed in their various
+tongues, the perspiring arresting officer reduced their statements
+to the common denominator of the judge's single tongue, and the
+smirking bullet-headed defendant was hopelessly buried under the
+evidence. Wherefore, when the shining black face of his lawyer,
+retained during the two minutes between the "Oye!" and the opening
+of the case, rose above the scene to purr:
+
+"Your Honor, the prosecution has shown no case. I move the charge
+against my client be quashed."
+
+I choked myself just in time to keep from gasping aloud, "Well, of
+all the nerve!" Never will I learn that the lawyer's profession
+admits lying 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
+in the same building. Here on Thursdays sits one of the three
+members of the Zone Supreme Court. Jury trial is rare on the
+Isthmus--which makes possibly for surer justice. This time there
+was all the machinery of court and I appeared only in my legal
+capacity. The judge, a man still young, with an astonishingly
+mobile face that changed at least once a minute from a furrowy
+scowl with great pouting lips to a smile so broad it 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 two
+years and eight months in the Zone penitentiary at Culebra. A deaf
+man would have fancied he was being awarded some prize. One of the
+never-ending surprises on the Zone is the apparent indifference of
+negro prisoners whether they get years or go free. Even if they
+testify in their own behalf it is in a listless, detached way, as
+if the matter were of no importance anyway. But the glance they
+throw the innocent arresting officer as they pass out on their way
+to the barb-wire enclosure on the outskirts of the Zone capital
+tells another story. There are members of the Z. P. who sleep with
+a gun under their pillow because of that look or a muttered word.
+But even were I nervous I should have been little disturbed at the
+glare in this case, for it will probably be a long walk from
+Culebra penitentiary to where I am thirty-two months from that
+morning.
+
+A holiday air brooded over all Gatun and the country-side. Workmen
+in freshly washed clothing lolled in the shade of labor-camps,
+black Britishers were gathering in flat meadows fitted for the
+national game of cricket, far and wide sounded the care-free
+laughter and chattering of negroes, while even within Gatun police
+station leisure and peace seemed almost in full possession.
+
+The morning "touch" with headquarters over, therefore, I scrambled
+away across the silent yawning locks and the trainless and
+workless dam to the Spillway, over which already some overflow
+from the lake was escaping to the Caribbean. My friends "Dusty"
+and H---- had carried their canoe to the Chagres below, and before
+nine we were off down the river. It was a day that all the world
+north of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal; just the weather
+for a perfect "day off." A plain-clothes man, it is true, is not
+supposed to have days off. Some one might run away with the
+Administration Building on the edge of the Pacific and the
+telephone wires be buzzing for me--with the sad result that a few
+days later there would be posted in Zone police stations where 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
+a Sunday? Surely no criminal would--least of all a black one.
+Moreover these forest-walled banks were also part of my beat.
+
+The sun was hot, yet the air of that ozone-rich quality for which
+Panama is famous. For headgear we had caps; and did not wear
+those, though barely a few puffy, snow-white clouds ventured out
+into the vast chartless sky all the brilliant day through. Then
+the river; who could describe this lower reach of the Chagres as
+it curves its seven deep and placid miles from where Uncle Sam
+releases it from custody, to the ocean. Its jungled banks were
+without a break, for the one or two clusters of thatch and reed
+huts along the way are but a part of the living vegetation. Now
+and then we had glimpses across the tree-tops of brilliant green
+jungle hills further inland, everywhere were huge splendid trees,
+the stack-shaped mango, the soldier-erect palm heavy, yet
+unburdened, with cocoanuts. Some fish resembling the porpoise rose
+here and there, back and forth above the shadows winged snow-white
+cranes so slender one wondered the sea breeze did not wreck them.
+Above all the quiet and peace and contentment of a perfect
+tropical day enfolded the landscape in a silence only occasionally
+disturbed by the cry of a passing bird. Once a gasoline launch
+deep-laden with Sunday-starched Americans, snorted by, bound
+likewise to Fort Lorenzo at the river's mouth; and we lay back in
+our soft, rumpled khaki and drowsily smiled our sympathy after
+them. When they had drawn on out of earshot life began to return
+to the banks and nature again took possession of the scene.
+Alligators abounded once on this lower Chagres, but they have
+grown scarce now, or shy, and though we sat with H----'s automatic
+rifle across our knees in turns we saw no more than a carcass or a
+skeleton on the bank at the foot of the sheer wall of impenetrable
+verdure.
+
+Till at length the sea opened on our sight through the alley-way
+of jungle, and a broad inviting cocoanut grove nodded and beckoned
+on our left. Instead we paddled out across the sandbar to play
+with the surf of the Atlantic, but found it safer to return and
+glide across the little bay to the drowsy straw and tin village.
+Here--for the mouth of the Chagres like its source lies in a
+foreign land--a solitary Panamanian policeman in the familiar
+Arctic uniform enticed us toward the little thatched office, and
+house, and swinging hammock of the alcalde to register our names,
+and our business had we had any. So deep-rooted was the serenity
+of the place that even when "Dusty," in all 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
+grassy rise to the old fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were
+still the massive, rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of
+prisoners of the old brutal days; blind owls stared upon us; once
+the boy brought down with his honda, or slung-shot, one of the
+bats that circled uncannily above our heads. In dank corners were
+mounds of worthless powder; the bakery that once fed the miserable
+dungeon dwellers had crumbled in upon itself. Outside great trees
+straddled and split the massive stone walls that once commanded
+the entrance to the Chagres, jungle waved in undisputed possession
+in its earth-filled moat, even the 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
+us and underfoot all the old famous scene, for centuries the
+beginning of all trans-Isthmian travel,--the scalloped surf-washed
+shore with its dwindling palm groves curving away into the west,
+the Chagres pushing off into the jungled land. We descended to the
+beach of the outer bay and 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 Lorenzo has 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
+one verse only of a stanza by the late bard of the Isthmus struck
+a false note 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
+sunny Sunday reigned in Gatun; new-laundered laborers were still
+lolling in the shade of the camps, West Indians were still batting
+at interminable balls with their elongated paddles in the faint
+hope of deciding the national game before darkness settled down.
+Then twilight fell and I set off through the rambling town already
+boisterous with church services. Before the little sub-station a
+swarm of negroes was pounding tamborines 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
+over an organ, while a burly Jamaican blacker than the night
+outside stood in the vestments of the Church of England, telling
+his version of the case in a voice that echoed back from the town
+across the gully, as if he would drown out all rival sects and
+arguments by volume of sound. The meeting-house on the next corner
+was thronged with a singing multitude, tamborines scattered among
+them and all clapping hands to keep time, even to the pastor, who
+let the momentum carry on and on into 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 edge of the shadows gazing
+as at a vaudeville performance. How well-fitted are the various
+brands of Christianity to the particular likings of their
+"flocks." The strongest outward manifestation of the religion of
+the West Indian black is this boisterous singing. All over town
+were dusky throngs exercising their strong untrained voices "in de
+Lard's sarvice"; though the West Indian is not noted as being
+musical. Here a preacher wanting suddenly to emphasize a point or
+clinch an argument swung an arm like a college cheer leader and
+the entire congregation roared forth with him some well-known hymn
+that settled the question for all time.
+
+I strolled on into darker High street. Suddenly on a veranda above
+there broke out a wild unearthly screaming. Two negroes were
+engaged in savage, sanguinary combat. Around them in the dim light
+thrown by a cheap tenement lamp I could make out their murderous
+weapons--machetes or great bars of iron--slashing wildly, while
+above the din rose screams and curses:
+
+    Yo----Badgyan, ah kill yo!
+
+I sped stealthily yet swiftly up the long steps, drawing my No. 38
+(for at last I had been issued one) as I ran and dashed into the
+heart of the turmoil swallowing my tendency to shout "Unhand him,
+villain!" and crying instead:
+
+"Here, what the devil is going on here?"
+
+Whereupon two negroes let fall at once two pine sticks and turned
+upon me their broad childish grins with:
+
+"We only playin', sar. Playin' single-sticks which we larn to de
+army in Bahbaydos, sahgeant."
+
+Thus I wandered on, in and out, till the night lost its youth and
+the last train from Colon had dumped its merry crowd at the
+station, then wound away along the still and deserted back road
+through the night-chirping jungle between the two surviving
+Gatuns. There was a spot behind the Division Engineer's hill that
+I rarely succeeded in passing without pausing to drink in the
+scene, a scallop in the hills where several trees stood out singly
+and alone against the myriad starlit sky, below and beyond the
+indistinct valleys and ravines from which came up out of the night
+the chorus of the jungle. Further on, in American Gatun there was
+a seat on the steps before a bungalow that offered more than a
+good view in both directions. A broad, U. S.-tamed ravine sank
+away in front, across which the Atlantic breeze wafted the
+distance-softened thrum of guitar, the tones of fifes and happy
+negro voices, while overhead feathery gray clouds as concealing as
+a dancer's gossamer hurried leisurely by across the brilliant face
+of the moon; to the right in a free space the Southern Cross,
+tilted a bit awry, gleamed as it has these untold centuries while
+ephemeral humans come and pass their brief way.
+
+It was somewhere near here that Gatun's dry-season mosquito had
+his hiding-place. Rumor whispers of some such letter as the
+following received 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 as indispensable in his sphere:
+
+GATUN, ... 26, 1912.
+
+Dear Colonel:--
+
+I am writing to call your attention to a gross violation of
+Sanitary Ordinance No. 3621, to an apparent loop-hole in your
+otherwise excellent department. The circumstances are as follows;
+
+On the evening of ... 24, as I was sitting at the roadside between
+Gatun and New Gatun (some 63 paces beyond house No. 226) there
+appeared a MOSQUITO, which buzzed openly and for some time about
+my ears. It was probably merely a male of the species, as it
+showed no tendency to bite; but a mosquito nevertheless. I trust
+you will take fitting measures to punish so bold and insolent a
+violation of the rules of your 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 the mosquito. Of course there was the champagne and the other
+things that come with it--later in the night. But after all it was
+the little songful mosquito that drove them in disgrace back
+across the Atlantic.
+
+Still further on toward the hotel and a midnight lunch there was
+one house that was usually worth lingering before, though good
+music is rare on the Zone. Then there was the naughty poker game
+in bachelor quarters number--well, never mind that detail--to keep
+an ear on in case the pot grew large enough to make a worth-while
+violation of the law 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, rambles erratically off like the reminiscences of an old
+man through the half-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilderness,
+rampant green with rooted life and almost noisy with the songs of
+birds. Eventually within a couple of hours it crossed Fox River
+with its little settlement and descended to Mt. Hope police
+station, where there is a 'phone with which to "get in touch"
+again and then a Mission rocker on the screened veranda where the
+breezes of the near-by Atlantic will have you well cooled off
+before you can catch the shuttle-train back to Gatun.
+
+Or another led out across the lake by the old abandoned line that
+was the main line when first I saw Gatun. It drops down beyond the
+station and charges across the lake by a causeway that steam-
+shovels were already devouring, toward forsaken Bohio. Picking its
+way across the rotting spiles of culverts, it pushed on through
+the unpeopled jungle, all the old railroad gone, rails, ties, the
+very spikes torn up and carried away, while already the parrots
+screamed again in derision as if it were they who had driven out
+the hated civilization and taken possession again of their own. A
+few short months and the devouring jungle will have swallowed up
+even the place where it has been.
+
+If it was only the little typewritten slip reporting the
+disappearance of a half-dozen jacks from the dam, every case
+called for full investigation. For days to come I might fight my
+way through the encircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to
+every native hut for miles around to see if by any chance the lost
+property could have rolled thither. More than once such a hunt
+brought me out on the water-tank knoll at the far end of the dam,
+overlooking miles of impenetrable jungle behind and above chanting
+with invisible life, to the right the filling lake stretching
+across to low blue ranges dimly outlined against the horizon and
+crowned by fantastic trees, and all Gatun and its immense works
+and workers below and before me.
+
+Times were when duty called me into the squalid red-lighted
+district of Colon and kept me there till the last train was gone.
+Then there was nothing 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' got anything goin' up the line?" and,
+according to the answer, return to read an hour or two in
+Cristobal Y.M.C.A. or push on at once into the forest of box-cars
+to hunt out the lighted caboose. Night freights do not stop at
+Gatun, nor anywhere merely to let off a "gum-shoe." But just
+beyond New Gatun station is a grade that sets the negro fireman to
+sweating even at midnight and the big Mogul to straining every
+nerve and sinew, and I did not meet the engineer that could drag
+his long load by so swiftly but that one could easily swing off on
+the road that leads to the police station.
+
+Even on the rare days when "cases" gave out there was generally
+something to while away the monotony. As, one morning an American
+widely known in Gatun was arrested on a warrant and, chatting
+merrily with his friend, Policeman ----, strolled over to the
+station. There his friend Corporal Macey subdued his broad Irish
+smile and ordered the deskman to "book him up." The latter was
+reaching for the keys to a cell when the American broke off his
+pleasant flow of conversation to remark;
+
+"All right, Corporal, I'm going over to the house to get a few
+things and write a few letters. I'll be back inside of an hour."
+
+Whereupon Corporal Macey, being a man of iron self-control,
+refrained from turning a double back sommersault and mildly called
+the prisoner's attention to a little point of Zone police rules he
+had overlooked.
