Frequent as are these melancholy errors, scores of "Zoners" cling faithfully to their arithmetical superstitions. Many a man spends his recreation hours working out the winning numbers by some secret recipe of his own. There are men on the Z. P. who, if you can get them started on the subject of lottery tickets, will keep it up until you run away, showing you the infallibility of their various systems, believing the drawing to be honest, yet oblivious to the fact that both the one and the other cannot be true. Dreams are held in special favor. It is probably safe to assert that one-half the numbers over 1,000 and under 10,000 that appear in Zone dreams are snapped up next day in lottery tickets. Many have systems of figuring out the all-important number from the figures on engines and cars. More than one Zone housewife has slipped into the kitchen to find the roast burning and her West Indian cook hiding hastily behind her ample skirt a long list of the figures on every freight-car that has passed that morning, from which by some Antillian miscalculation and the murmuring of certain invocations she was to find the magic number that would bring her cooking days to an end.

Yet there is sometimes method in their madness. Did not "Joe" who slept in the next room to me at Gatun "hit Duque for two pieces"—which is to say he had $3,000 to sprinkle along with his police salary? Yet personally the only really appealing "system" was that of Cristobal. Upon his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he picked out a number at random, took out a yearly subscription to it, and thought no more about it than one does of a newspaper delivered at the door each morning—until one Monday during this month of May, after he had squandered something over $500, on worthless bits of paper, he strolled into the lottery office and was handed an inconspicuous little bag containing $7,500 in yellow gold.

Like all Z. P. "rookies" (recruits) I had been warned early to beware the "sympathy dodge." But experience is the only real teacher. One afternoon I bestraddled a crazy, stilt-legged Jamaican horse to go out into the bush beyond the Panama line to fetch and deliver a citizen of that sovereign republic who was wanted on the Zone for horse-stealing. At the town of Sabanas, where those Panamanians who have bagged the most loot since American occupation have their "summer" homes,—giddy, brick-painted monstrosities among the great trees, deep green foliage and brilliant flower-beds (pause a moment and think of brilliant red houses in the tropics; it will make you better acquainted with the "Spig") I dropped in at the police station for ice-water and information. I found it in charge of a negro policeman who knew nothing, and had forgotten that. When, therefore, it also chanced that an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals stopped before the gate with a coachman of Panama, it fell upon me to assume command. The horse was the usual emaciated rat of an animal indigenous to Panama City. When overhauled, the driver was beating the animal uphill on his way to Old Panama to bring back a party of tourists visiting the ruins. How he expected the decrepit beast to carry four more persons was a mystery. When the harness was lifted there was disclosed the expected half-dozen large raw sores. We tied the animal in the shade near hay and water and adjourned to the station.

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

It was a very sad case. Here was a poor, honest coachman struggling to support a wife and I don't recall how many children, but any number sounds quite reasonable in Panama, who was about to be punished for the fault of another. The paradox of honest and coachman did not strike me until later. He was certainly telling the truth—you come to recognize it readily in all ordinary cases after a few weeks in plain clothes. The real culprit was, of course, the employer. My righteous wrath demanded that he and not his poor serf be punished. I could not release the driver. But I would see that the truth was brought out in court next morning and a warrant sworn out against the owner. With showering tears and rib-shaking sobs the coachman promised to tell the judge the whole story. I went through him, and locking him up with assurances of my deepest sympathy and full assistance, stilted on toward the little village of shacks scattered out of sight among the hills, and valleys across the border.

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

"Five dollars!" snapped the judge.

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

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

"What kind of a game—," I began.

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

This justice business, one soon learns, is of the same infallible stuff as the rest of life. After all it is only the personal opinion of the judge between two persons swearing on oath to diametrically opposed statements; and for all the impressiveness of deep furrowed brows I did not find that the average judge had any more power of reading human nature than the average of the rest of us. I well remember the morning when a meek little Panamanian was testifying in his own behalf, in Spanish of course, when the judge broke in without even asking for a translation of the testimony:

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

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

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

"Ancon! Bingham talking!"

