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Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers

by Harry Alverson Franck · English · Gutenberg #4786 · 362,526 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers

Author: Harry Alverson Franck


        
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #4786]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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ZONE POLICEMAN 88

A CLOSE RANGE STUDY OF THE PANAMA CANAL AND ITS WORKERS


BY

HARRY A. FRANCK


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





TO A HOST OF GOOD FELLOWS THE ZONE POLICE

Quito, December 31, 1912




CHAPTER I


Strip by strip there opened out before me, as I climbed the "Thousand
Stairs" to the red-roofed Administration Building, the broad panorama
of Panama and her bay; below, the city of closely packed roofs and
three-topped plazas compressed in a scallop of the sun-gleaming
Pacific, with its peaked and wooded islands to far Taboga tilting
motionless away to the curve of the earth; behind, the low, irregular
jungled hills stretching hazily off into South America. On the
third-story landing I paused to wipe the light sweat from forehead and
hatband, then pushed open the screen door of the passageway that leads
to police headquarters.

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

"None."

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

"But I speak Spanish and--"

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

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

"Inspector:" he called suddenly; but a moment having passed without
response, he went on in his sharp-cut tones, "How do you think you
would like police work?"

"I believe I should."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

"Military ser--"

"Nor that either."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I descended to the world below, not by the long perspective of stairs
that leads down and across the gully to the heart of Ancon, but by a
short-cut that took me quickly into a foreign land. The graveled
highway at the foot of the hill I might not have guessed was an
international boundary had I not chanced to notice the instant change
from the trim, screened Zone buildings, each in its green lawn, to the
featureless architecture of a city where grass is all but unknown; for
the formalities of crossing this frontier are the same as those of
crossing any village street. It was my first entrance into the land of
the panamenos, technically known on the Zone as "Spigoties," and
familiarly, with a tinge of despite, as "Spigs"; because the first
Americans to arrive in the land found a few natives and cabmen who
claimed to "Speaga dee Eng-leesh."

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

Toward sunset I passed through a gateway with scores of
fellow-countrymen, all as composedly at home as in the heart of their
native land. Across the platform stood a train distinctively American
in every feature, a bilious-yellow train divided by the baggage car
into two sections, of which the five second-class coaches behind the
engine, with their wooden benches, were densely packed in every
available space with workmen and laborer's wives, from Spaniards to
ebony negroes, with the average color decidedly dark. In the
first-class cars at the Panama end were Americans, all but exclusively
white Americans, with only here and there a "Spigoty" with his long
greased hair, his finger rings, and his effeminate gestures, and even a
negro or two. For though Uncle Sam may permit individual states to do
so, he may not himself openly abjure before the world his assertion as
to the equality of all men by enacting "Jim Crow" laws.

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

It was not without effort that I rose in time next morning to continue
on the 6:37 from Corozal across another bit of the Zone. Exactly thus
should one first see the Great Work, piece-meal, slowly; unless he will
go home with it all in an undigested lump. The train rolled across a
stretch of almost uninhabited country, with a vast plain of broken rock
on the right, plunged unexpectedly through a short tunnel, and stopped
at a station perched on the edge of a ridge above a small Zone town
backed by some vast structure, above which here and there a huge crane
loomed against the sky of dawn. Another mile and the collectors were
announcing as brazenly as if they challenged the few "Spigs" on board
to correct them, "Peter M'Gill! Peter M'Gill!" We were already moving
on again before I had guessed that by this noise they designated none
other than the famous Pedro Miguel. The sun rose suddenly as we swung
sharply to the left and rumbled across a girderless bridge. Barely had
I time to discover that we were crossing the great canal itself and to
catch a brief glimpse of the jagged gulf in either direction, before
the train had left it behind, as if the sight of the world-famous
channel were not worth a pause, and was roaring on through a hilly
country of perpetual summer. A peculiarly shaped reservoir sped past on
the left, twice or thrice more the green horizon rose and fell, and at
7:30 we drew up at the base of Culebra, the Zone capital.

On the screened veranda of a somewhat sooty and dismal building high up
near the summit of the town, another and I were pacing anxiously back
and forth when, well on in the morning, an abrupt and rather
gloomy-faced American dashed into the building and one of the rooms
thereof, snapping over his shoulder as he disappeared, "One of you!"
The other had precedence. Then soon from behind the wooden shutters
came a growl of "Next!" and two moments later I was standing in the
reputed costume of Adam on the scales within. At about ten-second
intervals a monosyllable fell from the lips of the morose American as
he delved into my personal make-up from crown to toe with all the
instrumental circumspection known to his secret-discovering profession.
Then with a gruff "Dress!" he sat down at a table to scratch a few
fantastic marks on the blank I had brought, and hand it to me as I
caught up my last garment and turned to the door. But, alas--tight
sealed! and all the day, though carrying the information in my pocket,
I must live in complete ignorance of whether I had been found lacking
an eye or a lung. For sooner would one have asked his future of the
scowling Parques than venture to invoke a hint thereof from that
furrow-browed being from the Land of Bruskness.

Meanwhile, as if it had been thus planned to give me such opportunity,
I stood at the very vortex of canal interest and fame, with nearly an
entire day before the evening train should carry me back to Corozal. I
descended to the "observation platform." Here at last at my very feet
was the famous "cut" known to the world by the name of Culebra; a
mighty channel a furlong wide plunging sheer through "Snake Mountain,"
that rocky range of scrub-wooded hills; severing the continental
divide. At first view the scene was bewildering. Only gradually did the
eye gather details out of the mass. Before and beyond were pounding
rock drills, belching locomotives, there arose the rattle and bump of
long trains of flat-cars on many tracks, the crash of falling boulders,
the snort of the straining steam-shovels heaping the cars high with
earth and rock, everywhere were groups of little men, some working
leisurely, some scrambling down into the rocky bed of the canal or
dodging the clanging trains, all far below and stretching endless in
either direction, while over all the scene hovered a veritable
Pittsburg of smoke.