+
+If every other known form of amusement absolutely failed it was
+still the dry, or tourist season, and poured down from the States
+hordes of unconscious comedians, or investigators who rushed two
+whole days about the Isthmus, taking care not to get into any
+dirty places, and rushed home again to tell an eager public all
+about it. Sometimes the sight-seers came from the opposite end of
+the earth, a little band of South Americans in tongueless awe at
+the undreamed monster of work about them, yet struggling to keep
+their fancied despite of the "yanqui," to which the "yanqui" is so
+serenely indifferent. Priests from this southland were especially
+numerous. The week never passed that a group of them might not be
+seen peering over the dizzy precipice of Gatun locks and crossing
+themselves ostentatiously as they turned away.
+
+One does not, at least in a few months, feel the "sameness" of
+climate at Panama and "long again to see spring grow out of
+winter." Yet there is something, perhaps, in the popular belief
+that even northern energy evaporates in this tropical land. It is
+not exactly that; but certainly many a "Zoner" wakes up day by day
+with ambitious plans, and just drifts the day through with the
+fine weather. He fancies himself as strong and energetic as in the
+north, yet when the time comes for doing he is apt to say, "Oh, I
+guess I'll loaf here in the shade half an hour longer," and
+before he knows it another whole day is charged up against his
+meager credit column with Father Time.
+
+There came the day early in April when the Inspector must go north
+on his forty-two days' vacation. I bade him bon voyage on board
+the 8:41 between the two Gatuns and soon afterward was throwing
+together my belongings and leaving "Davie" to enjoy his room
+alone. For Corporal Castillo was to be head of the subterranean
+department ad interim, and how could the digging of the canal
+continue with no detective in all the wilderness of morals between
+the Pacific and Culebra? Thus it was that the afternoon train bore
+me away to the southward. It was a tourist train. A New York
+steamer had docked that morning, and the first-class cars were
+packed with venturesome travelers in their stout campaign outfits
+in which to rough it--in the Tivoli and the sight-seeing motors--
+in their roof-like cork helmets and green veils for the terrible
+Panama heat--which is sometimes as bad as in northern New York.
+
+The P.R.R. is one of the few railroads whose passengers may drop
+off for a stroll, let the train go on without them, and still take
+it to their destination. They have only to descend, as I did, at
+Gamboa cabin and wander down into the "cut," climb leisurely out
+to Bas Obispo, and chat with their acquaintances among the Marines
+lolling about the station until the trains puffs in from its
+shuttle-back excursion to Gorgona. The Zone landscape had lost
+much of its charm. For days past jungle fires had been sweeping
+over it, doing the larger growths small harm but leaving little of
+the greenness and rank clinging life of other seasons. Everywhere
+were fires along the way, even in the towns. For quartermasters--
+to the rage of Zone house-wives were sending up in clouds of smoke
+the grass and bushes that quickly turn to breeding-places of
+mosquitoes and disease with the first rains. Night closed down as
+we emerged from Miraflores tunnel; soon we swung around toward the
+houses, row upon row and all alight, climbed the lower slope of
+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
+Canal Zone. To begin with, there isn't any of course. No man would
+dream of looking for socialism in an undertaking set in motion by
+the Republican party and kept on the move by the regular army. But
+there are a number of little points in the management of this
+private government strip of earth that savors more or less faintly
+of the Socialist's program, and the Zone offers perhaps as good a
+chance as we shall ever have to study some 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 a sneaking curiosity to see railroads and similar purely
+public utilities government-owned, just to find how it would work.
+Down on the Canal Zone they have a sort of modified socialism
+where one can watch much of this under a Bell jar. There one
+quickly discovers that a locomotive with the brief and sufficient
+information "U.S." on her tender flanks--or more properly the
+flanks of her tender--gives one a swelling of the chest no other
+combination of letters could inspire. Thus far, too, theory seems
+to work well. The service could hardly be better, and recalling
+that under the old private system the fare for the forty-seven
+miles across the Isthmus was $25 with a charge of ten cents for
+every pound of baggage, the $2.40 of today does not seem
+particularly exorbitant.
+
+The official machinery of this private government strip also seems
+to run like clockwork. To be sure the wheels even of a clock grind
+a bit with friction at times, but the clock goes on keeping time
+for all that. The Canal Zone is the best governed district in the
+United States. It is worth any American's time and sea-sickness to
+run down there, if only to assure himself that Americans really
+can govern; until he does he will not have a very clear notion of
+just what good American government means.
+
+But before we go any further be it noted that the socialism of the
+Canal 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 are combined in an inconspicuous, white-
+haired American popularly known on the Zone as "the Colonel"--so
+popularly in fact that an attempt to replace him would probably
+"start something" among all classes and races of "Zoners." That he
+is omnipotent--on the Zone--not many will deny; a few have
+questioned--and landed in the States a week later much less joyous
+but far wiser. Omniscient--well they have even Chinese secret-
+service men on the Isthmus, and soldiers and marines not
+infrequently go out in civilian clothes under sealed orders; to
+say nothing of "the Colonel's private gum-shoe" and probably a lot
+of other underground sources of information neither you nor I
+shall ever hear of. But you must get used to spies under
+socialism, you know, until we all wear one of Saint Peter's halos.
+Look at the elaborate system of the Incas, even with their docile
+and uninitiative subjects. In the matter of Omnipresence; it would
+be pretty hard to find a hole on the Canal Zone where you could
+pull off a stunt of any length or importance without the I.C.C.
+having a weather-eye on you. When it comes to the no less
+indispensable ingredient of benevolence one glimpse of those mild
+blue eyes would probably reassure you in that point, even without
+the pleasure of watching the despot sit in judgment on his
+subjects in his castle office on Sunday mornings like old Saint
+Louis under his oak--though with a tin of cigarettes beside him
+that old Louis had to worry along without.
+
+This all-powerful government insists on and enforces many of the
+things which Americans as a whole stand for,--Sunday closing,
+suppression of resorts, forbidding of gambling. But the Zone is no
+test whether these laws could be genuinely enforced in a whole
+nation. For down there Panama and Colon serve as a sort of safety-
+valve, where a man can run down 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 a ventless society. This we
+should not lose sight of when we boast that there 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 many of the weekly
+prizes of the Panama lottery find their way into the pockets of
+American canal builders, and in any Zone gathering of whatever
+hour--or sex!--you are almost certain to hear flitting back and
+forth mysterious whispers of "--have a 6 and a 4 this week."
+
+The Zone system is work-coupons for all; much as the Socialist
+would have it. Only the legitimate members of the community--the
+workers--can live in it--long. You should see the nonchalant way a
+clerk at the government's Tivoli hotel charges a tourist a quarter
+for a cigar the government sells for six cents in its
+commissaries. Mere money does not rank high in Zone society. It's
+the labor-coupon that counts. They sell cigarettes at the
+Y.M.C.A.; you are in that state where you would give your ticket
+home for a smoke. Yet when you throw down good gold or silver,
+black Sam behind the showcase looks up at you with that pitying
+cold 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
+merely that you have done your appointed task gets you the same
+meal wherever you may drop in, a total stranger, yet without being
+identified, without a word from any one, but merely thrusting your
+coupon-book at the yellow West Indian at the door as you enter
+that he may snatch out so many minutes of labor. Drop in anywhere
+there is a vacant bed and you are perfectly at home. There is the
+shower-bath, the ice-water, the veranda rocker--you knew exactly
+what was coming to you, just what kind of bed, just what
+vegetables you would be served at dinner. It reminds one of the
+Inca system of providing a home for every citizen, and tambos
+along the way if he must travel.
+
+But it IS the same meal. That is just the point. There is where
+you begin to furrow your brow and look more closely at this
+splendid system, and fall to wondering if that public kitchen of
+socialism would not become in time an awful bore. There are some
+things in which we want variety and originality and above all
+personality. A meal is a meal, I suppose, as a cat is a cat; yet
+there are many subtle little things that make the same things
+distinctly different. When it comes to dinner you want a rosy fat
+German or a bulky French madame putting thought and pride and
+attention into it; which they will do only if they get good coin
+of the realm or similar material emolument out of it in
+proportion. No one will ever fancy he has a "mission" to serve
+good meals--to the public.
+
+In the I.C.C. hotels we have a government steward who draws a good
+salary and wears a nice white collar. But though he is sometimes a
+bit different, 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 wonders just what his activities are. Certainly it is not the
+planning of meals, for the I.C.C. menu is as fixed and automatic
+as if it had been taken from a stone slab in the pyramids. A poor
+meal neither turns his hair white nor cuts down his income.
+Frequently, especially if he is English and certainly if he has
+been a ship's steward, the negro waiters seem to run his
+establishment without interference. Dinner hours, for example, are
+from 11 to 1. But beware the glare of the waiter at whose table
+you sit down at 12:50. He slams cold rubbish at you from the
+discard and snatches it away again before you have time to find
+you can't eat it. You have your choice of enduring this
+maltreatment or of unostentatiously slipping him a coin and a hint
+to go cook you the best he can himself. For you know that as the
+closing hour approaches the cooks will not have their private
+plans interfered with by accepting your order. Here again is where
+the fat German or the French madame is needed--with an ox-goad.
+
+In other words the tip system invented by Pharaoh and vitiated by
+quick-rich Americans rages as fiercely in government hotels on the
+Zone as in any "lobster palace" bordering Broadway--worse, for
+here the non-tipper has no living being to advocate his cause. All
+food is government property. Yet I have sat down opposite a man
+who gave the government at the door a work-coupon identical with
+mine, but who furthermore dropped into the waiter's hand "35 cents
+spig"--which is half as bad as to do it in U.S. currency--and
+while I was gazing tearfully at a misshapen lump of vacunal
+gristle there was set before him, steaming hot from the government
+kitchen, a porterhouse steak which a dollar bill would not have
+brought him within scenting distance of in New York. Do not blame
+the waiter. If he does not slip an occasional coin to the cook he
+will invariably draw the gristle, and even occasional coins do not
+grow on his waist band. It would be as absurd to charge it to the
+cook. He probably has a large family to support, as he would have
+under socialism. There runs this story on the Zone, vouched for by
+several:
+
+A "Zoner" called an I.C.C. steward and complained that his waiter
+did not 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-
+off too?"
+
+"I certainly am," replied the steward; "What do you think I'm down
+here for, me health?"
+
+Surely we can't blame it all to the steward, or to any other
+individual. Lay it rather to human nature, that stumbling-block of
+so many varnished and upholstered systems.
+
+I hope I am not giving the impression that I.C.C. hotels are
+unendurable. "Stay home"--which on the Zone means always eat at
+the same hotel table--subsidize your waiter and you do moderately
+well. But to 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 come down to paying their waiter the regular
+blackmail of a dollar a month and setting it down as one of the
+unavoidable evils of life. One or two I knew who insisted on
+sticking to "principles," and they grew leaner and lanker day by
+day.
+
+Because of these things many an American employee will be found
+eating in private restaurants of the ubiquitous Chinaman or the
+occasional Spaniard, though here he must often pay in cash instead
+of in futures on his labor--which are so much cheaper the world
+over. It is sad enough to dine on the same old identical round for
+months. But how if you were one of those who blew in on the heels
+of the last Frenchman and have been eating it ever since? By this
+time even rat-tails would be a welcome change--and with genuine
+socialism there would not even be that escape. It is said to be
+this hotel problem as much as the perpetual spring-time of the
+Zone that so frequently reduces--with the open connivance of the
+government--a building housing forty-eight quiet, harmless
+bachelors to a four-family residence housing eight and gradually
+upwards; that wreaks such matrimonious havoc among the white-
+frocked stenographers who come down to type and remain to cook.
+
+Besides the hotel there is the P.R.R. commissary, the government
+department stores. It is likewise laundry, bakery, ice-factory; it
+makes ice-cream, roasts coffee, sends out refrigerator-cars and a
+morning supply train to bring your orders right to your door--oh,
+yes, it strongly resembles what Bellamy dreamed years ago. Only,
+as in the case 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
+a railroad company--all machine done of course, as everything
+would be under socialism, and no come-back for the garment that is
+not hardy enough of constitution to stand the system. In the
+stores is little or no shoddy material; in general the stock is
+the best available. If a biscuit or a bolt of khaki is better made
+in England than in the United States the commissary stocks with
+English goods, which is unexpected broad-mindedness for government
+management. But while prices are lower than in Panama or Colon
+they are every whit as high as in American stores; and most of us
+know something of the exorbitant profit our private merchants
+exact, particularly on manufactured goods. The government claims
+to run the commissary only to cover cost. Either that is a crude
+government joke or there is a colored gentleman esconced in the
+coal-bin. Moreover if the commissary hasn't the stuff you want you
+had better give up wanting, for it has no object in laying in a
+supply of 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 home without. True, most of them are merely negroes,
+and the few Americans at the head of departments are chiefly
+provincial little fellows from small towns whose notions of
+business are rather those of Podunk, Mass., than of New York. But
+lolling about the commissary a half-hour hoping to buy a box of
+matches, one cannot shake off the conviction that it is the system
+more than the clerks. Poets and novelists and politicians may work
+for "glory," but no man is going to show calico and fit slippers
+for such remuneration.
+
+Nor are all the old evils of the competitive method banished from
+the Zone. In the Canal Record, the government organ, the
+government commissary advertised a sale of excellent $7 rain-coats
+at $1 each. The "Record"! It is like reading it in the Bible.