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

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

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

And so the "Kangaroos" or the "Red Men" or whatever his lodge was filed behind the I. C. C. casket to the church in Ancon, and "Andy" was laid away under another of the simple white iron crosses that thickly populate many a Zone hillside, and he was charged up to the big debit column of the costs of the canal. On the cross is his new number; for officially a "Zoner" is always a number; that of the brass-check he wears as a watch-charm alive, that at the head of his grave when his canal-digging is over.

Late one unoccupied afternoon I picked up the path behind the Administration Building and, skirting a Zone residence, began to climb that famous oblong mound that dominates the Pacific end of the landscape from every direction,—Ancon Hill. For a way a fairly steep and stony path lead through thick undergrowth. Then this ceased, and a far steeper trail zigzagged up the face of the bare mountain, covered only with thin dead grass. The setting sun cast its shadow obliquely across the summit when I reached it,—a long ridge, with groves of trees, running off abruptly toward the sea. On the opposite side Uncle Sam was cutting away a whole side of the hill. But the five o'clock whistle had blown, and whole armies of little workmen swarmed across all the landscape far below, and silence soon settled down save for the dredges at Balboa that chug on through the night. But for myself the hill was wholly unpeopled. A sturdy ocean breeze swept steadily across it. The sinking sun set the jungle afire in a spot that would have startled those who do not know that it rises in the Pacific at Panama, crude, glaring colors glowed, fading to gentler and more delicate tints, then the evening shadow that had climbed the hill with me spread like a great black veil over all the world.

But the moon nearing its full followed almost on the heels of the setting sun and, casting its half-day over a scene rich in nature and history, invited the eye to swing clear round the hazy circle. Below lay Panama dully rumbling with night traffic. Silent Ancon, still better lighted, cuddled upon the lower skirts of the hill itself. Then beyond, the curving bay, half seen, half guessed, with its long promontory dying away into the hazy moonlit distance, lighted up here and there by bush fires in the jungled hills. Some way out winked the cluster of lights that marked Las Sabanas. In front, the placid Pacific, the "South Sea" of the Spaniards, spread dimly away into the void of night, its several islands seen only by the darker darkness that marked where they lay.

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

If only the film of time might roll back and there pass again before our eyes all that has come to pass within sight of Ancon hilltop. Across the bay there, where now are only jungle-tangled ruins, Pizarro set out with his handful of vagabonds to conquer South America; there old Buccaneer Morgan laid his bloody hand. Back in the hills there men died by scores trying to carry a ship across the Isthmus, the Spanish viceroys passed with their rich trains, there on some unknown knoll Balboa reached four hundred years ago the climax of a career that began with stowing away in a cask and ended under the headsman's ax—no end of it, down to the "Forty-niners" going hopefully out and returning filled with gold or disease, or leaving their bones here in the jungle before they really were "Forty-niners"; on down to the railroad days with men wading in swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying down to die. Then if a bit of the future, too, could for a moment be unveiled, and one might watch the first ship glide majestically and silently into the canal and away into the jungle like some amphibious monster.

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

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

The fear in his big blue eyes struggled with his ingenuous, girlish smile as I marched him through the long hall full of white beds and darker inmates. The Peruvian sat bolstered up in his cot, a stoical, revengeful glare on his reddish-brown swollen face. He gazed a long minute at the boy's face, across which flitted the flush of fear and embarrassment, at the big doll's eyes, then shook a raised forefinger slowly back and forth before his nose—the negative of Spanish-speaking peoples. Then he groaned, spat in a tin-can beside him, and called for paper and pencil. In the note-book I handed him he wrote in atrociously spelled Spanish:

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

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

"Senor," I asked, "did you go to the dance in Miraflores last Saturday night with this youth?"

"Si, senor."

"Then I place you under arrest. We will take the one o'clock train."

He opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again without having uttered a sound. He opened it a second time, then sat suddenly down on the low edge of the box-car porch. A more genuinely astonished man I have never seen. No actor could have approached it. Still, whatever my own conviction, it was my business to bring him before his accuser. After a time he recovered sufficiently to ask permission to change his clothes, and disappeared in one of the resident box-cars. The boy was already being fed in another. Had my prisoners been of almost any one of the other seventy-one nationalities I should not have thought of letting them out of my sight. But the Zone Spaniard's respect for law is proverbial.

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

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

He had come to the Canal Zone chiefly to gather literary material. Not being a man of wealth, however, nor one satisfied with superficial observation, he had sought employment at his trade as stationary engineer. Besides laying in a stock for more important writing he hoped to do in the future, he was Zone correspondent of "El Liberal" of Madrid and other Spanish cities. In the social life of his fellow-countrymen on the Isthmus he had taken no part, whatever. He was too busy. He did not drink. He could not dance; he saw no sense in squandering time in such frivolities. But ever since his arrival he had been promising himself to attend one of these wild Saturday-night debauches in the edge of the jungle that he might use a description of it in some later work. So he had coaxed his one personal friend, the boy, to go with him. It was virtually the one thing besides work that he had ever done on the Zone. They had stayed two hours, and had left the moment the trouble began. Yet here he was arrested.

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

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

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

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

"This is the man."

"What man?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did NOT think so, and as the sum total of his descriptions of his assailant during the past several days amounted to "a tall man, rather short, with a face and two eyes"—he was very insistent about the eyes, which is the reason the doll-eyed boy had fallen into the drag-net—I permitted myself to accept my own opinion as evidence. The Peruvian was in all likelihood in no condition to recognize a man from a loup-garou by the time the fracas started. Much ardent water had flowed that night. I took the suspects down to Ancon station and let them cool off in porch rocking-chairs. Then I gave them passes back to Pedro Miguel for the evening train. The doll-eyed boy smiled girlishly upon me as he descended the steps, but the correspondent strode slowly away with the downcast, cheerless countenance of a man who has been hurt beyond recovery.

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

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

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

A meek touch on the leg awoke me at four next morning. I looked up to see dimly a black face under a khaki helmet bent over me whispering, "It de time, sah," and fade noiselessly away. It was the frontier policeman carrying out his orders of the night before. For once there was not a carriage in sight. I stumbled sleepily down into Panama and for some distance along Avenida Central before I was able to hail an all night hawk chasing a worn little wreck of a horse along the macadam. I spread my lanky form over the worn cushions and we spavined along the graveled boundary line, past the Chinese cemetery where John can preserve and burn joss to his ancestors to the end of time, out through East Balboa just awakening to life, and reached Balboa docks as day was breaking. I was not long there, and the equine caricature ambled the three miles back to town in what seemed reasonable time, considering. As we turned again into Avenida Central my watch told me there was time and to spare to catch the morning passenger. I was not a little surprised therefore to hear just then two sharp rings on the station gong. I dived headlong into the station and brought up against a locked gate, caught a glimpse of two or three ladies weeping and the tail of the passenger disappearing under the bridge. Americans have introduced the untropical idea of starting their trains on time, to the disgust of the "Spig" in general and the occasional discomfiture of Americans. I dashed wildly out through the station, across Panama's main street, down a rugged lane to the first steps descending to the track, and tumbled joyously onto a slowly moving train—to discover that it was the Balboa labor-train and that the Colon passenger was already half-way to Diablo Hill.

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

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

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

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

Later I found the fault lay with my brass watch.

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

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

The ticket-collector pointed out my man to me in the first passenger coach, the "ladies' car"—he is a school-teacher and tobacco smoke distresses him—and by the time we pulled into Panama I had the desired information. Dinner was not to be thought of; I had barely time to dash through the second-class gate and back along the track to Balboa labor-train. From the docks a sand-train carried me to Pedro Miguel.