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

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

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

Panama, they had said, is insupportably hot. Comparing it with other
lands I knew I could not but smile at the notion. Again it was the lack
of perspective. Sweat ran easily, yet so fresh the air and so
refreshing the breeze sweeping incessantly across from the Atlantic
that even the sweating was almost enjoyable. Hot! Yes, like June on the
Canadian border--though not like July. It is hot in St. Louis on an
August Sunday, with all the refreshment doors tight closed--to
strangers; hot in the cotton-fields of Texas, but with these plutonic
corners the heat of the Zone shows little rivalry.

The way led round a cone-shaped hill crowned by another military camp
with the Stars and Stripes flapping far above, until I came at last in
sight of the renowned Chagres, seven miles above Culebra, to all
appearances a meek and harmless little stream spanned by a huge new
iron bridge and forbidden to come and play in the unfinished canal by a
little dam of earth that a steam-shovel will some day eat up in a few
hours. Here, where it ends and the flat country begins, I descended
into the "cut," dry and waterless, with a stone-quarry bottom. A sharp
climb out on the opposite side and I plunged into rampant jungle, half
expecting snake-bites on my exposed ankles--another pre-conceived
notion--and at length falling into a narrow jungle trail that pitched
down through a dense-grown gully, came upon a fenced compound with
several Zone buildings on the banks of the Chagres, down to which
sloped a broad green lawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll probably assign you to Empire district," the slender young man
was saying, "there's everything up there and almost any language will
sure be some help to us. This time we are taking a thorough, complete
census of all the Zone clear back to the Zone line. Here's a sample
card and list of instructions."

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

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

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

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

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

"Not immoderately."

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the new week I moved to Empire, the "Rules and Regulations" in a
pocket and the most indispensable of my possessions under an arm. Once
more we rumbled through Miraflores tunnel through a mole-hill, past her
concrete light-house among the astonished palms, and her giant hose of
water wiping away the rock hills, across the trestleless bridge with
its photographic glimpse of the canal before and behind for the
limber-necked, and again I found myself in the metropolis of the Canal
Zone. At the quartermaster's office my "application for quarters" was
duly filed without a word and a slip assigning me to Room 3, House 47,
as silently returned. I climbed by a stone-faced U. S. road to my new
home on the slope of a ridge overlooking the railway and its buildings
below.

It was the noon-hour. My two room-mates, therefore, were on hand for
inspection, sprawlingly engrossed in a--quite innocent and legal--card
game on a table littered with tobacco, pipes, matches, dog-eared wads
of every species of literature from real estate pamphlets to locomotive
journals, and a further mass of indiscriminate matter that none but a
professional inventory man would attempt to classify. About the room
was the usual clutter of all manner of things in the usual unarranged,
"unwomaned" Zone way, which the negro janitor feels it neither his duty
nor privilege to bring to order; while on and about my cot and bureau
were helter-skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent employee, who
had left for his six-weeks' vacation without hanging up his
shirt--after the fashion of "Zoners." So when I had wiped away the dust
that had been gathering thereon since the days of de Lesseps and
chucked my odds and ends into a bureau drawer, I was settled,--a
full-fledged Zone employee in the quarters to which every man on the
"gold roll" is entitled free of charge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empire hotel sat a bit down the hill. There the "gold" ranks were again
subdivided. The coatless ate and sweltered inside the great
dining-room; the formal sat in haughty state in what was virtually a
second-story veranda overlooking the railroad yards and a part of the
town, where were tables of four, electric fans, and "Ben" to serve with
butler formality. I found it worth while to climb the hill for my coat
thrice a day. As yet I was jangling down a Panamanian dollar at each
appearance, but the day was not far distant when I should receive the
"recruits" hotel-book and soon grow as accustomed as the rest to having
a coupon snatched from it by the yellow negro at the door. Uncle Sam's
boarding scale on the Zone is widely varied. Three meals cost the
non-employee $1.50, the "gold" employee $.90, the white European
laborer $.40, and negroes in general $.30.

That afternoon, when the sun had begun to bow its head on the thither
side of the canal, I climbed to the newly labeled census office on the
knoll behind the police station, from the piazza of which all native
Empire lies within sweep of the eye. "The boss," a smiling youth only
well started on his third decade, whose regular duties were in the
sanitary department, had already moved bed, bag, and baggage into the
room that had been assigned the census, that he might be "always on the
job."

Not till eight that evening, however, did the force gather to look
itself over. There was the commander-in-chief of the census bureau,
sent down from Washington specifically for the task in hand, under whom
as chairmen we settled down into a sort of director's meeting, a wholly
informal, coatless, cigarette-smoking meeting in which even the chief
himself did not feel it necessary to let his dignity weigh upon him. He
had been sent down alone. Hence there had been great scrambling to
gather together on the Zone men enough who spoke Spanish--and with no
striking success. Most noticeable of my fellow-enumerators, being in
uniform, were three Marines from Bas Obispo, fluent with the working
Spanish they had picked up from Mindanao to Puerto Rico, and
flush-cheeked with the prospect of a full month on "pass," to say
nothing of the $4.40 a day that would be added to their daily military
income of $.60. Then there were four of darker hue,--Panamanians and
West Indians; and how rare are Spanish-speaking, Americans on the Zone
was proved by the admittance of such complexions to the "gold" roll.

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

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

"When you have once signed on as an enumerator you cannot cease to
exercise your functions as such without justifiable cause under penalty
of $500 fine." Which warning was quickly followed by the hair-raising
announcement:

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

From there on the injunctions grew less nerve-racking: "You must use a
medium soft black pencil (which will be furnished)"--law-breaking under
such conditions would be absurdity--"use no ditto marks and"--here I
could not but shudder as there passed before my eyes memories of
college lecture rooms and all the strange marks that have come to mean
something to me alone--"take pains to write legibly!"