+Witness the rush of bargain hunters, who, it proves, are by no
+means of one gender. Yet those splendid rain-coats, as manager,
+clerks, and even negro sweepers well knew and could not refrain
+from snickering to themselves at thought of, were just as rain-
+proof as a poor grade of cheese-cloth. I do not speak from hear-
+say for I was numbered among the bargain hunters--"recruits" are
+the natural victims, and there arrive enough of them each year to
+get rid of worthless stock. Ten minutes after making the purchase
+I set out to walk to Corozal through the first mild shower of the
+rainy season--and arrived there I went and laid the bargain gently
+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--will descend to these tricks of the trade to keep out of
+the clutches of the auditor, or to make a "good record." The
+socialist's answer perhaps would be that under their system
+government factories would make only perfect goods. But won't the
+factory superintendent also be anxious to make a "record"? And
+even government stock will deteriorate on the shelves.
+
+All small things, to be sure; but it is the sum of small things
+that make up that great complex thing--Life. Few of us would
+object to living in that ideal dream world. But could it ever be?
+I have anxiously asked this question and hinted at these little
+weaknesses suggested by Zone experiences to several Zone
+socialists--who are not hard to find. They merely answer that
+these things have nothing to do with 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 passed through a corner of the state.
+
+As to the other side of the ledger,--equal pay for all, nowhere is
+man further from socialism than on the Canal Zone. Caste lines are
+as sharply drawn as in India, which should not be unexpected in an
+enterprise largely in charge of graduates of our chief training-
+school for caste. The Brahmins are the "gold" employees, white
+American citizens with all the advantages and privileges thereto
+appertaining. But--and herein we out-Hindu the Hindus--the Brahmin
+caste itself is divided and subdivided into infinitesimal
+gradations. Every rank and shade of man has a different salary,
+and exactly in accordance with that salary is he housed,
+furnished, and treated down to the least item,--number of electric
+lights, candle-power, style of bed, size of bookcase. His Brahmin
+highness, "the Colonel," has a palace, relatively, and all that
+goes with it. The high priests, the members of the Isthmian Canal
+Commission, have less regal palaces. Heads of the big departments
+have merely palatial residences. Bosses live in well-furnished
+dwellings, conductors are assigned a furnished house--or quarter
+of a house. Policemen, artisans, and the common garden variety of
+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 well
+before or since. The shovelman's wife who gives five-o'clock teas
+and keeps two servants will find life different when the canal is
+opened and she moves back to the smoky little factory cottage and
+learns again to do her own washing.
+
+At work, "on the job" there is a genuine American freedom of wear-
+what-you-please and a general habit of going where you choose in
+working clothes. That is one of the incomprehensible Zone things
+to the little veneered Panamanian. He cannot rid himself of his
+racial conviction that a man in an old khaki jacket who is
+building a canal must be of inferior clay to a hotel loafer in a
+frock coat and a tall hat. The real "Spig" could never do any real
+work for fear of soiling his clothes. He cannot get used to the
+plain, brusk American type without embroidery, who just does
+things in his blunt, efficient way without wasting time on little
+exterior courtesies. None of these childish countries is man
+enough to see through the rough surface. Even with seven years of
+American example about him the Panamanian has not yet grasped the
+divinity of labor. Perhaps he will eons hence when he has grown
+nearer true civilization.
+
+But among Americans off the job reminiscences of East India flock
+in again. 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 be horrified to find herself at the same dance with Mrs. J.
+Mrs. X, whose husband is a foreman at $165, and whose dining table
+is a full six inches longer and whose ice-box will hold one more
+cold-storage chicken, would not think of sitting in at bridge with
+Mrs. Y, whose husband 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 is not too tanned, is accepted on staring
+suffrance. As for the man whose skin is a bit dull, he might sit
+on the steps of an I. C. C. hotel with dollars dribbling out of
+his pockets until he starved to death--and he would be duly buried
+in the particular grave to which his color entitled him. A real
+American place is the Zone, with outward democracy and inward
+caste, an unenthusiastic and afraid-to-break-the-conventions place
+in play, and the opposite at work.
+
+Yet with it all it is a good place in which to live. There you
+have always summer, jungled hills to look on by day and moonlight,
+and to roam in on Sunday--unless you are a policeman seven days a
+week. It is possible that perpetual summer would soon breed quite
+a different type of American. The Isthmus is nearly always in
+boyish--or girlish--good temper. Zone women and girls are noted
+for plump figures and care-free faces. And there is a contentment
+that is more than climatic. There are no hard times on the Zone,
+no hurried, worried faces, no famished, wolfish eyes. The "Zoner"
+has his little troubles of course,--the servant problem, for
+instance, for the Jamaican housemaid is a thorn in any side. Now
+and then we hear some one wailing, "Oh, it gets so--tiresome!
+Everybody's shoveling dirt or talking about the other fellow." But
+he knows it isn't strictly true when he says it and that he is
+kicking chiefly to keep in practice. Every one is free from
+worries as to job, pay, house, provisions, and even hospital fees,
+and the smoothness of it all, perhaps, gets on his nerves at
+times. I question whether "the Colonel" himself loses much sleep
+when a chunk of the hill that bears up his residence lets go and
+pitches into the canal. It sets one to musing at times whether the
+rock-bound system of the Incas was not best after all,--a place
+for every man and every man in his place, each his allotted work,
+which he was fully able to do and getting Hail Columbia if he
+failed to do it.
+
+Which brings up the question of results in labor under the pseudo-
+socialist Zone system. Most American employees work steadily and
+take their work seriously. It is as if each were individually
+proud of being one of the chosen people and builders of the
+greatest work of modern times. Yet the far-famed "American rush"
+is not especially prevalent. The Zone point of view seems to be
+that no shoveling is so important, even that of digging a ditch
+half the ships of the world are waiting to cross, that a man
+should bring upon himself a premature funeral. The common
+laborers, non-Americans, almost dawdle. There are no contractor's
+Irish straw-bosses to keep them on the move. The answer to the
+Socialist's scheme of having the government run all big building
+enterprises is to go out and watch any city street gang for an
+hour.
+
+The bringing together into close contact of Americans from every
+section of our broad land is tending to make a new amalgamated
+type. Even New Englanders grow almost human here among their
+broader-minded fellow-countrymen. Any northerner can say "nigger"
+as glibly as a Carolinian, and growl if one of them steps on his
+shadow. It is not easy to say just how much effect all this will
+have when the canal is done and this handful of amalgamated and
+humanized Americans is sprinkled back over all the States as a
+leaven to the whole. They tell on the Zone of a man from Maine who
+sat four high-school years on the same bench with two negro boys,
+and returning home after three years on the Isthmus was so
+horrified to find one of those boys an alderman that he packed his
+traps and moved to Alabama, "where a nigger IS a nigger"--and if
+there isn't the "makings" of a story in that I 'll leave it to the
+postmaster of Miraflores.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+"There is much in this police business," said "the Captain," with
+his slow, deliberate enunciation, "that must lead to a blank wall.
+Out of ten cases to investigate it is quite possible nine will
+result in nothing. This percentage could not of course be true of
+a thousand cases and a man's services still be considered
+satisfactory. But of ten it is quite possible. As for knowing HOW
+to do detective work, all I bring to the department myself is some
+ordinary common sense and a little knowledge of human nature, and
+with these I try to work things out as best I can. This peeping-
+through-the-key-hole police work I know nothing whatever about,
+and don't want to. Nor do I expect a man to."
+
+I had been discussing with "the Captain" my dissatisfaction at my
+failure to "get results" in an important case. A few weeks on the
+force had changed many a preconceived notion of police life. It
+had gradually become evident, for instance, that the profession of
+detective is adventurous, absorbing, heart-stopping chiefly
+between the covers of popular fiction; that real detective work,
+like almost any other vocation, is made up largely of the little
+unimportant every-day details, with only a rare assignment bulking
+above the mass. As "the Captain" said, it was just plain every-day
+work carried on by the application of ordinary common sense. Such
+best-seller artifices as disguise were absurd. Not only would
+disguise in all but the rarest cases be impossible, but useless.
+The A-B-C of plain-clothes work is to learn to know a man by his
+face rather than by his clothing--and at the outset one will be
+astonished to find how much he has hitherto been depending 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 furthermore
+should not be a handsome man or a man of striking appearance in
+any way; the ideal plain-clothes man is the little insignificant
+snipe whom even the ladies will not notice.
+
+Since April tenth I had been settled in notorious House 111,
+Ancon, a sort of frontiersman resort or smugglers' retreat--had
+there been anything to smuggle--where to have fallen through the
+veranda screening would have been to fall into a foreign land. As
+pay-day approached there came the duty of standing a half-hour at
+the station gate before the departure of each train to watch and
+discuss with the ponderous, smiling, dark-skinned chief of
+Panama's plain-clothes squad, or with a vigilante the suspicious
+characters and known crooks of all colors going out along the
+line. On the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth the I. 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-clothes duty was
+not merely to scan the embarking passengers but to ride out with
+each train to one of the busy towns. There scores upon scores of
+soil-smeared workmen swarmed over all the landscape with long
+paper-wrapped rolls of Panamanian silver in their hands, while
+flashily dressed touts and crooks of both sexes drifted out from
+Panama with every train to worm their insidious way into wherever
+the scent of coin promised another month free from labor. To add
+to those crowded times the chief dissipation of the West Indian
+during the few days following pay-day that his earnings last is to
+ride aimlessly and joyously back and forth on the trains.
+
+There is one advantage, though some policemen call it by quite the
+opposite name, in being stationed at Ancon. When crime takes a
+holiday and do-nothing threatens tropical dementia, or a man tires
+of his native land and people a short stroll down the asphalt
+takes him into the city of Panama. Barely across the street where
+his badge becomes mere metal, and he must take care not to arrest
+absent-mindedly the first violator of Zone laws--whom he is sure
+to come upon within the first block--he notes that the English
+tongue has suddenly almost disappeared. 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 into Avenida Central he grows
+gradually aware that there has settled down about him a cold
+indifference, an atmosphere quite different from that on his own
+side of the line. Those he addresses in the tongue of the land
+reply to his questions with their customary gestures and fixed
+phrases of courtesy. But no more; and a cold dead silence falls
+sharply upon the last word, and at times, if the experience be
+comparatively new, there seems to hover in the air something that
+reminds him that way back fifty-six years ago there was a
+"massacre" of Americans in Panama city. For the Panamanian has
+little love for the United States or its people; which is the
+customary thanks any man or nation gets for lifting a dirty half-
+breed gamin from the gutter.
+
+Off in the vortex of the city lolls Panama's public market, where
+Chinamen are the chief sellers and flies the chief consumers.
+Myriads of fruits in every stage of development and
+disintegration, haggled bits of meat, the hundred sights and
+sounds and smells one hurries past suggest that Panama may even
+have outdone Central America before Uncle Sam came with his
+garbage-cans and his switch. Further on, down at the old harbor,
+lingers a hint of the picturesqueness of Panama in pre-canal days.
+Clumsy boats, empty, or deep-laden with fruit from, or freight to,
+the several islands that sprinkle the bay, splash and bump against
+the little cement wharf. Aged wooden "windjammers" doze at their
+moorings, everywhere are jabbering natives with that shifty half-
+cast eye and frequent evidence of deep-rooted disease. Almost
+every known race mingles in Panama city, even to Chinese coolies
+in their umbrella hats and rolled up cotton trousers, delving in
+rich market gardens on the edges of the town or dog-trotting
+through the streets under two baskets dancing on the ends of a
+bamboo pole, till one fancies oneself at times in Singapore or
+Shanghai. The black Zone laborer, too, often prefers to live in
+Panama for the greater freedom it affords--there he doesn't have
+to clean his sink so often, marry his "wife," or banish his
+chickens from the bedroom. Policemen with their clubs swarm
+everywhere, for no particular reason than that the little republic
+is forbidden to play at army, and with the presidential election
+approaching political henchmen must be kept good-humored. Not a
+few of these officers are West Indians who speak not a word of
+Spanish--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 in Panama. Any man can afford ten cents even if he has
+no expense account; besides he runs no risk of being overcharged,
+which is a greater advantage than the cost. All this may be
+different when Panama's electric line, all the way from Balboa
+docks to Las Sabanas, is opened--but that's another year.
+Meanwhile the lolling in carriages comes 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
+government allows its children to spend the evening in town. Then
+frequent trains, unknown during the week, begin with the setting
+of the sun to disgorge Americans of all grades and sizes through
+the clicking turnstiles into the arms of gesticulating hackmen,
+some to squirm away afoot between the carriages, all to be
+swallowed up within ten minutes in the great sea of "colored"
+people. So that, large as may be each train-load, white American
+faces are so rare on Panama streets that one involuntarily glances
+at each that passes in the throng.
+
+It is the "gum-shoe's" duty to know and be unknown in as many
+places as possible. Wherefore on such nights, whatever his choice,
+he drifts early down by the "Normandie" and on into the "Pana-
+zone" to see who is out, and why. In the latter emporium he adds a
+bottle of beer to his expense account, endures for a few moments
+the bawling above the scream of the piano of two Americans of
+Palestinian antecedents, admires some local hero, like "Baldy" for
+instance, who is credited with doing what Napoleon could not do,
+and floats on, perhaps to screw up his courage and venture into
+the thinly-clad Teatro Apolo. He who knows where to look, or was
+born under a lucky star, may even see on these merry evenings a
+big Marine from Bas Obispo or a burly soldier of the Tenth howling
+some joyful song with six or seven little "Spig" policemen
+climbing about on his frame. At such times everything but real
+blood, flows in Panama. Her history runs that way. On the day she
+won her independence from Spain it is said the General in Chief
+cut his finger on a wine glass. The day she won it from Colombia
+there was a Chinaman killed--but every one agrees that was due to
+the celestial's criminal carelessness.