There was a craneman in Bas Obispo "cut" whose testimony was wanted. I reached him by two short walks and a ride. His statements suggested the advisability of questioning his room-mate, a towerman in Miraflores freight-yards. Luck would have it that my chauffeur friend —— was just then passing with an I. C. C. motor-car and only a photographer for a New York weekly aboard. I found room to squeeze in. The car raced away through the "cut," up the declivity, and dropped me at the foot of the tower. The room-mate referred me to a locomotive engineer and, being a towerman, gave me the exact location of his engine. I found it at the foot of Cucaracha slide with a train nearly loaded. By the time the engineer had added his whit of information, we were swinging around toward the Pacific dump. I dropped off and, climbing up the flank of Ancon hill, descended through the hospital grounds.

Where the royal palms are finest and there opens out the broadest view of Panama, Ancon, and the bay, I gave myself five minutes' pause, after which a carriage bore me to a shop near Cathedral Plaza where second-hand goods are bought—and no questions asked. On the way back to Ancon station I visited two similar establishments.

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

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

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

"Who's talking?"

"Policeman Green, sah."

"Station commander there?"

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

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

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



CHAPTER IX

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

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

We tramped resolutely on along the hard curving beach past the disheveled bath-houses before which ladies from the Zone gather in some force of a Sunday afternoon. For this time we were really out for a swim rather than to display our figures. On past the light-brown bathers, and the chocolate-colored bathers, and the jet black bathers who seemed to consider that color covering enough, till we came to the big silent saw-mill at the edge of the cocoanut grove that we had been invited long since to make a Z. P. dressing-room.

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

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

A rain-drop fell. Nor was it long lonesome. Before we had finished the hundred-yard dash we were in the midst of —— it was undeniably raining. Half a moment later "bucketsful" would have been a weak simile. All the pent up four months of an extra long rainy season seemed to have been loosed without warning. The blanket of water blotted out Panama and Ancon hill across the bay, blotted out the distant American bathers, then the light-brown ones, then the chocolate-tinted, then even the jet black ones close at hand.

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

The saw-mill was without side-walls; consisted only of a sheet-iron roof and floors, on the former of which the storm pounded with a roar that made only the sign language feasible. It was now as if we were surrounded on all sides by solid walls of water and forever shut off from the outer world—if indeed that had survived. Sheets of water slashed in further and further across the floor. We took to huddling behind beams and under saw-benches—the militant storm hunted us out and wetted us bit by bit. "The Admiral" and I tucked ourselves away on the 45-degree eye-beams up under the roaring roof. The angry water gathered together in columns and swept in and up to soak us.

At the end of an hour the downpour had increased some hundred per cent. It was as if an express train going at full speed had gradually doubled its rapidity. That was the day when little harmless streams tore themselves apart into great gorges and left their pathetic little bridges alone and deserted out in the middle of the gulf. That was the famous May twelfth, 1912, when Ancon recorded the greatest rainfall in her history,—7.23 inches, virtually all within three hours. Three of us were ready to surrender and swim home through it. But there was "the Admiral" to consider. He was dressed clear to his scarf-pin—and Panama tailors tear horrible holes in a police salary. So we waited and dodged and squirmed into closer holes for another hour; and grew steadily wetter.

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

Wet? We had not taken the third step before we were streaming like fire hose. There was nearly an hour of it, splashing knee-deep through what had been when we came out little dry sandy hollows; steering by guess, for the eye could make out nothing fifty yards ahead, even before the cheese-thick darkness fell; bowed like nonogenarians under the burden of water; staggering back and forth as the storm caught us crosswise or the earth gave way under us. "The Admiral's" patent-leather shoes—but why go into painful details? Those who were in Panama on that memorable afternoon can picture it all for themselves, and the others will never know. The wall of water was as thick as ever when we fought our bowed and weary way up over the railroad bridge and, summoning up the last strength, splurged tottering into "Angelini's."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I piled him into a cab and we rolled away to East Balboa, to climb upon an empty dirt-train and drop off as it raced through Miraflores, the sturdy legs of the Peruvian saving him where his practice would not have. Up in the bush between Pedro Miguel and Paraiso we found a hut where the Greek had stopped for water and gone on up a gully. We set out to follow, mounting partly on hands and knees, partly dragging ourselves by grass and bushes up what had been and would soon be again a torrential mountain stream. For hours we tore through the jungle, up hills steeper than the path of righteousness, following now a few faint foot-prints or trampled bushes, now a hint from some native bush dweller. The rain outside vied with the sweat within as to which would first soak us through. To make things merrier I had not only to wear an arsenal but a coat atop to conceal it from the general public.