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




CHAPTER II


"The boss" and I initiated the Canal Zone Census that very night.
Legally it was to begin with the dawning of February, but there were
many labor camps in our district and the hours bordering on midnight
the only sure time to "catch 'em in." Up in House 47 I gathered
together the legion paraphernalia of this new occupation,--some two
hundred red cards a foot long and half as wide, a surveyor's field
notebook for the preservation of miscellaneous information, tags for
the tagging of canvassed buildings, tacks for the tacking of the same,
the necessary tack-hammer, the medium soft black pencil, above all the
awesome legal "Commission," impressively signed and sealed, wherein
none other than our weighty nation's chief himself did expressly
authorize me to search out, enter, and question ad libitum. All this
swung over a shoulder in a white canvas sack, that carried memory back
through the long years to my newsboy days, I descended to the town.

"The boss" was ready. It was nearly eleven when we crossed the silent
P. R. R. tracks and, plunging away into the night past great heaps of
abandoned locomotives huddled dim and uncertain in the thin moonlight
like ghosts of the French fiasco, dashed into a camp of the laborer's
village of Cunette, pitched on the very edge of the now black and
silent void of the canal. Eighteen thick-necked negroes in undershirts
and trousers gazed up white-eyed from a suspended card game at the long
camp table. But we had no time for explanations.

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

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

We had enrolled the group before a son of wisdom among them surmised
that we were not, after all, plain-clothes men in quest of criminals;
and his announcement brought visible relief. Twice as many blacks were
sprawled in the two rows of double-sided, three-story bunks,--mere
strips of canvas on gas-pipes that could be hung up like swinging
shelves when not in use. Mere noise did not even disturb their dreams.
We roused them by pencil-jabs in the ribs, and they started up with
savage, animal-like grunts and murderous glares which instantly
subsided to sheepish grins and voiceless astonishment at sight of a
white face bending over them. Now and again open-mouthed guffaws of
laughter greeted the mumbled admission of some powerful buck that he
could not read, or did not know his age. But there was nothing even
faintly resembling insolence, for these were all British West Indians
without a corrupting "States nigger" among them. A half-hour after our
arrival we had tagged the barracks and dived into the next camp,
blacker and sleepier and more populous than the first. It was February
morning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and stepped under the
shower-bath that is always preliminary, on the Zone, to a night's
repose.

A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general destruction developed
gradually into full consciousness at four-thirty. House 47 was in
riotous uproar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign invasion was
pending; it was merely the houseful of engineers in their customary
daily struggle to catch the labor-train and be away to work by
daylight. When the hour's rampage had subsided I rose to switch off the
light and turned in again.

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

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

They lived chiefly in windowless, six-by-eight rooms, always a cheap,
dirty calico curtain dividing the three-foot parlor in front from the
five-foot bedroom behind, the former cluttered with a van-load of
useless junk, dirty blankets, decrepit furniture, glittering gewgaws, a
black baby squirming naked in a basket of rags with an Episcopal
prayerbook under its pillow--relic of the old demon-scaring
superstitions of Voodoo worship. Every inch of the walls was
"decorated," after the artistic temperament of the race, with pages of
illustrated magazines or newspapers, half-tones of all things
conceivable with no small amount of text in sundry languages, many a
page purely of advertising matter, the muscular, imbruted likeness of a
certain black champion rarely missing, frequently with a Bible laid
reverently beneath it. Outside, before each room, a tin fireplace for
cooking precariously bestrided the veranda rail.

Often a tumble-down hovel where three would seem a crowd yielded up
more than a dozen inmates, many of whom, being at work, must be looked
for later--the "back-calls" that is the bete-noire of the census
enumerator. West Indians, however, are for the most part well
acquainted with the affairs of friends and room-mates, and enrolment of
the absent was often possible. Occasionally I ran into a den of
impertinence that must be frowned down, notably a notorious swarming
tenement over a lumber-yard. But on the whole the courtesy of British
West Indians, even among themselves, was noteworthy. Of the two great
divisions among them, Barbadians seemed more well-mannered than
Jamaicans--or was it merely more subtle hypocrisy? Among them all the
most unspoiled children of nature appeared to be those from the little
island of Nevis.

"You ain't no American?"

"Yes, ah is."

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

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

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

Sunday came and I chose to continue, though virtually all the Zone was
on holiday and even "the boss," after what I found later to be his
invariable custom, had broken away from his card-littered
dwelling-place on Saturday evening and hurried away to Panama, drawn
thither and held till Monday morning--by some irresistible attraction.
Sunday turns holiday completely on the Zone, even to hours of trains
and hotels. The frequent passengers were packed from southern white end
to northern black end with all nations in gladsome garb, bound
Panamaward to see the lottery drawing and buy a ticket for the
following Sunday, across the Isthmus to breezy Colon, or to one of a
hundred varying spots and pastimes. Others in khaki breeches fresh from
the government laundry in Cristobal and the ubiquitous leather leggings
of the "Zoner" were off to ride out the day in the jungles; still
others set resolutely forth afoot into tropical paths; a dozen or so,
gleaned one by one from all the towns along the line were even on their
way to church. Yet with all this scattering there still remained a
respectable percentage lounging on the screened verandas in pajamas and
kimonas, "Old Timers" of four or five or even six years' standing who
were convinced they had seen and heard, and smelt and tasted all that
the Zone or tropical lands have to offer.

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

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

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

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

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

Thus the enrolling of the faithful continued. Chinese laundrymen
divulged the secrets of their mysterious past between spurts of water
at steaming shirt-bosoms; Chinese merchants, of whom there are hordes
on the Zone, cueless, dressed and betailored till you must look at them
twice to tell them from "gold" employees, the flag of the new republic
flapping above their doors, the new president in their lapels, left off
selling crucifixes and breastpin medallions of Christ to negro women,
to answer my questions. One evening I stumbled into a nest of eleven
Bengali peddlers with the bare floor of their single room as bed,
table, and chairs; in one corner, surmounted by their little
embroidered skull-caps, were stacked the bundles with which they pester
Zone housewives, and in another their god wrapped in a dirty rag
against profaning eyes.