+
+Down at the quieter end of the city are "Las Bovedas," that
+curving sea-wall Phillip of Spain tried to make out from his
+palace walls, as many another, regal and otherwise, has strained
+his eyes in vain to see where his good coin has gone. But the
+walls are there all right, though Phillip never saw them;
+crumbling a bit, yet still a sturdy barrier to the sea. A broad
+cement and grass promenade runs atop, wide as an American street.
+Thirty or forty feet below the low parapet sounds the deep, time-
+mellowed voice of the Pacific, as there rolls higher and higher up
+the rock ledges that great tide so different from the scarcely
+noticeable one at Colon. The summer breeze never dies down, never
+grows boisterous. On the landward side Panama lies mumbling to
+itself, down in the hollow between squats Chiriqui prison with its
+American warden, once a Zone policeman; while in the round stone
+watch-towers on the curving parapets lean prison guards with fixed
+bayonets and incessantly blow the shrill tin whistles that is the
+universal Latin-American artifice for keeping policemen awake. On
+the way back to the city the elite--or befriended--may drop in at
+the University Club at the end of the wall for a cooling libation.
+
+On Sunday night comes the band concert in the palm-ringed
+Cathedral Plaza. There is one on Thursday, too, in Plaza Santa
+Ana, but that is packed with all colors and considered "rather
+vulgah." In the square by the cathedral the aggregate color is far
+lighter. Pure African blood hangs chiefly in the outskirts. Then
+the haughty aristocrats of Panama, proud of their own individual
+shade of color, may be seen in the same promenade with American
+ladies--even a garrison widow or two--from out along the line.
+Panamanian girls gaudily dressed and suggesting to the nostrils
+perambulating drug-stores shuttle back and forth with their
+perfumed dandies. Above the throng pass the heads and shoulders of
+unemotional, self-possessed Americans, erect and soldierly.
+Sergeant Jack of Ancon station was sure to be there in his
+faultless civilian garb, a figure neat but not gaudy; and even
+busy Lieutenant Long was known to break away from his stacked-up
+duties and his black stenographer and come to overtop all else in
+the square save the palm-trees whispering together in the evening
+breeze between the numbers.
+
+There is no favoritism in Zone police work. Every crime reported
+receives full investigation, be it only a Greek laborer losing a
+pair of trousers or--
+
+There was the case that fell to me early in May, for instance. A
+box billed from New York to Peru had been broken open on Balboa
+dock and--one bottle of cognac stolen. Unfortunately the matter
+was turned over to me so long after the perpetration of the
+dastardly crime that the possible culprits among the dock hands
+had wholly recovered from the probable consumption of the
+evidence. But I succeeded in gathering material for a splendid
+typewritten report of all I had not been able to unearth, to file
+away among other priceless headquarters' archives.
+
+Not that the Z. P. has not its big jobs. The force to a man
+distinctly remembers that absorbing two months between the escape
+of wild black Felix Paul and the day they dragged him back into
+the penitentiary. No less fresh in memory are the expeditions
+against Maurice Pelote, or Francois Barduc, the murderer of
+Miraflores. All Martinique negroes, be it noted; and of all things
+on this earth, including greased pigs, the hardest to catch is a
+Martinique criminal. After all, four or five murders on the Zone
+in three years is no startling record in such a swarm of
+nationalities.
+
+Cases large and small which it would be neither of interest nor
+politic to detail poured in during the following weeks. Among them
+was the counterfeit case unearthed by some Shylock Holmes on the
+Panamanian force, that called for a long perspiring hunt for the
+"plant" in odd corners of the Zone. Then there was--, an ex-Z. P.
+who lost his three years' savings on the train, for which reason I
+shadowed a well-known American--for it is a Z. P. rule that no one
+is above suspicion--about Panama afoot and in carriages nearly all
+night, in true dime-novel fashion. There was the day that I was
+given a dangerous convict to deliver at Culebra Penitentiary. The
+criminal was about three feet long, jet black, his worldly
+possessions comprising two more or less garments, one reaching as
+far down as his knees and the other as far up as 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
+already served time for burglary and horse-stealing, his
+conviction for stealing a gold necklace from a negro washerwoman
+of San Miguel left the Chief Justice no choice but to send him to
+meditate a half-year at Culebra. There is no reform school on the
+Zone. The few American minors who have been found guilty of
+misdoing have been banished to their native land. When the deputy
+warden had sufficiently recovered from the shock brought upon him
+by the sight of his new charge to give me a receipt for him, I
+raced for the noon train back to the city.
+
+Thereon I sat down beside Pol--First-Class Policeman X---,
+surprised to 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 Rio Grande reservoir did he turn to confide to me the
+following extraordinary occurrence:
+
+"Last night I dreamed old Judge-----had my father and my mother up
+before him. On the stand he asked my mother her age--and the funny
+part of it is my mother has been dead over ten years. She turned
+around and wrote 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 to the dream. But take it from me I know what
+it means. Now just add 'em together, and multiply by five--because
+I could see five people in the court-room--divide by two--father
+and mother--and I get--," he drew out a crumpled "arrest" form
+covered with penciled figures, "--9280. And there--" his voice
+dropped low, "--is your winning number for next Sunday."
+
+So certain was this, that First-Class X----had bribed another
+policeman to take his eight-hour shift, dressed in his vacation
+best, bought a ticket to Panama and return, with real money at
+tourist prices, and would spend the blazing afternoon seeking
+among the scores of vendors in the city for lottery ticket 9280.
+And if he did not find it there he certainly paid his fare all the
+way to Colon and back to continue his search. I believe he at
+length found and acquired the whole ticket, for the customary sum
+of $2.50. But there must have been a slip in the arithmetic, or
+mother's chalk; for the winning number that Sunday was 8895.
+
+Frequent as are these melancholy errors, scores of "Zoners" cling
+faithfully to their arithmetical superstitions. Many a man spends
+his recreation hours working out the winning numbers by some
+secret recipe of his own. There are men on the Z. P. who, if you
+can get them started on the subject of lottery tickets, will keep
+it up until you run away, showing you the infallibility of their
+various systems, believing the drawing to be honest, yet oblivious
+to the fact that both the one and the other cannot be true. Dreams
+are held in special favor. It is probably safe to assert that one-
+half the numbers over 1,000 and under 10,000 that appear in Zone
+dreams are snapped up next day in lottery tickets. Many have
+systems of figuring out the all-important number from the figures
+on engines and cars. More than one Zone housewife has slipped into
+the kitchen to find the roast burning and her West Indian cook
+hiding hastily behind her ample skirt a long list of the figures
+on every freight-car that has passed that morning, from which by
+some Antillian miscalculation and the murmuring of certain
+invocations she was to find the magic number that would bring her
+cooking days to an end.
+
+Yet there is sometimes method in their madness. Did not "Joe" who
+slept in the next room to me at Gatun "hit Duque for two pieces"--
+which is to say he had $3,000 to sprinkle along with his police
+salary? Yet personally the only really appealing "system" was that
+of Cristobal. Upon his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he
+picked out a number at random, took out a yearly subscription to
+it, and thought no more about it than one does of a newspaper
+delivered at the door each morning--until one Monday during this
+month of May, after he had squandered something over $500, on
+worthless bits of paper, he strolled into the lottery office and
+was handed an inconspicuous little bag containing $7,500 in yellow
+gold.
+
+Like all Z. P. "rookies" (recruits) I had been warned early to
+beware the "sympathy dodge." But experience is the only real
+teacher. One afternoon I bestraddled a crazy, stilt-legged
+Jamaican horse to go out into the bush beyond the Panama line to
+fetch and deliver a citizen of that sovereign republic who was
+wanted on the Zone for horse-stealing. At the town of Sabanas,
+where those Panamanians who have bagged the most loot since
+American occupation have their "summer" homes,--giddy, brick-
+painted monstrosities among the great trees, deep green foliage
+and brilliant flower-beds (pause a moment and think of brilliant
+red houses in the tropics; it will make you better acquainted with
+the "Spig") I dropped in at the police station for ice-water and
+information. I found it in charge of a negro policeman who knew
+nothing, and had forgotten that. When, therefore, it also chanced
+that an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Animals stopped before the gate with a coachman of Panama, it fell
+upon me to assume command. The horse was the usual emaciated rat
+of an animal indigenous to Panama City. When overhauled, the
+driver was beating the animal uphill on his way to Old Panama to
+bring back a party of tourists visiting the ruins. How he expected
+the decrepit beast to carry four more persons was a mystery. When
+the harness was lifted there was disclosed the expected half-dozen
+large raw sores. We tied the animal in the shade near hay and
+water and adjourned to the station.
+
+The coachman, a weary, unshaven Spaniard whose red eyelids showed
+lack of sleep, was weeping copiously. He claimed to be a
+madrileno--which was evident; that he had been a coachman in Spain
+and Panama all his life without ever before having been arrested--
+which was possible. He was merely one of many drivers for a
+livery-stable owner in Panama. Ordered to go for the tourists, he
+had called his employer's attention to the danger of crossing Zone
+territory with a horse in that condition; but the owner had
+ordered him to cover up the sores with pads and harness and drive
+along.
+
+It was a very sad case. Here was a poor, honest coachman
+struggling to support a wife and I don't recall how many children,
+but any number sounds quite reasonable in Panama, who was about to
+be punished for the fault of another. The paradox of honest and
+coachman did not strike me until later. He was certainly telling
+the truth--you come to recognize it readily in all ordinary cases
+after a few weeks in plain clothes. The real culprit was, of
+course, the employer. My righteous wrath demanded that he and not
+his poor serf be punished. I could not release the driver. But I
+would see that the truth was brought out in court next morning and
+a warrant sworn out against the owner. With showering tears and
+rib-shaking sobs the coachman promised to tell the judge the whole
+story. I went through him, and locking him up with assurances of
+my deepest sympathy and full assistance, stilted on toward the
+little village of shacks scattered out of sight among the hills,
+and valleys across the border.
+
+Coachman, witnesses, and arresting officer, to say nothing of
+horse, carriage, and sores were on hand when court opened next
+morning. As I expected, the judge failed to ask the poor fellow a
+single question that would bring out the complicity of his
+employer; did not in fact discover there was an employer. I asked
+to be sworn, and gave the true version of the case. The judge
+listened earnestly. When I had ended, he recalled the coachman.
+The latter expressed his astonishment that I should have made any
+such statements. He denied them in toto. His employer had nothing
+whatever to do with the case. The fault was entirely his, and no
+one else was in the remotest degree connected with the matter.
+
+"Five dollars!" snapped the judge.
+
+The coachman paid, hitched up the rat of a horse, and wabbled away
+into Panama.
+
+Police business, taking me down into "the Grove" that night, I
+found the driver, clean-shaven and better dressed, waiting for
+fares before the 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 testify
+against the patron. He'd discharge me and blackmail me, and you
+know I have a wife and innumerable children to support. Come on
+over and have a drink."
+
+This justice business, one soon learns, is of the same infallible
+stuff as the rest of life. After all it is only the personal
+opinion of the judge between two persons swearing on oath to
+diametrically opposed statements; and for all the impressiveness
+of deep furrowed brows I did not find that the average judge had
+any more power of reading human nature than the average of the
+rest of us. I well remember the morning when a meek little
+Panamanian was testifying in his own behalf, in Spanish of course,
+when the judge broke in without even asking for a translation of
+the testimony:
+
+"That'll do! Because of your gestures I believe you are trying to
+bunco this court. You are lying--tell him that," this to the negro
+interpreter; and he therewith sentenced the witness to jail.
+
+As if any Panamanian could talk earnestly of anything without
+waving his 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
+and insistent. In the adjoining room, over the "blotter," snapped
+the brusk stereotyped 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're sending 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 had made such short work of the circus wrestler in Gatun and
+whom I had seen 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 to go generally shows no hesitation in his
+exit. But at least a man who dies for the I. C. C. has the affairs
+he left behind him attended to in a thorough manner. In ten
+minutes to a half-hour one of the Z. P. is on the ground taking
+note of every detail of the accident. A special train or engine
+rushes the body to the morgue in Ancon hospital grounds. A
+coroner's jury is soon meeting under the chairmanship of a
+policeman, long reports of everything concerning the victim or the
+accident are soon flowing Administration-ward. The police accident
+report is detailed and in triplicate. There is sure to be in the
+"personal files" at Culebra a history of the deceased and the
+names of his nearest relative or friend both on the Isthmus and in
+the States; for every employee 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 his possessions down to the last lead
+pencil, and to forward them to the legal heirs. A year's pay goes
+to his family--were as much required of every employer and his the
+burden of proving the accident the fault of the employee, how the
+safety appliances in factories would multiply. There is a man
+attached to Ancon hospital whose unenviable duty it is to write a
+letter of condolence to the relatives in the States.
+
+And so the "Kangaroos" or the "Red Men" or whatever his lodge was
+filed behind the I. C. C. casket to the church in Ancon, and
+"Andy" was laid away under another of the simple white iron
+crosses that thickly populate many a Zone hillside, and he was
+charged up to the big debit column of the costs of the canal. On
+the cross is his new number; for officially a "Zoner" is always a
+number; that of the brass-check he wears as a watch-charm alive,
+that at the head of his grave when his canal-digging is over.