To mention the holes I crawled into and the clues I followed during the next few days would be more tiresome than a Puritan prayer. By day I was dashing back and forth through all Ancon district, by night prowling about the grimier sections of Panama city. Almost daily I got near enough to sniff the prey. Now it was a Greek confectioner on Avenida Central who admitted that the fugitive had called on him during the night, now a Panamanian pesquisa whose stool-pigeon had seen him out in the bush, then the information that he had stopped to shave and otherwise alter his appearance in some shack half-way across the Zone and afterward struck off for Panama by an unused route. The clues were pendulum-like. They took me a half-dozen times at least out the winding highway to Corozal, on to Miraflores and even further. The rainy season and the reign of umbrellas had come. It had been formally opened on that memorable Sunday afternoon. There was still sunshine at times, but always a wet season heaviness to the atmosphere; and the rains were already giving the rolling jungle hills a tinge of new green. There was nothing to be gained by hurrying. The fugitive was as likely to crawl forth from one place as another along the rambling road. Here I paused to kill a lizard or to watch the clumsy march of one of the huge purple and many-colored land-crabs, there to gaze away across a jungled valley soft and fuzzy in the humid air like some Corot painting.

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

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

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

It turned out that the ancient village of Cruces was a mere two-mile stroll from the canal, a thatch-roofed native town of some thirty dwellings on the rocky shore of an inner curve of the Chagres, where travelers from Balboa to the last "Forty-niner" disembarked from their thirty-six mile ride up the river and struck on along the ten-mile road through the jungle to Panama—the famous Cruces trail. Except for its associations the village was without interest—except some personal Greek interest. Sour looks were chiefly my portion, for the villagers have never taken kindly to Americans.

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

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

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

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

Then came the real Cruces trail—the rest only follows the general direction. I fell upon it unexpectedly. It is still there as it was when the Peruvian viceroys and their glittering trains clattered along it, surprisingly well preserved; a cobbled way some three feet wide of that rough and bumpy variety the Spaniard even to-day fancies a real road, broken in places but still well marked, leading away southward through the wilderness.

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

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

There was not a sign of human life in the vicinity. The door was tied shut with a single strand of old rope, but there was no question that the fugitive might be hiding inside, for the reed walls had holes in them large enough to drive a sheep through, and there was nothing within to hide behind. I thrust an arm through an opening and dragged the large and heavy earthenware water-jar to me for a drink, and pushed on.

Squatter's cabins were now appearing, as contrasted with the native bushman's peaked hut; sleeping-places thrown together of tin cans, boxes and jungle rubbish, many negro shanties built of I. C. C. scraps—all of which announced the vicinity of the canal. Any hut might be a hiding-place. I made ostensibly casual inquiries, interlarded between stories, at several of them, and at length established that the Greek had been there not long before, but was elsewhere now. Then about four of the afternoon I burst out suddenly in sight of a broad modern highway, and leaving the ancient route as it headed away toward Old Panama, I turned aside to the modern city.

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

As everything must have its flaws, perhaps the chief one that might be charged against the Z. P. is "red tape." Strictly speaking it is no Z. P. fault at all, but a weakness of all government. One example will suffice.

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

Which general line I followed and, the information having been gathered and the report made up, I proceed to make out my expenditures of $45 for the month to forward to Empire for reimbursement. Now it needs no deep detective experience to know that in such cases you naturally begin with, "Well, what you going to drink, girls?" and end by paying the bill in a lump sum—a large lump sum—and go your way in peace. What more then could I do than set down such items as:

"May 12, Liquor, investigation, Panama—$6.50?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Take the 10:55 to Gatun," said the Inspector one morning, without looking up from his filing case, "Corporal Macey will tell you about it when you get there."