Many days had passed before I landed the first Zone resident I could
not enroll unassisted. He was a heathen Chinee newly arrived, who spoke
neither Spanish nor English. It was "Chinese Charlie" who helped me
out. "Chinese Charlie" was a resident of the Zone before the days of de
Lesseps and at our first meeting had insisted on being enrolled under
that pseudonym, alleging it his real name. Upstairs above his store all
was sepulchral silence when I mounted to investigate--and I came
quickly and quietly down again; for the door had opened on the gaudy
Oriental splendor of a joss-house where dwelt only grinning wooden
idols not counted as Zone residents by the materialistic census
officials. On the Isthmus as elsewhere "John" is a law-abiding
citizen--within limits; never obsequious, nearly always friendly, ready
to answer questions quite cheerily so long as he considers the matter
any of your business, but closing infinitely tighter than the
maltreated bivalve when he fancies you are prying too far.

In time I reached the Commissary--the government department store--and
enrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel, from steward
to scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography; the police station
on its knoll fell like the rest. I went to jail--and set down a large
score of black men and a pair of European whites, back from a day's
sweaty labor of road building, who lived now in unaccustomed
cleanliness in the heart of the lower story of a fresh wooden building
with light iron bars, easy to break out of were it not that policemen,
white and black, sleep on all sides of them. Crowded old Empire not
only faces her streets but even her back yards are filled with shacks
and inhabited boxes to be hunted out. On the hem of her tattered
outskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandoned
junk,--locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters "U.
S." painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day investigator
material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste); all now soon to be
removed by a Chicago wrecking company.

Then all the town must be done again--"back calls." By this time so
wide and varied was my acquaintance in Empire that wenches withdrew a
dripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with a sympathetic giggle,
and piccaninnies ran out to meet me as I returned in quest of one
missing inmate in a house of fifty. For the few laborers still uncaught
I took to coming after dark. But West Indians rarely own lamps, not
even the brass tax-numbers above the doors were visible, and as for a
negro in the dark--

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

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

Several dusky females regularly ran away whenever I approached; one at
least I came a-seeking in vain nine times, and found her the tenth
behind a garbage barrel. Many fancied the secret marks on the
"enumerated" tag--date, and initials of the enumerator--were intimately
concerned with their fate. So strong is the fear of the law imbued by
the Zone Police that they dared not tear down the dreaded placard, but
would sometimes sit staring at it for hours striving to penetrate its
secret or exorcise away its power of evil, and now and then some bolder
spirit ventured out--at midnight--with a pencil and put tails and extra
flourishes on the penciled letters in the hope of disguising them
against the fatal day.

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

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

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

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

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

"He name 'Rasmus Iggleston."

"What's his metal-check number?"

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

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

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

"Is he a Jamaican?"

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

"What color is he?"

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

"For instance."

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

"How old is he?"

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

"Well, about how old?"

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

"Is he older than you?"

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

"And how old are you?"

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

"Is he married?"

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

"Can he read?"

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

"What kind of work does he do?"

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

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

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

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

"Mah name Mistress Jane Iggleston."

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

"Oh, not too long, mah love."

"Since when have you lived in this house?"

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

"Can you read and write?"

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

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

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

Enumerator looks hard from her to washtub.

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

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

"We don' git no children, sah."

"What! How did that happen?"

Loud, house-shaking laughter.

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

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

Variations on the above might fill many pages:

"How old are you?"

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

"How old _I_ are? Ah don rightly know mah age, mahster, mah mother
never tol' me."

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

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

"'Bout dat, sah."

"Are you married?"

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

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

"Dat's all, sir."

"Doesn't your husband live here?"

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

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

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

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

To a Jamaican youth;

"How many people live in this room?"

"Three persons live here, sir."

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

"We remove here in April."

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

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

"Do his parents live on the Zone?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Married?"

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

A colored family:

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

West Indian wit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When did you come to Panama?"

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

"Before the Americans, perhaps?"

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

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

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

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

"Occupation?"

"Pico y pala," he answered.

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

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

I plunged into the jumble of negroes next door, putting my questions
and setting down the answers without even hearing them, my thoughts
still back in the clean, bare room behind, wondering whether I should
not have been wiser after all to have ignored the sharp-drawn lines and
the prejudices of my fellow-countrymen and joined the pick and shovel
Zone world. There might have been pay dirt there. A few months before,
I remembered, a Spanish laborer killed in a dynamite explosion in the
"cut" had turned out to be one of Spain's most celebrated lawyers. I
recalled that EL UNICO, the anarchist Spanish weekly published in
Miraflores contains some crystal-clear thinking set forth in a
sharp-cut manner that shows a real inside knowledge of the "job" and
the canal workers, however little one may agree with its philosophy and
methods.

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




CHAPTER III


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

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

At first sight you would take "Mac" for a mere roustabout, like most
who go a'soldiering. But before long you'd begin to wonder where he got
his rich and fluent vocabulary and his warehouse of information. Then
you'd run across the fact that he had once finished a course in a
middle-western university--and forgotten it. The schools had left
little of their blighting mark upon him, yet "pump" "Mac" on any
subject from rapid-fire guns to grand opera and you'd get at least a
reasonable answer. Though you wouldn't guess the knowledge was there
unless you did pump for it, for "Mac" was not of the type of those who
overwork the first person pronoun, not because of foolish diffidence
but merely because it rarely occurred to him as a subject of
conversation. Seventeen years in the marine corps--you were sure he was
"jollying" when he first said it--had taken "Mac" to most places where
warships go, from Pekin and "the Islands" to Cape Town and Buenos
Ayres, and given him not merely an acquaintance with the world
but--what is far more of an acquisition--the gift of getting acquainted
in almost any stratum of the world in the briefest possible space of
time.

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

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

Renson's "bush" troubles were legion. Not only were there the seducing
brown "Spigoty" women out in the wilderness to help him on his
descending trail, but when and wherever fire-water of whatever
nationality or degree of voltage showed its neck--and it is to be found
even in "the bush"--there was Renson sure to give battle--and fall.
"It's no use bein' a man unless you're a hell of a man," was Renson's
"influenced" philosophy. How different this was from his native good
sense when the influence was turned off was demonstrated when he
returned from cautiously reconnoitering a cottage far back in the wilds
one dark night and reported as his reason for postponing the
enumerating: "If you'd butt in on one o' them Martinique booze
festivals they'd crown you with a bottle."