+
+Late one unoccupied afternoon I picked up the path behind the
+Administration Building and, skirting a Zone residence, began to
+climb that famous oblong mound that dominates the Pacific end of
+the landscape from every direction,--Ancon Hill. For a way a
+fairly steep and stony path lead through thick undergrowth. Then
+this ceased, and a far steeper trail zigzagged up the face of the
+bare mountain, covered only with thin dead grass. The setting sun
+cast its shadow obliquely across the summit when I reached it,--a
+long ridge, with groves of trees, running off abruptly toward the
+sea. On the opposite side Uncle Sam was cutting away a whole side
+of the hill. But the five o'clock whistle had blown, and whole
+armies of little workmen swarmed across all the landscape far
+below, and silence soon settled down save for the dredges at
+Balboa that chug on through the night. But for myself the hill was
+wholly unpeopled. A sturdy ocean breeze swept steadily across it.
+The sinking sun set the jungle afire in a spot that would have
+startled those who do not know that it rises in the Pacific at
+Panama, crude, glaring colors glowed, fading to gentler and more
+delicate tints, then the evening shadow that had climbed the hill
+with me spread like a great black veil over all the world.
+
+But the moon nearing its full followed almost on the heels of the
+setting sun and, casting its half-day over a scene rich in nature
+and history, invited the eye to swing clear round the hazy circle.
+Below lay Panama dully rumbling with night traffic. Silent Ancon,
+still better lighted, cuddled upon the lower skirts of the hill
+itself. Then beyond, the curving bay, half seen, half guessed,
+with its long promontory dying away into the hazy moonlit
+distance, lighted up here and there by bush fires in the jungled
+hills. Some way out winked the cluster of lights that marked Las
+Sabanas. In front, the placid Pacific, the "South Sea" of the
+Spaniards, spread dimly away into the void of night, its several
+islands seen only by the darker darkness that marked where they
+lay.
+
+On the other side of the hill the rumble of cranes and night labor
+came up from Balboa dock. There, began the canal, which the eye
+could follow away into the dim hilly inland distance--and come
+upon a great cluster of lights that was Corozal, then another
+group that was Miraflores, close followed by those of Pedro
+Miguel; and yet further, rising to such height as to be almost
+indistinguishable from the lower stars the lights of the negro
+cabins of upper Paraiso twinkled dimly above a broad glow that was
+Paraiso itself. There the vista ended. For at Paraiso the canal
+turns to the left for its plunge through Culebra hill, and all
+that follows,--Empire, Cascadas, and far Gatun, was visible only
+in the imagination.
+
+If only the film of time might roll back and there pass again
+before our eyes all that has come to pass within sight of Ancon
+hilltop. Across the bay there, where now are only jungle-tangled
+ruins, Pizarro set out with his handful of vagabonds to conquer
+South America; there old Buccaneer Morgan laid his bloody hand.
+Back in the hills there men died by scores trying to carry a ship
+across the Isthmus, the Spanish viceroys passed with their rich
+trains, there on some unknown knoll Balboa reached four hundred
+years ago the climax of a career that began with stowing away in a
+cask and ended under the headsman's ax--no end of it, down to the
+"Forty-niners" going hopefully out and returning filled with gold
+or disease, or leaving their bones here in the jungle before they
+really were "Forty-niners"; on down to the railroad days with men
+wading in swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying down to
+die. Then if a bit of the future, too, could for a moment be
+unveiled, and one might watch the first ship glide majestically
+and silently into the canal and away into the jungle like some
+amphibious monster.
+
+It was along in those days that we were looking for a "murderous
+assaulter." At a Saturday night dance in a native shack back in
+Miraflores bush the usual riot had broken out about midnight and a
+revolver had come into play. As a result there was a Peruvian
+mulatto up in Ancon hospital who had been shot through the mouth,
+the bullet being 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
+early train had brought in on suspicion a Spanish laborer of
+twenty or twenty-two; a pretty, girlish chap with huge blue eyes
+over which hung long black lashes like those painted on Nurnberg
+dolls. No one with a shadow of faith in human nature left would
+have believed him capable of any crime; any one at all acquainted
+with Spaniards must have known he could 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,
+girlish smile as I marched him through the long hall full of white
+beds and darker inmates. The Peruvian sat bolstered up in his cot,
+a stoical, revengeful glare on his reddish-brown swollen face. He
+gazed a long minute at the boy's face, across which flitted the
+flush of fear and embarrassment, at the big doll's eyes, then
+shook a raised forefinger slowly back and forth before his nose--
+the negative of Spanish-speaking peoples. Then he groaned, spat in
+a tin-can beside him, and called for paper and pencil. In the
+note-book I handed him he wrote in atrociously spelled Spanish:
+
+"The man that came to the dance with this man is the man that shot
+me with a bullet."
+
+The blue-eyed boy promised to point out his companion of that
+night. We took the 10:55 and reached Pedro Miguel during the noon
+hour. Down in a box-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 overalls and working shirt. Here was even less a
+criminal type than the boy.
+
+"Senor," I asked, "did you go to the dance in Miraflores last
+Saturday night with this youth?"
+
+"Si, senor."
+
+"Then I place you under arrest. We will take the one o'clock
+train."
+
+He opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again without having
+uttered a sound. He opened it a second time, then sat suddenly
+down on the low edge of the box-car porch. A more genuinely
+astonished man I have never seen. No actor could have approached
+it. Still, whatever my own conviction, it was my business to bring
+him before his accuser. After a time he recovered sufficiently to
+ask permission to change his clothes, and disappeared in one of
+the resident box-cars. The boy was already being fed in another.
+Had my prisoners been of almost any one of the other seventy-one
+nationalities I should not have thought of letting them out of my
+sight. But the Zone Spaniard's respect for law is proverbial.
+
+"Jose! Pinched Jose!" cried his American boss, when I explained
+that he would find himself a man short that afternoon. "You people
+are sure barking up the wrong tree this time. Why, Jose has been
+my engineer for over two years, and the steadiest man on the Zone.
+He writes for some Spanish paper and tells 'em the truth over
+there so straight that the rest of 'em down here, the anarchists
+and all that bunch, are aching to get him into trouble. But
+they'll never get anything on Jose. Have him tell you about it in
+Spanish if you sabe the lingo."
+
+But Jose was a gallego, whence instead of the voluble flood of
+protesting words one expects from a Spaniard on such an occasion,
+he wrapped himself in a stoical silence. Not until we were on our
+way to the 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.
+Not being a man of wealth, however, nor one satisfied with
+superficial observation, he had sought employment at his trade as
+stationary engineer. Besides laying in a stock for more important
+writing he hoped to do in the future, he was Zone correspondent of
+"El Liberal" of Madrid and other Spanish cities. In the social
+life of his fellow-countrymen on the Isthmus he had taken no part,
+whatever. He was too busy. He did not drink. He could not dance;
+he saw no sense in squandering time in such frivolities. But ever
+since his arrival he had been promising himself to attend one of
+these wild Saturday-night debauches in the edge of the jungle that
+he might use a description of it in some later work. So he had
+coaxed his one personal friend, the boy, to go with him. It was
+virtually the one thing besides work that he had ever done on the
+Zone. They had stayed two hours, and had left the moment the
+trouble began. Yet here he was arrested.
+
+I bade him cheer up, to consider the trip to Ancon merely an
+afternoon excursion on government pass. He remained downcast.
+
+"But think of the experience!" I cried. "Now you can tell exactly
+how it feels to be arrested--first-hand literary material."
+
+But he was not philosopher enough to look at it from that point of
+view. To his Spanish mind arrest, even in innocence, was a
+disgrace for which no amount of "material" could compensate. It is
+a common failing. How many of us set out into the world for
+experience, yet growl with rage or sit downcast and silent all the
+way from Pedro Miguel to Panama if one such experience gives us a
+rough half-hour, or robs us of ten minutes sleep.
+
+At the hospital the Peruvian gurgled and spat, beckoned for paper
+and wrote:
+
+"This is the man."
+
+"What man?" I asked.
+
+"The man who came with that man," he scribbled, nodding his heavy
+face toward 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
+glaring out of his swollen, vindictive countenance propped up in
+his pillows at the 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
+his assailant during the past several days amounted to "a tall
+man, rather short, 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--I permitted myself to accept my own
+opinion as evidence. The Peruvian was in all likelihood in no
+condition to recognize a man from a loup-garou by the time the
+fracas started. Much ardent water had flowed that night. I took
+the suspects down to Ancon station and let them cool off in porch
+rocking-chairs. Then I gave them passes back to Pedro Miguel for
+the evening train. The doll-eyed boy smiled girlishly upon me as
+he descended the steps, but the correspondent strode slowly away
+with the downcast, cheerless countenance of a man who has been
+hurt beyond recovery.
+
+There were strangely contrasted days in the "gum-shoe's" calendar.
+Two examples taken almost at random will give the idea. On May
+twentieth I lolled all day in a porch rocker at Ancon station,
+reading a novel. Along in the afternoon Corporal Castillo drifted
+in. For a time he stood leaning against the desk-rail, his felt
+hat pushed far back on his head, his eyes fixed on some point in
+the interior of China. Then suddenly he snatched up a sheet of I.
+C. C. stationery, dropped down at a typewriter, and wrote at
+express speed a letter in Spanish. Next he grasped a telephone
+and, in the words of the deskman, "spit Spig into the 'phone" for
+several minutes. That over he caught up an envelope, sealed the
+letter and addressed it. An instant later the station was in an
+uproar looking for a stamp. One was found, the Corporal stuck it
+on the letter, fell suddenly motionless and stared for a long time
+at vacancy. Then a new thought struck him. He jerked open a drawer
+of the "gum-shoe" desk, flung the letter inside--where I found it
+accidentally one day some weeks afterward--and dropping into the
+swivel-chair laid his feet on the "gum-shoe" blotter and a moment
+later seemed to have fallen asleep.
+
+By all of which signs those of us who knew him began to suspect
+that the Corporal had something on his mind. Not a few considered
+him the best detective on the force; at least he was different
+enough from a printer's ink detective to be a real one. But
+naturally the strain of heading a detective bureau for weeks was
+beginning to wear upon him.
+
+"Damn it!" said the Corporal suddenly, opening his eyes, "I can't
+be in six places at once. You'll have to handle these cases," and
+he drew from a pocket and handed me three typewritten sheets, then
+drifted away into the dusk. I looked them over and returned to the
+porch rocker and the last chapters of the novel.
+
+A meek touch on the leg awoke me at four next morning. I looked up
+to see dimly a black face under a khaki helmet bent over me
+whispering, "It de time, sah," and fade noiselessly away. It was
+the frontier policeman carrying out his orders of the night
+before. For once there was not a carriage in sight. I stumbled
+sleepily down into Panama and for some distance along Avenida
+Central before I was able to hail an all night hawk chasing a worn
+little wreck of a horse along the macadam. I spread my lanky form
+over the worn cushions and we spavined along the graveled boundary
+line, past the Chinese cemetery where John can preserve and burn
+joss to his ancestors to the end of time, out through East Balboa
+just awakening to life, and reached Balboa docks as day was
+breaking. I was not long there, and the equine caricature ambled
+the three miles back to town in what seemed reasonable time,
+considering. As we turned again into Avenida Central my watch told
+me there was time and to spare to catch the morning passenger. I
+was not a little surprised therefore to hear just then two sharp
+rings on the station gong. I dived headlong into the station and
+brought up against a locked gate, caught a glimpse of two or three
+ladies weeping and the tail of the passenger disappearing under
+the bridge. Americans have introduced the untropical idea of
+starting their trains on time, to the disgust of the "Spig" in
+general and the occasional discomfiture of Americans. I dashed
+wildly out through the station, across Panama's main street, down
+a rugged lane to the first steps descending to the track, and
+tumbled joyously onto a slowly moving train--to discover that it
+was the Balboa labor-train and that the Colon passenger was
+already half-way to Diablo Hill.
+
+A Panama policeman of dusky hue, leaning against a gate-post, eyed
+me drowsily as I slowly climbed the steps, mopping my brow and
+staring at my watch.
+
+"What time does that 6:35 train leave?" I demanded.
+
+"Yo, senor," he said with ministerial dignity, shifting slowly to
+the other shoulder, "no tengo conocimiento de esas cosas" (I have
+no knowledge of those things).
+
+He probably did not know there is a railroad from Panama to Colon.
+It has 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.
+Hounding Diablo Hill the realization that I was hungry came upon
+me simultaneously with the thought that unless I got through the
+door of Corozal hotel by 7:30 I was likely to remain so. Breakfast
+over, I caught the morning supply-train to Miraflores, there to
+dash through the locks for a five-minute interview. I walked to
+Pedro Miguel and, descending from the embankment of the main line,
+"nailed" a dirt-train returning empty and stood up for a breezy
+ride down through the "cut." It was the same old smoky, toilsome
+place, a perceptible bit lower. As in the case of a small boy only
+those can see its growth who have been away 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. The matter there to be
+investigated required ten minutes. That over, I "got in touch" at
+the nearest telephone, and the Corporal's voice called for my
+immediate presence at headquarters. There chanced to be passing
+through Cascadas at that moment a Panama-bound freight, the
+caboose of which caught me up on the fly; and forty minutes later
+I was racing up the long stairs.
