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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





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