Already one or two enumerators had gone back to private life--by
request. Particularly sad was the case of our dainty, blue-blooded
Panamanian. As with many Panamanians, and not a few of the self-exalted
elsewhere, he was more burdened with blue corpuscles than with gray
matter. At any rate--

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

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

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

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

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

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

For soon the Spillway at Gatun is to close its gates and all this vast
region will be flooded and come to be Gatun Lake. Villages that were
old when Pizarro began his swine-herding will be wiped out, even this
splendid double-tracked railroad goes the way of the rest, for on
February fifteenth, a bare few days away, it was to be abandoned and
where we were now racing northwestward through brilliant sunshine and
Atlantic breezes would soon be the bottom of a lake over which great
ocean steamers will glide, while far below will be tall palm-trees and
the spreading mangoes, the banana, king of weeds, gigantic ferns
and--well, who shall say what will become of the brilliant parrots, the
monkeys and the jaguars?

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

On the cement platform was a great foregathering of the census clans
from all districts, whence we climbed to the broad porch of the
administration building above. There before me, for the first time
in--well, many months, spread the Atlantic, the Caribbean perhaps I
should say, seeming very near, so near I almost fancied I could have
thrown a stone to where it began and stretched away up to the bluish
horizon, while the entrance to the canal where soon great ships will
enter poked its way inland to the locks beside us. Across the tree-tops
of the flat jungle, also seeming close at hand though the railroad
takes seven miles--and thirty-five cents if you are no employee--to
reach it, was Colon, the tops of whose low buildings were plainly
visible above the vegetation. Not many "Zoners," I reflected, catch
their first view of Colon from the veranda of the Administration
Building at Gatun.

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

That was the overwhelming problem,--in what language to address each
victim. Barter, speaking only his nasal New Jersey, took to picking out
negroes, and even then often turned away in disgust when he landed a
Martinique or a Haytian. West Indian "English" alternated with a black
patois that smelt at times faintly of French, muscular, bullet-headed
negroes appeared slowly and laboriously counting their money in their
hats, eagle-nosed Spaniards under the boina of the Pyrenees, Spaniards
from Castile speaking like a gatling-gun in action, now and again even
a snappy-eyed Andalusian with his s-less slurred speech, slow,
laborious Gallegos, Italians and Portuguese in numbers, Colombians of
nondescript color, a Slovak who spoke some German, a man from Palestine
with a mixture of French and Arabic noises I could guess at, and
scattered here and there among the others a Turk who jabbered the
lingua franca of Mediterranean ports. I "got" all who fell into my
hands. Once I dragged forth a Hindu, and shuddered with fear of a first
failure. But he knew a bit of a strange English and I found I recalled
six or seven words of my forgotten Hindustanee.

Then suddenly a flood of Greeks broke upon us, growing deeper with
every moment. Above the pandemonium my companions were howling hoarsely
and imploringly for the interpreter, while clutching their trembling
victim by the slack of his labor-stained shirt lest he escape
un-enrolled. The interpreter, in accordance with a well-known law of
physics and the limitations of human nature, could not be in sixteen
places at once. I crowded close, caught his words, memorized the few
questions, and there was I with my "Poomaynes?" "Poseeton?" and
"Padremaynos?" enrolling Greeks unassisted, not only that but haughtily
acting as interpreter for my fellows--not only without having studied
the tongue of Achilles but never even having graced a Greek letter
fraternity.

Quick tropical twilight descended, and still the labor-smeared line
wound away out of sight into the darkness, still workmen of every shade
and tongue jingled their brass-checks timidly on the edge of the
pay-window, from behind which came roaring noises that the Americans
within fancied Spaniards, or Greeks, or Roumanians must understand
because they were not English noises; still we pounced upon the paid as
upon a tackling-dummy in the early days of spring practice.

The colossal wonder of it all was how these deep-chested,
muscle-knotted fellows endured us, how they refrained from taking us up
between a thumb and forefinger and dropping us over the veranda
railing. For our attack lacked somewhat in gentle courtesy, notably so
that of "the Rowdy." He was a chestless youth of the type that has
grown so painfully prevalent in our land since the soft-hearted
abolishment of the beech-rod of revered memory; of that all too
familiar type whose proofs of manhood are cigarettes and impudence and
discordant noise, and whose national superiority is demonstrated by the
maltreating of all other races. But the enrolled were all, black,
white, or mixed, far more gentlemen than we. Some, of brief Zone
experience, were sheepish with fear and the wonder as to what new
mandate this incomprehensible U. S. was perpetrating to match its
strange sanitary laws that forbade a man even to be uncleanly in his
habits, after the good old sacred right of his ancestors to remotest
ages. Then, too, there was a Zone policeman in dressy, new-starched
khaki treading with dangling club and the icy-eye of public appearance,
waiting all too eagerly for some one to "start something." But the
great percentage of the maltreated multitude were "Old Timers," men of
four or five years of digging who had learned to know this strange
creature, the American, and the world, too; who smiled indulgently down
upon our yelping and yanking like a St. Bernard above the snapping
puppy he well knows cannot seriously bite him.

Dense black night had fallen. Here and there lanterns were hung, under
one of which we dragged each captive. The last passenger back to Empire
roared away into the jungle night; still we scribbled on, "backed" a
yellow card and dived again into the muscular whirlpool to emerge
dragging forth by the collar a Greek, a Pole, or a West Indian. It was
like business competition, in which I had an unfair advantage, being
able to understand any jargon in evidence. When at last the pay-windows
came down with a bang and an American curse, and the serpentining tail
squirmed for a time in distress and died away, as a snake's tail dies
after sundown, I turned in more than a hundred cards. To-morrow the
tail would revive to form the nucleus of a new serpent, and we should
return by the afternoon train to the lock city, and so on for several
days to come.