+
+There I learned among other things that a man I was anxious to
+have a word with was coming in on the noon train, but would be
+unavailable after arrival. I sprang into a cab and was soon
+rolling away again, past the Chinese cemetery. At the commissary
+crossing in East Balboa we were held up by an empty dirt-train
+returning from the dump. I tossed a coin at the cabman and
+scrambled aboard. The train raced through Corozal, down the grade
+and around the curve at unslacking speed. I dropped 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 and shoulders
+had already disappeared in the tunnel.
+
+The ticket-collector pointed out my man to me in the first
+passenger coach, the "ladies' car"--he is a school-teacher and
+tobacco smoke distresses him--and by the time we pulled into
+Panama I had the desired information. Dinner was not to be thought
+of; I had barely time to dash through the second-class gate and
+back along the track to Balboa labor-train. From the docks a sand-
+train carried me to Pedro Miguel.
+
+There was a craneman in Bas Obispo "cut" whose testimony was
+wanted. I reached him by two short walks and a ride. His
+statements suggested the advisability of questioning his room-
+mate, a towerman in Miraflores freight-yards. Luck would have it
+that my chauffeur friend----was just then passing with an I. C. C.
+motor-car and only a photographer for a New York weekly aboard. I
+found room to squeeze in. The car raced away through the "cut," up
+the declivity, and dropped me at the foot of the tower. The room-
+mate referred me to a locomotive engineer and, being a towerman,
+gave me the exact location of his engine. I found it at the foot
+of Cucaracha slide with a train nearly loaded. By the time the
+engineer had added his whit of information, we were swinging
+around toward the Pacific dump. I dropped off and, climbing up the
+flank of Ancon hill, descended through the hospital grounds.
+
+Where the royal palms are finest and there opens out the broadest
+view of Panama, Ancon, and the bay, I gave myself five minutes'
+pause, after which a carriage bore me to a shop near Cathedral
+Plaza where second-hand goods are bought--and no questions asked.
+On the way back to 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 I reached the third-story back he handed me extradition
+papers to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Panama. A half-hour
+later, wholly outstripping the manana idea, I had signed a receipt
+for the Jap in question and transferred him from Panama to Ancon
+jail. Whereupon I descended to the evening passenger and rode to
+Pedro Miguel for five minutes' conversation, and caught the labor-
+train Panamaward. At Corozal I stepped off for a word with the
+officer on the platform and the 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 the curve and carried
+me away to Panama.
+
+That might have done for the day, but I had gathered a momentum it
+was hard to check. Not long after returning from the police mess
+to the swivel chair a slight omission in the day's program
+occurred to me. I called 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 play
+billiards, sah. Dey one big match on to-night."
+
+Of course I could have "got" him there. But on second thoughts it
+would be better to see him in person and clear up at the same time
+a little matter in one of the labor camps, and not run the risk of
+causing the loss of the billiard championship. Besides Corozal is
+cooler to sleep in than Ancon. In a black starry night I set out
+along the invisible railroad for the first station.
+
+An hour later, everything settled to my satisfaction, I had
+discovered a vacant bed in Corozal bachelor quarters and was
+pulling off my coat preparatory to the shower-bath and a well-
+earned night's repose. Suddenly I heard a peculiar noise in the
+adjoining room, much like that of a seal coming to the surface
+after being long under water. My curiosity awakened, I sauntered a
+few feet along the veranda. Beside one of the cots stood a short,
+roly-poly little man, the lower third of whom showed rosy pink
+below his bell-shaped white nightie. As he turned his face toward
+the light to switch it off I swallowed the roof of my mouth and
+clawed at the clap-boarding for support. It was "the Sloth!" He
+had been transferred. I slipped hastily into my coat and, turning
+up the collar, plunged out into the rain and the night and
+stumbled blindly away on weary legs towards Panama.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+There were four of us that Sunday. "Bish" and I always went for an
+afternoon swim unless police or mess duties forbade. Then there
+was Bridgley, 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 if you never knew him ten pages would give
+you no clearer idea, and if you ever did, the mere mention of the
+name Bridgley will be full and ample description. Still, if you
+must have some sort of a lay figure to hang your imaginings on,
+think of a man who always reminds you of a slender, delicate
+porcelain vase of great antiquity that you know a strong wind
+would smash to fragments,--yet when you accidentally swat it off
+the mantelpiece to the floor it bobs up without a crack. Then you
+grow bolder and more curious and jump on it with both feet in your
+hob-nailed boots, and to your astonishment it not only does not
+break but--
+
+Well, Bridgley was one of us that Sunday afternoon; and then there
+was "the Admiral," well-dressed as always, who turned up at the
+last moment; for which we were glad, as any one would be to have
+"the Admiral" along. So we descended into Panama by the train-
+guard short-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 the beach sands past the old iron hulls about which
+Panamanian laborers are always tinkering under the impression that
+they are working. This time we walked. I don't recall now whether
+it was quarter-cracks, or the Lieutenant hadn't slept well--no, it
+couldn't have been that, for the Lieutenant never let his personal
+mishaps trample on his good nature--or whether "Bish" had decided
+to try to reduce weight. At any rate we were afoot, and thereby
+hangs the tale--or as much of a tale as there is to tell.
+
+We tramped resolutely on along the hard curving beach past the
+disheveled bath-houses before which ladies from the Zone gather in
+some force of a Sunday afternoon. For this time we were really out
+for a swim rather than to display our figures. On past the light-
+brown bathers, and the chocolate-colored bathers, and the jet
+black bathers who seemed to consider that color covering enough,
+till we came to the big silent saw-mill at the edge of the
+cocoanut grove that we had been invited long since to make a Z. P.
+dressing-room.
+
+Before us spread the reposing, powerful, sun-shimmering Pacific.
+Across the bay, clear as an etching, lay Panama backed by Ancon
+hill. In regular cadence the ocean swept in with a hoarse,
+resistless roll on the sands.
+
+We dived in, keeping an eye out for the sharks we knew never come
+so far in and probably wouldn't bite if they did. The sun blazed
+down white hot from a cloudless sky. This time the Lieutenant and
+Sergeant Jack had not been able to come, but we arranged the races
+and jumps on the 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
+the hundred-yard dash we were in the midst of----it was undeniably
+raining. Half a moment later "bucketsful" would have been a weak
+simile. All the pent up four months of an extra long rainy season
+seemed to have been loosed without warning. The blanket of water
+blotted out Panama and Ancon hill across the bay, blotted out the
+distant American bathers, then the light-brown ones, then the
+chocolate-tinted, then even the jet black ones close at hand.
+
+We remained under water for a time to keep dry. But the rain
+whipped our faces as with thousands of stinging lashes. We crawled
+out and dashed blindly up the bank toward the saw-mill, the rain
+beating on our all but bare skins, feeling as it might to stand
+naked in Miraflores locks and let the sand pour down upon us from
+sixty feet above. When at last we stumbled under cover and up the
+stairs to where our clothing hung, it was as if a weight of many
+tons had been lifted from our shoulders.
+
+The saw-mill was without side-walls; consisted only of a sheet-
+iron roof and floors, on the former of which the storm pounded
+with a roar that made only the sign language feasible. It was now
+as if we were surrounded on all sides by solid walls of water and
+forever shut off from the outer world--if indeed that had
+survived. Sheets of water slashed in further and further across
+the floor. We took to huddling behind beams and under saw-benches
+--the militant storm hunted us out and wetted us bit by bit. "The
+Admiral" and I tucked ourselves away on the 45-degree eye-beams up
+under the roaring roof. The angry water gathered 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 doubled its rapidity. That was the day when little
+harmless streams tore themselves apart into great gorges and left
+their pathetic little bridges alone and deserted out in the middle
+of the gulf. That was the famous May twelfth, 1912, when Ancon
+recorded the greatest rainfall in her history,--7.23 inches,
+virtually all within three hours. Three of us were ready to
+surrender and swim home through it. But there was "the Admiral" to
+consider. He was dressed clear to his scarf-pin--and Panama
+tailors tear horrible holes in a police salary. So we waited and
+dodged and squirmed into closer holes for another hour; and grew
+steadily wetter.
+
+Then at length dusk began to fall, and instead of slacking with
+the day the fury of the storm increased. It was then that "the
+Admiral" capitulated, seeing fate plainly in league with his
+tailor; and wigwagging the decision to us beside him, he led the
+way down the stairs and dived into the world awash.
+
+Wet? We had not taken the third step before we were streaming like
+fire hose. There was nearly an hour of it, splashing knee-deep
+through what had been when we came out little dry sandy hollows;
+steering by guess, for the eye could make out nothing fifty yards
+ahead, even before the cheese-thick darkness fell; bowed like
+nonogenarians under the burden of water; staggering back and forth
+as the storm caught us crosswise or the earth gave way under us.
+"The Admiral's" patent-leather shoes--but why go into painful
+details? Those who were in Panama on that memorable afternoon can
+picture it all for themselves, and the others will never know. The
+wall of water was as thick as ever when we fought our bowed and
+weary way up over the railroad bridge and, summoning up the last
+strength, splurged tottering into "Angelini's."
+
+When our streaming had so far subsided that they recognised us for
+solvent human beings, encouraging concoctions were set before us.
+Bridgley, fearing the after effects, acquired a further quart
+bottle of protection, and when we had gathered force for the last
+dash we plunged out once more toward our several goals. As the
+door of 111 slammed behind me, the downpour suddenly slackened. As
+I paused before my room to drain, it stopped raining.
+
+I supped on bread, beer, and cheese from over the frontier--we had
+arrived thirty seconds too late for Ancon police mess. Then when I
+had saved what was salvable from the wreckage and reclad in such
+wardrobe as had luckily remained at home, I strolled over toward
+the police station to put in a serene and quiet evening.
+
+But it has long since been established that troubles flock
+together. As I crunched up the gravel walk between the hedge-rows,
+wild riot broke on my ear. Ancon police station was in eruption.
+From the Lieutenant to the newest uniformless "rookie" every
+member of the force was swarming in and out of the building. The
+Zone and Panama telephones were ringing in their two opposing
+dialects, the deskman was shouting his own peculiar brand of
+Spanish into one receiver and bawling English at the other, all
+hands were diving into old clothes, the most apathetic of the
+force were girding up their loins with the adventurous fire of the
+old 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
+was shouted at me over a telephone. Murder! A white Greek--who
+ever heard of a colored Greek?--with a white shirt on had shot a
+man at Pedro Miguel at 6:35. Every road and bypath of escape to
+Panama was already blocked, armed men would meet the assassin
+whatever way he might take. I went down to meet the evening train,
+resolved after that to strike out 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 it could never again equal
+the afternoon record.
+
+Then suddenly the excitement exploded. It was only a near-murder.
+Two Colombians had been shot, but would in all probability
+recover. The news reached me as I stood at the second-class gate
+scanning the faces of the great multicolored river of passengers
+that poured out into the city. For two hours, one by one with
+crestfallen mien, the manhunters leaked back into Ancon station
+and, the case having dwindled to one of regular daily routine, by
+eleven we were all abed.
+
+In the morning the "Greek chase" fell to me. More detailed
+description of the culprit had come in during the night, including
+the bit of information that he was a bad man from the Isle of
+Crete. The belt-straining No. 38 oiled and loaded, I set off on an
+assignment that was 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
+with the young Greek who had exchanged hats with the assassin
+after the crime. That afternoon a volunteer joined me. He was a
+friend of the wounded men, a Peruvian black as jade, but without a
+suggestion of the negro in anything but his outward appearance. He
+was of the size and build of a Sampson in his prime, spoke a
+Spanish so clear-cut it seemed to belie his African blood, and had
+the restless vigor acquired in a youth of tramping over the Andine
+ranges.
+
+I piled him into a cab and we rolled away to East Balboa, to climb
+upon an empty dirt-train and drop off as it raced through
+Miraflores, the sturdy legs of the Peruvian saving him where his
+practice would not have. Up in the bush between Pedro Miguel and
+Paraiso we found a hut where the Greek had stopped for water and
+gone on up a gully. We set out to follow, mounting partly on hands
+and knees, partly dragging ourselves by grass and bushes up what
+had been and would soon be again a torrential mountain stream. For
+hours we tore through the jungle, up hills steeper than the path
+of righteousness, following now a few faint foot-prints or
+trampled bushes, now a hint from some native bush dweller. The
+rain outside vied with the sweat within as to which would first
+soak us through. To make things merrier I had not only to wear an
+arsenal but a coat atop to conceal it from the general public.
+
+To mention the holes I crawled into and the clues I followed
+during the next few days would be more tiresome than a Puritan
+prayer. By day I was dashing back and forth through all Ancon
+district, by night prowling about the grimier sections of Panama
+city. Almost daily I got near enough to sniff the prey. Now it was
+a Greek confectioner on Avenida Central who admitted that the
+fugitive had called on him during the night, now a Panamanian
+pesquisa whose stool-pigeon had seen him out in the bush, then the
+information that he had stopped to shave and otherwise alter his
+appearance in some shack half-way across the Zone and afterward
+struck off for Panama by an unused route. The clues were pendulum-
+like. They took me a half-dozen times at least out the winding
+highway to Corozal, on to Miraflores and even further. The rainy
+season and the reign of umbrellas had come. It had been formally
+opened on that memorable Sunday afternoon. There was still
+sunshine at times, but always a wet season heaviness to the
+atmosphere; and the rains were already giving the rolling jungle
+hills a tinge of new green. There was nothing to be gained by
+hurrying. The fugitive was as likely to crawl forth from one place
+as another along the rambling road. Here I paused to kill a lizard
+or to watch the clumsy march of one of the huge purple and many-
+colored land-crabs, there to gaze away across a jungled valley
+soft and fuzzy in the humid air like some Corot painting.