CHAPTER X

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

From which important beginning I fell quickly back into the old life again, derelicting about Gatun and vicinity by day, wandering the nights away in black, noisy New Gatun and along the winding back road under the cloud-scudding sky. Yet it was a different life. Gatun had changed. Even her concrete light-house was winking all night now up among the I. C. C. dwellings. The breeze from off the Caribbean was heavy and lifeless. The landscape looked wet and lush and rampant, of a deep-seated green, and instead of the china-blue skies the dull, leaden-gray heavens seemed to hang low and heavy overhead, like a portending fate. On the winding back road the jungle trees still stood out against the night sky, at times, too, there was a moon, but only a pale silver one that peered weakly here and there through the scudding gray clouds. The air grew more thick and sultry day by day, the heat was sticky, the weather dripping, with the sun only an irregular whitish blotch in the sky. Through the open windows the heavy, damp night came miasmically floating in, the very cigarettes mildewed in my pockets. Earth and air seemed heavy and toil-bowed by comparison with other days. The jungle still hummed busily, yet, it seemed, a bit mournfully as if preparing for production and unhilarious with the task before it, like a woman first learning of her pregnancy. Life seemed to hang more heavily even on humanity; "Zoners" looked less gay and carefree than in the sunny dry season, though still far more so than in the north. One could not shake off a premonition of impending disaster in I know not what form—like that of Teufelsdroeck before he entered the "Center of Indifference."

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

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

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

"Through a Forest in a Motor-boat" we might have dubbed the trip. We had soon crossed the unbroken expanse of the lake and were moving through a submerged forest. Splendid royal palms stood up to their necks in the water, corpulent, century-old giants of the jungle stood on tip-toe with their jagged noses just above the surface, gasping their last. Great mango-trees laden with fruit were descending into the flood. The lake was so mirror-like we could see the heads of drowning palm-trees and the blue sky with its wisps of snow-white feathery clouds as plainly below as above, so mirror-like the protruding stump of a palm looked like a piece of just double that length and exactly equal ends floating upright like a water thermometer, so reflective that the broken end of a branch showing above the surface appeared to be an acute angle of wood floating exactly at the angle in impossible equilibrium.

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

We were mounting the river Trinidad. River, yes, but we followed it only because it had kept back the jungle and left a way free of tree-tops, not because there was not water enough anywhere, in any direction, to float a boat of many times our draught. Turns so sharp we rocked in our own wake; once we passed acres upon acres of big, cod-like fish floating dead upon the water among the branches and the forest rubbish. It seems the lake in rising spread over some poisonous mineral in the soil. But life there was none, except the rampant green dying plant life in every direction to the horizon. There were not even birds, other than now and then a stray snow-white slender one of the heron species that fled majestically away across the face of the nurtureless waters as we steamed—no, gasolined down upon it. Soon after leaving Gatun we had passed a couple of jungle families on their way to market in their cayucas laden with mounds of produce,—plump mangoes with a maidenly blush on either cheek, fat yellow bananas, grass-green plantains, a duck or a chicken standing tied by one leg on top of it all and gazing complacently around at the scene with the air of an experienced tourist. It was two hours later that we sighted the next human being. He was a solitary old native paddling about at the entrance to the "grass-bird region" in a huge dugout as time-scarred as himself.

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

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

The rescue expedition proceeded. Once we got caught in the top-most branches of a tree, released from which we pushed on along the sinuous river that had no banks. It was not hot, even at noonday. We sweated a bit in poling a thirty-foot boat out of a tree-top, but cooled again directly we were off. My kodak was far away at the other end of the Zone. But then, on second thought it was better for once to enjoy nature as it was without trying to carry it away. Kodaking is a species of covetousness, anyway, an attempt to bear away home with us and hoard for our own the best we come upon in our travels. Whereas here, of course, it was impossible. The greatest of artists could not have carried away a tenth of that scene, a scene so fascinating that though we had tossed into the bottom of the boat at the start a bundle of fresh New York papers—and fresh New York papers are not often scorned down on the Zone—they still lay in the bottom of the boat when the trip ended.