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

A Chinese grocer sold us bread and cheese. Down on the further corner
of the hubbub we entered a Spanish saloon and spread ourselves over the
"white" bar, adding beer to our humble collation. Beyond the
lattice-work that is the "color line" in Zone dispensaries, West
Indians were dancing wild, crowded "hoe-downs" and "shuffles" amid much
howling and more liquidation; on our side a few Spanish laborers
quietly sipped their liquor. The Marines of course were "busted." The
rest of us scraped up a few odd "Spigoty" dimes. The Spanish
bar-tender--who is never the "tough" his American counterpart strives
to show himself--but merely a cheery good-fellow--drifted into our
conversation, and when we found I had slept in his native village he
would have it that we accept a round of Valdepenas. Which must have
been potent, for it moved "Scotty" to unbutton an inner pocket and set
up an entire bottle of amontillado. So midnight was no great space off
when we turned out again into the howling night and, having helped
Renson to reach a sleeping-place, scattered to the bachelor quarters
that had been found for us and lay down for the few hours that remained
before the 5:51 should carry us back to Empire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once I fancied the bulk of my troubles was over. Tom disappeared,
leaving not a trace behind--except his working-clothes tumbled on and
about his cot. Then it turned out that he was not dead, but in Ancon
hospital taking the Keeley cure; and one summer evening he blew in
again, his "cure" effected--with a bottle in his coat pocket and two
inside his vest. So the next day there was Tom celebrating his recovery
all over House 47 and when next morning he did finally go back to his
shovel there were scattered about the room six empty quart bottles each
labeled "whiskey." Luckily Tom ran a shovel instead of a passenger
train and could claw away at his hillside as savagely as he chose
without any danger whatever, beyond that of killing himself or an odd
"nigger" or two.

We had other treasures on exhibition in 47. There was "Shorty," for
instance. "Shorty" was a jolly, ugly open-handed, four-eyed little
snipe of a roughneck machinist who had lost "in the line of duty" two
fingers highly useful in his trade. In consequence he was now, after
the generous fashion of the I.C.C., on full pay for a year without
work, providing he did not leave the Zone. And while "Shorty," like the
great majority of us, was a very tolerable member of society under the
ordinary circumstances of having to earn his "three squares a day,"
paid leisure hung most ponderously upon him.

The amusements in Empire are few--and not especially amusing. There is
really only one unfailing one. That is slid in glass receptacles across
a yellow varnished counter down on Railroad Avenue opposite Empire
Machine Shops. So it happened that "Shorty" was gradually winning the
title of a thirty-third degree "booze-fighter," and passengers on any
afternoon train who took the trouble to glance in at a wide-open door
just Atlanticward of the station might have beheld him with his back to
the track and one foot slightly raised and resting lightly and with the
nonchalance of long practice on a gas-pipe that had missed its
legitimate mission. In fact "Shorty" had come to that point where he
would rather be caught in church than found dead without a bottle on
him, and arriving home overflowing with joy about midnight slept away
most of the day in 47 that he might spend as much of the night as the
early closing laws of the Zone permitted at the amusement headquarters
of Empire.

With these few hints of the life that raged beneath the roof of 47 it
may perhaps be comprehensible, without going into detail, why I came to
contemplate a change of quarters. I detest a kicker. I have small use
for any but the man who will take his allotted share with the rest of
the world without either whining or snarling. Yet when an official
government census enumerator falls asleep on the edge of a tenement
washtub with a question dead on his lips, or solemnly sets down a
crow-black Jamaican as "white," it is Uncle Sam who is suffering and
time for correction.

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

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

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

He lived in the next room south, a half-inch wooden partition reaching
half-way to the ceiling between his pillow and mine. By day he lay on
his back in the right hand seat of a locomotive cab with his hand on
the throttle and the soles of his shoes on the boiler plate--he was
just long enough to fit into that position without wrinkling. During
the early evening he lay on his back in a stout Mission rocking-chair
on the front porch of House 35, Empire, C.Z. And about 8 P. M. daily he
retired within to lie on his back on a regulation I.C.C. metal
cot--they are stoutly built--one pine half-inch from my own. Obviously
twenty-four hours a day of such onerous occupation had left some slight
effects on his figure. His shape was strikingly similar to that of a
push-ball. Had he fallen down at the top of Ancon or Balboa hill it
would have been an even bet whether he would have rolled down sidewise
or endwise--if his general type of build and specifications will permit
any such distinction.

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

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

There were a few inexperienced inmates who had not yet utterly given up
hope. The long hours of the night were spent in solemn conference.
Pounding on the walls with hammers, chairs, and shoe-heels was like
singing a lullaby. One genius invented a species of foghorn which
proved very effective--in waking up all Empire east of the tracks,
except "the Sloth." Some took to dropping their heavier and more
dispensable possessions over the partition. One memorable night a
fellow-sufferer cast over a young dry-goods box which, bouncing from
the snorer's figure to the floor, caused him to lose a beat--one; and
the feat is still one of the proud memories of 35. On Sundays when all
the rest of the world was up and shaved and breakfasted and off on the
8:39 of a brilliant, sunny day to Panama, "the Sloth" would be still
imperturbably snorting and choking in the depths of his cot. And in the
evening, as the train roamed back through the fresh cool jungle dusk
and deposited us at Empire station, and we crossed the wooden bridge
before the hotel and began to climb the graveled path behind, hoping
against hope that we might find crape on that door, from the night
ahead would break on our cars a sound as of a hippopotamus struggling
wildly against going down for the third and last time.

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




CHAPTER IV


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

The P.R.R., you will recall, has been operating across the Isthmus
since 1855. When the United States took over the Zone in 1904 it built
a new double-tracked line of five-foot gauge for nearly the whole
forty-seven miles. Much of this, however, runs through territory soon
to be covered by Gatun Lake, nearly all the rest of it is on the wrong
side of the canal. An almost entirely new line, therefore, is being
built through the virgin jungle on the South American side of the
canal, which is to be the permanent line and is known in Zone parlance
as the "relocation." This is forty-nine miles in length from Panama to
Colon, and is single track only, as freight traffic especially is
expected, very naturally, to be lighter after the canal is opened.
Already that portion from the Chagres to the Atlantic had been put in
use--on February fifteenth, to be exact; and the time was not far off
when the section within our district--from Gamboa to Pedro
Miguel--would also be in operation.