+
+I even sailed for San Francisco in the quest. For of course each
+outgoing 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 the fore and aft schooner Meteor far out in the
+bay. When I plunged down into the cabin the peeled-headed German
+captain was seated at a table before a heap of "Spig" dollars,
+paying off his black shore hands. He solemnly asserted he had no
+Greek aboard, and still more solemnly swore that if he found one
+stowed away he would turn him over to the police in San Francisco
+--which was kind of him but would not have helped matters. There
+are several men running gaily about San Francisco streets who
+would be very welcome in certain quarters on the Zone and sure of
+lodging and food for a long time to come.
+
+By this time the tug Bolivar had us in tow, the captain went
+racing over his ship like any of his crew, tugging at the ropes,
+and we were gliding out across Panama bay, past the little
+greening islands, the curving panorama of the city and Ancon hill
+growing smaller and smaller behind--bound for 'Frisco. What ho!
+the merry "windjammer" with her stowed sails and smell of tar
+awakened within me old memories, hungry and grimy for the most
+part. But this was no independent, self-respecting member of the
+Wind-wafted sisterhood. Far out in the offing lay a steamer of the
+same line that was to TOW the Meteor to the Golden Gate! How is
+the breed of sailors fallen! The few laborers aboard would take an
+occasional wheel, pick oakum, and yarn their unadventurous yarns.
+As we drew near, a boat was lowered to set me aboard 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 than three
+Irishmen, any one of whom--facetiousness seemed to be one of the
+captain's characteristics--I might have and welcome. A few moments
+later I was back aboard the tug waving farewell to steamer and
+"windjammer" as they pushed away into the twilight sea, and the
+Bolivar turned shoreward.
+
+I received a "straight tip" one evening that the fugitive Greek
+was hiding 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. So next morning as the thick gray dawn of this
+tropical land was melting into day, I descended at Bas Obispo,
+through the canal to Gamboa and struck off into the dense dripping
+jungle. The rainy season had greened things up and gone--
+temporarily, of course, for in a day or two it would be on us
+again in all tropical fury. In the few days since the first rain
+the landscape had changed like a theater decoration, a green not
+even to be imagined in the temperate zone.
+
+It turned out that the ancient village of Cruces was a mere two-
+mile stroll from the canal, a thatch-roofed native town of some
+thirty dwellings on the rocky shore of an inner curve of the
+Chagres, where travelers from Balboa to the last "Forty-niner"
+disembarked from their thirty-six mile ride up the river and
+struck on along the ten-mile road through the jungle to Panama--
+the famous Cruces trail. Except for its associations the village
+was without interest--except some personal Greek interest. Sour
+looks were chiefly my portion, for the villagers have 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 of the wilderness grew every tropical thing; countless
+giant ferns, draping tangles of vines, the mango tree with its
+rounded dome of leaves like the mosque of Omar done in greenery,
+the humble pineapple with its unproportionate fruit, everywhere
+the banana, king of vegetables, clothed in its own immense leaves,
+the frondy zapote, now and then in a hollow a clump of yellowish-
+green bamboo, though not numerous or nearly so large as in many
+another tropical land, above all else the symmetrical Gothic
+fronds of the palm nodding in a breeze the more humble vegetation
+could not know. The constant music of insect life sounded in my
+ears; everywhere were flowers of brilliant hue, masses of bush
+blossoms not unlike the lilac in appearance, but like all down on
+the Isthmus, odorless--or rather with a pungent scent, like strong
+catsup.
+
+Four months earlier I should have been chary of diving back into
+the Panamanian "bush" alone, above all on a criminal hunt. But it
+needs only a little time on the Zone to make one laugh at the
+absurd stories of 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 they were all of that familiar languid
+Central American type, blinking at me apathetically out of the
+shade of their huts, crowding to one edge of the trail as I
+passed, eying me silently, a bit morosely, somewhat frightened
+because their experience of Americans is of a discourteous
+creature who shouts at them in a strange tongue and swears at them
+because they do not understand it. The moment they heard their own
+customary greetings they changed to children delighted to do
+anything to oblige--even to the extent of dragging their indolent
+forms erect to lead the way a quarter-mile through the bush to
+some isolated shack. Far from contemplating any injury, all these
+wayward children of the jungle 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 than the 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 a joyous, brilliant day overhead. Down in the dense, rampant,
+singing jungle I sweated profusely--and enjoyed it. Choking for a
+drink in a hutless section, I took one of the crooked, tunnel-like
+trails to the left in the direction of the Chagres. But it
+squirmed off through thick jungle, through banana groves and
+untended pineapple gardens to come out at last at an astonished
+hut on a knoll, from which was not to be seen a sign of the river.
+I crawled through another struggling side-trail further on and
+this time reached the stream, but at a bank too sheer and bush-
+matted to descend. The third attempt brought me to where the river
+made a graceful bend at my feet and I descended an abrupt jungle
+bank to drink and stroll a bit along the stony shore; then plunged
+in for a swim. It was just the right temperature, with dense
+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
+native dug-out made of the hollowed trunk of a tree, usually the
+cedro--though to a jungle native any tree is a "cedro" if he does
+not happen to think of its right name. Twenty to thirty feet long,
+sometimes piled high with vegetables, sometimes with several
+natives seated Indian file in the bottom, the gunwales a bare two
+or three inches above the water, they needed nice management,
+especially in the rapids below Cruces. The locomotive power,
+generally naked to the waist, stood up in the craft and climbed
+his polanca, or long pike pole, hand over hand, every naked brown
+muscle in play, moving in perfect rhythm and apparent ease even
+up-stream against the powerful current.
+
+Soon after Chagres and trail parted company, the former to wind on
+up through the jungle hills to its birthplace in the land of
+Darien and wild Indians, the latter to strike for the Pacific.
+Over a mildly rough country it led, down into tangled ravines, up
+over dense forested hillocks where the jungle had been fought back
+by Uncle Sam and on the brows of which I halted to drink of the
+fresh breeze sweeping across from the Atlantic. All this time not
+a suggestion of anything Greek, though I managed by some simple
+strategy to cast a sweeping glance into every hovel along the way.
+
+Then came the real Cruces trail--the rest only follows the general
+direction. I fell upon it unexpectedly. It is still there as it
+was when the Peruvian viceroys and their glittering trains
+clattered along it, surprisingly well preserved; a cobbled way
+some three feet wide of that rough and bumpy variety the Spaniard
+even to-day fancies a real road, broken in places but still well
+marked, leading away southward through the wilderness.
+
+Overhead were tall spreading trees laden with blossomless orchids.
+Under some of them was broad grassy shade; but the surrounding
+wall of vegetation cut off all breeze. The way was intersected by
+many roads of leaf-cutting ants, as level, wide and well-built in
+their proportion as the old Roman highways, with such an
+industrious throng going and coming upon them as one could find
+nowhere equaled, unless it be on the Grand Trunk Road of India.
+
+Then suddenly there appeared the hut that had been described to
+me. I surrounded it and, hand upon the butt of my No. 38, closed
+in upon the place, then rushed it with all forces.
+
+There was not a sign of human life in the vicinity. The door was
+tied shut with a single strand of old rope, but there was no
+question that the fugitive might be hiding inside, for the reed
+walls had holes in them large enough to drive a sheep through, and
+there was nothing within to hide behind. I thrust an arm through
+an opening and dragged the large and heavy earthenware water-jar
+to me for a drink, and pushed on.
+
+Squatter's cabins were now appearing, as contrasted with the
+native bushman'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 might be a hiding-place. I made ostensibly casual
+inquiries, interlarded between stories, at several of them, and at
+length established that the Greek had been there not long before,
+but was elsewhere now. Then about four of the afternoon I burst
+out suddenly in sight of a broad modern highway, and leaving the
+ancient route as it headed away toward Old Panama, I turned aside
+to the modern city.
+
+Then I was "called off the Greek chase"; and a couple of evenings
+later, along with the evening train and the evening fog, the
+Inspector "blew in" from his forty-two days' vacation in the
+States, like a breath from far-off Broadway. Buffalo Bill had been
+duly opened and started on his season's way, the absent returned,
+and Corporal Castillo suddenly dwindled again to a mere corporal.
+
+As everything must have its flaws, perhaps the chief one that
+might be charged 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 will suffice.
+
+During the month of May I was assigned the investigation of
+certain alleged conditions in Panama's restricted district. The
+then head of the plain-clothes division gave me carte blanche, but
+suggested that I need not spare my expense account in libating the
+various establishments until I "got acquainted" sufficiently with
+the inmates to pick up indirectly the information desired.
+
+Which general line I followed and, the information having been
+gathered and the report made up, I proceed to make out my
+expenditures of $45 for the month to forward to Empire for
+reimbursement. Now it needs no deep detective experience to know
+that in such cases you naturally begin with, "Well, what you going
+to drink, girls?" and end by paying the 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--$6.50?"
+
+But here I began to feel the tangling strands. Was it not stated
+that all applications for reimbursement required an exact itemized
+account of each separate expenditure, with the price of each? It
+did. But in the first place I did not know half the beverages
+consumed in that investigation by sight, smell, or name. In the
+second place I came ostensibly as a "rounder"; it would perhaps
+have been advisable at the close of each evening's entertainment
+to draw out note-book and pencil and starting the round of the
+table announce:
+
+"Now, girls, I'm a dee-tective. No, keep yer places, I ain't going
+to pinch nobody. Anyhow I'm only a Zone detective. But I just want
+to ask you a few questions. Now, Mamie, what's that you're
+drinking? Ah! A gin ricky. And just how much does that cost--here?
+And you, Flossie? An absinthe frappe? Ah! Very good. And what is
+the retail price of that particular drink?"--and so on ad nauseum.
+
+"Very true," replied authority, "that would of course be
+impossible. But to be reimbursed you must set down in detail every
+item of expenditure, and its price."
+
+Reason and government red tape move in two parallel lines, with
+the usual meeting-place.
+
+Nor was that all. While the black Peruvian was on my staff I gave
+him money for food. It was not merely expected, it was definitely
+so ordered. Yet when I set down:
+
+"May 27, To Peruvian for food--$.50." authority threw up its hands
+in horror. Did I not know that reimbursements were ONLY for
+"liquor and cigars, cab or boat hire, and meals away from home?" I
+did. But I also knew that superiors had ordered me to feed the
+Peruvian. "To be sure!" cried astounded authority. "But you set
+down such an expenditure as follows:
+
+"'May 27, Two bottles of beer, Pan., investigation--$.50.'
+
+"And as you are allowed cab fare ONLY for yourself, when you take
+the Peruvian 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 open another investigation and gather from all the
+Z. P. authorities on the subject, from Naos Island to Paraiso, the
+name and price of every known beverage. Then when I had fitted
+together a picture puzzle of these that summed up to the amount I
+had actually spent, I was called upon to sign a statement
+thereunder that "this is a true and exact account of expenditures
+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
+unless crime began to pick up down at the Pacific end of the Zone,
+I should find myself again banished to the foreign land of Gatun.
+For there had been a distinct rise in the criminal commodity at
+that end during the past weeks. The premonition soon fell true.
+
+"Take the 10:55 to Gatun," said the Inspector one morning, without
+looking up from his filing case, "Corporal Macey will tell you
+about it when you get there,"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+"Why, the fact is," said Corporal Macey, lighting his meerschaum
+pipe until the match burned down to his fingers," several little
+burglary stunts have been pulling themselves off since the
+sergeant went on vacation. But the most aggrayvaatin' is this new
+one of twinty-two quarts 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
+life again, derelicting about Gatun and vicinity by day, wandering
+the nights away in black, noisy New Gatun and along the winding
+back road under the cloud-scudding sky. Yet it was a different
+life. Gatun had changed. Even her concrete light-house was winking
+all night now up among the I. C. C. dwellings. The breeze from off
+the Caribbean was heavy and lifeless. The landscape looked wet and
+lush and rampant, of a deep-seated green, and instead of the
+china-blue skies the dull, leaden-gray heavens seemed to hang low
+and heavy overhead, like a portending fate. On the winding back
+road the jungle trees still stood out against the night sky, at
+times, too, there was a moon, but only a pale silver one that
+peered weakly here and there through the scudding gray clouds. The
+air grew more thick and sultry day by day, the heat was sticky,
+the weather dripping, with the sun only an irregular whitish
+blotch in the sky. Through the open windows the heavy, damp night
+came miasmically floating in, the very cigarettes mildewed in my
+pockets. Earth and air seemed heavy and toil-bowed by comparison
+with other days. The jungle still hummed busily, yet, it seemed, a
+bit mournfully as if preparing for production and unhilarious with
+the task before it, like a woman first learning of her pregnancy.
+Life seemed to hang more heavily even on humanity; "Zoners" looked
+less gay and carefree than in the sunny dry season, though still
+far more so than in the north. One could not shake off a
+premonition of impending disaster in I know not what form--like
+that of Teufelsdroeck before he entered the "Center of
+Indifference."
+
+Dr. O--- of the Sanitary Department had gone up into the interior
+along the Trinidad river to hunt mosquitoes. Why he went so far
+away for them in this season was hard to understand. There he was,
+however, and the order had come to bring him back to civilization.
