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.