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

"The boss" barely noticed these things. One quickly grows accustomed to
them. Why, Americans who have been down on the Zone for a year don't
know there's a palm-tree on the Isthmus--or at least they do not
remember there were no palm-trees in Keokuk, Iowa, when they left there.

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

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

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

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

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

From the outside world "P'reeso" scarcely draws a glance of attention;
but once in it you find a whole Zone town with all the accustomed
paraphernalia of I. C. C. hotel and commissary, hospital and police
station, all ruled over and held in check by the famous "Colonel" in
command of the latter. Moreover Paraiso will some day come again into
her own, when the "relocation" opens and brings her back on the main
line, while proud Culebra and haughty Empire, stranded on a railless
shore of the canal, will wither and waste away and even their broad
macadamed roads will sink beneath a second-growth jungle.

Renson had come to lend assistance. He set to work among the negro
cabins, the upper gallery seats of Paraiso's amphitheater of hills, for
Renson had been a free agent for more than a month now and was not
exactly in a condition to interview American housewives. My own task
began down at the row of inhabited box-cars, and so on through shacks
and tenements with many Spanish laborers' wives. Then toward noon the
labor-train screamed in, with two "gold" coaches and many open
cattle-cars with long benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six
hundred men in the six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood
through a suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused and
shrieked away again.

Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds of
sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-mell
around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumble
food--yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days when
each man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour to
cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We jotted them down at express speed,
with changes of tongue so abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and
in the place where our minds should have been sounded only a confused
chaotic uproar like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot
dictionary. Then suddenly I landed a Russian! It was the final straw. I
like to speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting to
talk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating "French" of
Martinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I will
NOT run the risk of talking Russian. It was the second and last case
during my census days when I was forced to call for interpretative
assistance.

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

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

Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued unabated. I had my first
experience enumerating "gold" married quarters--white American
families; just enough for experience and not enough to suffer severely.
The enrolling of West Indians was pleasanter. The wives of locomotive
engineers and steam-shovel cranemen were not infrequently supercilious
ladies who resented being disturbed during their "social functions" and
lacked the training in politeness of Jamaican "mammies." Living in
Paradise now under a paternal all-providing government, they seemed to
have forgotten the rolling-pin days of the past. It was here in Paraiso
that I first encountered that strange, that wondrous strange custom of
lying about one's age. Negro women never did. What more absurd,
uncalled-for piece of dishonesty! Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs. Jones
next door will succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit of
information? Little does she know the long prison sentence at "hard
labor" that stares me in the face for any such slip; to say nothing of
my naturally incommunicative disposition. Or is she ashamed to let ME
know the truth?--unaware that all such information goes in at my ears
and down my pencil to the pink card before me like a message over the
wires, leaving no more trace behind. Surely she must know that I care
not a pencil-point whether she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor remember
which one minute after her screen door has slammed behind me--unless
she has caused me to glance up in wonder at her silvering temples of
thirty-five when she simpers "twenty-two"--and to set her down as forty
to be on the safe side. Oh now, please, ladies, do not understand me as
accusing the American wives of Paraiso in general of this weakness. The
large majority were quite pleasant, frank, and overflowing with cheery
good sense. But the percentage who were not was far larger than I, who
am also an American, was pleased to find it.

But doubly astonishing were the few cases of lying by proxy. A
"clean-cut," college-graduated civil engineer of thirty-two whom one
would have cited as an example of the best type of American, gave all
data concerning himself in an unimpeachable manner. His wife was
absent. When the question of her age arose he gave it, with the
slightest catch in his voice, as twenty. Now that might be all very
well. Men of thirty-two are occasionally so fortunate as to marry girls
of twenty. But a moment later the gentleman in question finds himself
announcing that his wife has been living on the Zone with him since
1907; and that she was born in New England! Thus is he tripped over his
own clothes-line. For New England girls do not marry at fifteen; mother
would not let them even if they would.

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

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

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

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

It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson's linguistic troubles
that "the boss" came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy mule. In his
eagerness to "clean up" the territory we fell to corraling negroes
everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying their supplies at the
commissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside trees, anywhere and
everywhere, until at last in his excitement "the boss" let his medium
soft pencil slip by the column for color and dashed down the
abbreviation for "mixed" after the question, "Married or Single?" Which
may have been near enough the truth of the case, but suggested it was
time to quit. So we marked Paraiso "finished except for recalls" and
returned to Empire.

One by one our fellow-enumerators had dropped by the wayside, some by
mutual agreement, some without any agreement whatever. Renson was now
relieved from census duty, to his great joy, there remained but four of
us,--"the boss" and "Mac" in the office, "Scotty" and I outside. A deep
conference ensued and, as if I had not had good luck enough already, it
was decided that we two should go through the "cut" itself. It was like
offering us a salary to view all the Great Work in detail, for
virtually all the excavation of any importance on the Zone lay within
the confines of our district.

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

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

All the day through I climbed and scrambled back and forth between the
different levels, dodging from one track to another and along the rocky
floor of the canal, needing eyes and ears both in front and behind, not
merely for trains but for a hundred hidden and unknown dangers to keep
the nerves taut. Now and then a palatial motorcar, like some rail-road
breed of taxi, sped by with its musical insistent jingling bells,
usually with one of the countless parties of government guests or
tourists in spotless white which the dry season brings. Dirt-trains
kept the right of way, however, for the Work always comes first at
Panama. Or it might be the famous "yellow car" itself with members of
the Commission. Once it came all but empty and there dropped off
inconspicuously a man in baggy duck trousers, a black alpaca coat of
many wrinkles; and an unassuming straw hat, a white-haired man with
blue--almost babyish blue-eyes, a cigarette dangling from his lips as
he strolled about with restless yet quiet energy. There has been no
flash and glitter of military uniforms on the Zone since the French
sailed for home, but every one knew "the Colonel" for all that, the
soldier who has never "seen service," who has never heard the shrapnel
scream by overhead, yet to whom the world owes more thanks than six
conquering generals rolled into one.