+The execution thereof fell, of course, to my friend B---, who to
+the world at large is merely Policeman No.----, to the force
+"Admiral of the Inland Fleet," and in the general scheme of things
+is a luckier man than Vanderchild to have for his task in life the
+patrolling of Gatun Lake. B--- invited me to go along. There was
+nothing particular doing in the criminal line around Gatun just
+then; moreover the doctor was known to be well armed and there was
+no telling just how much resistance he might offer a single
+policeman. I accepted.
+
+I was at the appointed rendezvous promptly at seven, a pocket
+filled with commissary cigars. Strict truthfulness demands the
+admission that it was really eight, however, when B--- came
+wandering down the muddy steps behind the railroad station,
+followed by a black prisoner with a ten-gallon can of gasoline on
+his head. When that had been poured into the tank, we were off
+across the ever-rising waters of Gatun Lake. For Gatun police
+launch is one of those peculiar motor-boats that starts the same
+day you had planned to.
+
+It was such a day as could not have been bettered had it been made
+to order, with a week to think out the details,--a dry-season day
+even to the Atlantic breeze that goes with it, a sort of Indian
+summer of the rainy season; though the heavy battalions of gray
+clouds that hung all around the horizon as if awaiting the order
+to charge warned the Zone to make merry while it might, for to-
+morrow it would surely rain--in deluges. The lake, much higher now
+than in my former Gatun days, was licking at the 27-foot level
+that morning. Under the brilliant blue sky it looked like some
+vast unruffled mirror--which is no figure of speech, but plain
+fact.
+
+"Through a Forest in a Motor-boat" we might have dubbed the trip.
+We had soon crossed the unbroken expanse of the lake and were
+moving through a submerged forest. Splendid royal palms stood up
+to their necks in the water, corpulent, century-old giants of the
+jungle stood on tip-toe with their jagged noses just above the
+surface, gasping their last. Great mango-trees laden with fruit
+were descending into the flood. The lake was so mirror-like we
+could see the heads of drowning palm-trees and the blue sky with
+its wisps of snow-white feathery clouds as plainly below as above,
+so mirror-like the protruding stump of a palm looked like a piece
+of just double that length and exactly equal ends floating upright
+like a water thermometer, so reflective that the broken end of a
+branch showing above the surface appeared to be an acute angle of
+wood floating exactly at the angle in impossible equilibrium.
+
+Our prisoner and crew were from "Bahbaydos"--only you can't
+pronounce it as he did, nor make the "a" broad enough, nor show
+the inside of your red throat clear back to the soft palate to
+contrast with the glistening black skin of your carefree, grinning
+face. Theoretically he was being punished for assault and battery.
+But if this is punishment to be sentenced to cruise around on
+Gatun Lake I wonder crime on the Zone is so rare and unusual. This
+much I am sure, if I were in that particular "Badgyan's" shoes--
+no, he had none; but his tracks, say--the day my time ran out I
+should pick a quarrel with a Jamaican and leave his countenance in
+such a condition that the judge could find no grounds for a
+reasonable doubt in the matter.
+
+We were mounting the river Trinidad. River, yes, but we followed
+it only because it had kept back the jungle and left a way free of
+tree-tops, not because there was not water enough anywhere, in any
+direction, to float a boat of many times our draught. Turns so
+sharp we rocked in our own wake; once we passed acres upon acres
+of big, cod-like fish floating dead upon the water among the
+branches and the forest rubbish. It seems the lake in rising
+spread over some poisonous mineral in the soil. But life there was
+none, except the rampant green dying plant life in every direction
+to the horizon. There were not even birds, other than now and then
+a stray snow-white slender one of the heron species that fled
+majestically away across the face of the nurtureless waters as we
+steamed--no, gasolined down upon it. Soon after leaving Gatun we
+had passed a couple of jungle families on their way to market in
+their cayucas laden with mounds of produce,--plump mangoes with a
+maidenly blush on either cheek, fat yellow bananas, grass-green
+plantains, a duck or a chicken standing tied by one leg on top of
+it all and gazing complacently around at the scene with the air of
+an experienced tourist. It was two hours later that we sighted the
+next human being. He was a solitary old native paddling about at
+the entrance to the "grass-bird region" in a huge dugout as time-
+scarred as himself.
+
+It was near here that weeks before I had turned with "Admiral" B--
+--up a little stream now forever gone to a knoll on which sat the
+thatched shelter of a negro who had "taken to the bush" and
+refused to move even when notified that he was living on U. S.
+public domain. When we had knocked from the trees a box of mangoes
+and turkey-red maranones, B---- touched a match to the thatch roof
+and almost before we could regain the launch the shack was pouring
+skyward in a column of smoke. Even the squatter's old table and
+chair and a barrel of tumbled odds and ends entirely outside the
+hut--it had no walls--caught fire, and when, we lost sight of the
+knoll only the blazing stumps of the four poles that had supported
+the roof remained.
+
+B---- had burned whole villages in this lake territory, after the
+owners with legal claims had been paid condemnation damages. Long
+ago the natives had been warned to move, and the banks of the
+lake-to-be specified. But many of these skeptical children of
+nature had taken this as a vain "yanqui" boast and either refused
+to move until burned out or had rebuilt their hovels on land that
+in a few months more would also be flooded.
+
+The rescue expedition proceeded. Once we got caught in the top-
+most branches of a tree, released from which we pushed on along
+the sinuous river that had no banks. It was not hot, even at
+noonday. We sweated a bit in poling a thirty-foot boat out of a
+tree-top, but cooled again directly we were off. My kodak was far
+away at the other end of the Zone. But then, on second thought it
+was better for once to enjoy nature as it was without trying to
+carry it away. Kodaking is a species of covetousness, anyway, an
+attempt to bear away home with us and hoard for our own the best
+we come upon in our travels. Whereas here, of course, it was
+impossible. The greatest of artists could not have carried away a
+tenth of that scene, a scene so fascinating that though we had
+tossed into the bottom of the boat at the start a bundle of fresh
+New York papers--and fresh New York papers are not often scorned
+down on the Zone--they still lay in the bottom of the boat when
+the trip ended.
+
+At length little thatched cottages began to appear on knolls along
+the way, and as we chugged our way around the tree-tops upon them
+the inhabitants slipped quickly into some clothes that were
+evidently kept for just such emergencies. Then we began nearing
+higher land, so that the 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. For though there was sunk already
+beneath the flood a forest greater than ten Fontainebleaus, the
+lake was steadily rising a full two inches a day. Where it touched
+that morning the 27-foot level, in a few months more, says "the
+Colonel," it will reach the 87-foot level and spread over one
+hundred and sixty-four square miles of territory--and when "the
+Colonel" makes an assertion wise men hesitate to put their money
+on the other horse. Then will all this vast area with more green
+than in all the state of Missouri disappear forever beneath the
+flood and man may dive down, down into the forest and see what the
+world was like in Noah's time, and fancy the sunken cities of
+Holland, for many a famous route, and villages older than the days
+of Pizarro will be forever wiped out by the rising waters--a scene
+to be beheld today nowhere else, and in a few years not even here.
+At last we were really in a river, an overflowed river, to be
+sure, where it would have been hard to find a landing-place or a
+bank among those tree trunks knee-deep in water. We had long since
+crossed the Zone line, but our badges were still valid. For it has
+pleased the Republic of Panama, at a whispered word from "Tio
+Sam," to cede to the Z. P. command over all Gatun 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
+trees and I looked up to see Y----, of the Smithsonian, fully
+dressed, standing waist-deep in the water at the edge of the
+forest, waving an insect 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
+I fancy 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 be lake bottom, we found a native shack transformed into the
+headquarters of a scientific expedition. We sat down to a frontier
+lunch which called for none of the excuses made for it by Y----
+when he appeared in his dripping full-dress and joined us without
+even bothering to change his water-spurting shoes. In his boxes he
+had carefully stuck away side by side an untold number of members
+of the mosquito family. Queer vocation; but then, any vocation is
+good that gives an excuse to live out 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; even nature cannot duplicate so perfect a thing. But two
+raging showers gave us views of the drowning jungle under another
+aspect, and between them we awakened vast rolling echoes across
+the silent flooded world by shooting at flocks of little birds
+with an army rifle that would have killed an elephant.
+
+It is not hard to realize why the bush native does not love the
+American. Put yourself in his breechclout. Suppose a throng of
+unsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all
+the world you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside
+world wanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from
+somewhere you never heard of, to somewhere you did not know.
+Suppose a representative of that unsympathetic government came
+snorting down upon you one day in a wild fearful invention they
+called a motor-boat, as you were lolling under the thatch roof
+your grandfather built, and cried:
+
+"Come on! Get out of here! We're going to burn your house and turn
+this country into a lake."
+
+Flood the land which was your great-grand-father's, the spot where
+you used to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane
+where your mother's courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree
+under which she was wedded--if matters were ever carried to that
+ceremonious length. What though this foreign nation gave you a bag
+of peculiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never
+seen a score of such coins in your life and barely knew the use of
+them, being acquainted with life only as it is picked from a
+mango-tree? The foreigners had cried, "Take this money and go buy
+a farm somewhere else," and you looked around you and saw all the
+world you had ever really known the existence of sinking beneath
+the rising waters. Where would you go, think you, to buy that new
+farm? Even if you fled and found 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 of metal to get food out of
+instead of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house your
+grandfather built ever since you were born and dropped mangoes
+whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would be some
+peeved.
+
+It was midafternoon when the white bulk of Gatun locks rose on the
+horizon. Then the lake opened out, the great dam, that is rather a
+connecting link between two ranges of hills, spread across all the
+landscape, and at four I raced up the muddy steps behind the
+station to a telephone. Five minutes later I was hurrying away
+across locks and dam 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 have
+remained longer without regret, but the world is wide and life is
+short. Soon came the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back
+across the 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 the same Empire of the census. Almost all the old
+crowd was gone; one by one they had "kissed the Zone good-by."
+"The boss" of those days had never returned, "smiling Johnny" had
+been transferred, even Ben had "done quit an' gone back to
+Bahbaydos." The Zone is like a small section of life; as in other
+places where generations are short one catches there a hint of
+what old age will be. It was like wandering over the old campus
+when those who were freshmen in our day had hawked their gowns and
+mortarboards and gone their way; I felt like a man in his dotage
+with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation about him.
+
+I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far down below was the
+same struggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the
+"cut" with its jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still
+stretching away endless in either direction. Here as in the world
+at large generations of us may come and pass away, but the tearing
+of the shovels at the rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains
+for the Pacific goes unbrokenly on, as the world and its work will
+continue without a pause when we are gone indeed.
+
+Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor
+will be submerged and forever hidden from view. The swift growth
+of the tropics will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels,
+and palm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will
+seem almost a natural channel. Then blase travelers lolling in
+their deck chairs will gaze about them and snort:
+
+"Huh! Is that all we got for nine years' work and half a billion
+dollars?" 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 to the last center table, they will not
+recall the rebuilding of the entire P. R. R., nor scores of little
+items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on
+the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so
+essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a
+trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the canal is
+the accomplishment of the United States in showing the natives how
+life can be lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet
+the lesson will not be learned, and on the heels of the last canal
+builder will return all the old slovenliness and disease, and the
+native will sink 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
+had landed on the Zone five months before was being razed to give
+place to the permanent, reenforced-concrete city that is to be the
+canal headquarters. Balboa police station was only a pile of
+lumber, with a band of negroes drilling away the very rock on
+which it had stood. I took a last view of the Pacific and her
+islands to far Taboga, where Uncle Sam sends his recuperating
+children to enjoy the sea baths, hill climbs, and unrivaled pine-
+apples. It was never my good fortune to get to Taboga. With thirty
+days' sick leave a year and countless ailments of which I might
+have been cured free of charge and with the best of care, I could
+not catch a thing. I had not even the luck of my friend--who, by
+dint of cross-country runs in the jungle at noonday and similar
+industrious efforts, worked up at last a temperature of 99 degrees
+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
+last ride across the Isthmus. There was a memory tucked away in
+every corner. Corozal hotel was still rattling with dishes,
+Paraiso peeped out from its lap of hills, Culebra with its
+penitentiary where burglarizing negroes go, sunk away into the
+past. Railroad Avenue in Empire was still lined with my
+"enumerated" tags; through an open door I caught a glimpse of a
+familiar short figure, one foot resting lightly and familiarly on
+a misapplied gas-pipe, the elbow crooked as if something were held
+between the fingers. At Bas Obispo I strained my eyes in vain to
+make out a familiar face in the familiar uniform, there was a
+glimpse of "Old Fritz" water-gauge as we rumbled across the
+Chagres, and the train churned away into the heavy green
+uninhabited night.
+
+Only once more was I aroused, as the lights of Gatun flashed up;
+then we rolled past the noisy glaring corner of New Gatun and on
+to Colon. In Cristobal police station I put badge and passes into
+a heavy envelope and dropped them into the train-guard's box; then
+turned in for my last night on the Zone. For the steamer already
+had her fires up that would bear me, and him who was the studious
+corporal of Miraflores, away in the morning to South America. My
+police days were ended.
+
+Then a last hand to you all, oh, Z. P. May you live long and
+continue to do your duty frankly and unafraid. I found you men
+when I expected only policemen. I reckon my days among you time
+well spent and I left you regretting that I could stay no longer
+with you--and when I leave any place with regret it must be
+possessed of some exceeding subtle charm. 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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Zone Policeman 88, by Harry A. Franck
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