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

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

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

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

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

By one we had Dr. O—— aboard and were waving farewell to the camp. The return, of course, was not the equal of the outward trip; even nature cannot duplicate so perfect a thing. But two raging showers gave us views of the drowning jungle under another aspect, and between them we awakened vast rolling echoes across the silent flooded world by shooting at flocks of little birds with an army rifle that would have killed an elephant.

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

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

Flood the land which was your great-grand-father's, the spot where you used to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane where your mother's courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree under which she was wedded—if matters were ever carried to that ceremonious length. What though this foreign nation gave you a bag of peculiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never seen a score of such coins in your life and barely knew the use of them, being acquainted with life only as it is picked from a mango-tree? The foreigners had cried, "Take this money and go buy a farm somewhere else," and you looked around you and saw all the world you had ever really known the existence of sinking beneath the rising waters. Where would you go, think you, to buy that new farm? Even if you fled and found another unknown land high and dry, or a town, what could you do, having not the remotest idea how to live in a town with only pieces of metal to get food out of instead of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house your grandfather built ever since you were born and dropped mangoes whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would be some peeved.

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

My Canal Zone days were drawing rapidly to a close. I could have remained longer without regret, but the world is wide and life is short. Soon came the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back across the Isthmus to clear up the last threads of my existence as a "Zoner." Chiefly for old times' sake I dropped off at Empire. But it was not the same Empire of the census. Almost all the old crowd was gone; one by one they had "kissed the Zone good-by." "The boss" of those days had never returned, "smiling Johnny" had been transferred, even Ben had "done quit an' gone back to Bahbaydos." The Zone is like a small section of life; as in other places where generations are short one catches there a hint of what old age will be. It was like wandering over the old campus when those who were freshmen in our day had hawked their gowns and mortarboards and gone their way; I felt like a man in his dotage with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation about him.

I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far down below was the same struggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the "cut" with its jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still stretching away endless in either direction. Here as in the world at large generations of us may come and pass away, but the tearing of the shovels at the rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains for the Pacific goes unbrokenly on, as the world and its work will continue without a pause when we are gone indeed.

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

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

I caught a dirt-train to Balboa. There the very town at which I had landed on the Zone five months before was being razed to give place to the permanent, reenforced-concrete city that is to be the canal headquarters. Balboa police station was only a pile of lumber, with a band of negroes drilling away the very rock on which it had stood. I took a last view of the Pacific and her islands to far Taboga, where Uncle Sam sends his recuperating children to enjoy the sea baths, hill climbs, and unrivaled pine-apples. It was never my good fortune to get to Taboga. With thirty days' sick leave a year and countless ailments of which I might have been cured free of charge and with the best of care, I could not catch a thing. I had not even the luck of my friend—who, by dint of cross-country runs in the jungle at noonday and similar industrious efforts, worked up at last a temperature of 99 degrees and got his week at Taboga. I stuck immovable at 98.6 degrees.

Soon after five I had bidden Ancon farewell and set off on the last ride across the Isthmus. There was a memory tucked away in every corner. Corozal hotel was still rattling with dishes, Paraiso peeped out from its lap of hills, Culebra with its penitentiary where burglarizing negroes go, sunk away into the past. Railroad Avenue in Empire was still lined with my "enumerated" tags; through an open door I caught a glimpse of a familiar short figure, one foot resting lightly and familiarly on a misapplied gas-pipe, the elbow crooked as if something were held between the fingers. At Bas Obispo I strained my eyes in vain to make out a familiar face in the familiar uniform, there was a glimpse of "Old Fritz" water-gauge as we rumbled across the Chagres, and the train churned away into the heavy green uninhabited night.

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

Then a last hand to you all, oh, Z. P. May you live long and continue to do your duty frankly and unafraid. I found you men when I expected only policemen. I reckon my days among you time well spent and I left you regretting that I could stay no longer with you—and when I leave any place with regret it must be possessed of some exceeding subtle charm. But though the world is large, it is also small.

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

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



THE END