Scores of "trypod" and "Star" drills, whole battalions of deafening
machines run by compressed air brought from miles away, are pounding
and grinding and jamming holes in the living rock. After them will
presently come nonchalantly strolling along gangs of the ubiquitous
black "powder-men" and carelessly throw down boxes of dynamite and
pound the drill-holes full thereof and tamp them down ready to "blow"
at 11:30 and 5:30 when the workmen are out of range,--those mighty
explosions that twelve times a week set the porch chairs of every
I.C.C. house on the Isthmus to rocking, and are heard far out at sea.

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

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

Now and then the boss is a stony-eyed American with a black cigar
clamped between his teeth. More often he is of the same nationality as
the workers, quite likely from the same town, who jabbers a little
imitation English. Which is one of the reasons why a force of "time
inspectors" is constantly dodging in and out over the job, time-book
and pencil in hand, lest some fellow-townsman of the boss be earning
his $1.50 a day under the shade of a tree back in the jungle. Here are
Basques in their boinas, preferring their native "Euscarra" to Spanish;
French "niggers" and English "niggers" whom it is to the interest of
peace and order to keep as far apart as possible; occasionally a few
sunburned blond men in a shovel gang, but they prove to be Teutons or
Scandinavians; laborers of every color and degree--except American
laborers, more than conspicuous by their absence. For the American
negro is an untractable creature in large numbers, and the caste system
that forbids white Americans from engaging in common labor side by side
with negroes is to be expected in an enterprise of which the leaders
are not only military men but largely southerners, however many may be
shivering in the streets of Chicago or roaming hungrily through the
byways of St. Louis. It is well so, perhaps. None of us who feels an
affection for the Zone would wish to see its atmosphere lowered from
what it is to the brutal depths of our railroad construction camps in
the States.

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

So many were the gangs that I advanced barely a half-mile during this
first day and, lost in my work, forgot the hour until it was suddenly
recalled by the insistent, strident tooting of whistles that forewarns
the setting-off of the dynamite charges from the little red electric
boxes along the edge of the "cut." I turned back toward Paraiso and,
all but stumbling over little red-wound wires everywhere on the ground,
dodging in and out, running forward, halting or suddenly retreating, I
worked my way gradually forward, while all the world about me was
upheaving and spouting and belching forth to the heavens, as if I had
been caught in the crater of a volcano as it suddenly erupted without
warning. The history of Panama is strewn with "dynamite stories." Even
the French had theirs in their sixteen per cent, of the excavation of
Culebra; in American annals there is one for every week. Three days
before, one of my Empire friends set off one afternoon for a stroll
through the "cut" he had not seen for a year. In a retired spot he came
upon two negroes pounding an irregular bundle. "What you doing, boys?"
he inquired with idle curiosity. "Jes' a brealdn' up dis yere dynamite,
boss," languidly answered one of the blacks. My friend was one of those
apprehensive, over-cautious fellows so rare on the Zone. Without so
much as taking his leave he set off at a run. Some two car-lengths
beyond an explosion pitched him forward and all but lifted him off his
feet. When he looked back the negroes had left. Indeed neither of them
has reported for work since.

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello, boy! Census taken yet?"

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

"Oh, yes sah, boss."

"When and where?"

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

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

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

Few are the "Zoners" now who do not consider the Spaniard the best
workman ever imported in all the sixty-five years from the railroad
surveying to the completion of the canal. The stocky, muscle-bound
little fellows come no longer to America as conquistadores, but to
shovel dirt. And yet more cheery, willing workers, more law-abiding
subjects are scarcely to be found. It is unfortunate we could not have
imported Spaniards for all the canal work; even they have naturally
learned some "soldiering" from the example of lazy negroes who, where
laborers must be had, are a bit better than no labor--though not much.

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

From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad that Americans are making
light of catastrophies on the Isthmus, that they cover up their great
disasters by a strict censorship of news. The latter is mere absurdity.
As to catastrophies, a great "slide" or a premature dynamite explosion
are serious disaster to Americans on the job just as they would be to
Europeans. But whereas the continental European would sit down before
the misfortune and weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on his
hands, and pitches in to shovel the "slide" out again. He isn't
belittling the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has got
to be dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the
Zone. Amid all the childish snarling of "Spigoties," the back-biting of
Europe, the congressional wrangles, the Cabinet politics, the man on
the job,--"the Colonel," the average American, the "rough-neck"--goes
right on digging the canal day by day as if he had never heard a rumor
of all this outside noise.

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

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

"Eh! 'Ad yer census taken yet?"

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

Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven Zone residents had I
enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were
Jamaicans. Of the states Pennsylvania was best represented. Martinique
negroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Panamanians were some eighty per cent
illiterate; of some three hundred of the first only a half dozen even
claimed to read and write; and non-wedlock was virtually universal
among them.

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

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

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

"'Deed ah don' know, boss,"

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

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

"Truly ah cahn't say, boss."

"Well what nationality was your father?"

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

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

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




CHAPTER V


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

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

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

He thrust into my hands a slip of paper, from another direction there
was tossed at me a new brass-check and "First-Class Private" police
badge No. 88, and I was racing down through Ancon. In the meadow below
the Tivoli I risked time to glance at the slip of paper. On it were the
names of an ex-president and two ministers of a frowsy little South
American republic during whose rule a former president and his henchmen
had been brutally murdered by a popular uprising in the very capital
itself.

In the first-class coach I found Lieutenant Long, towering so far above
all his surroundings as to have been easily recognized even had he not
been in uniform. Beside him sat Corporal Castillo of the
"plain-clothes" squad, a young man of forty, with a high forehead, a
stubby black mustache, and a chin that was decisive without being
aggressive.

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

"Franck."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The police launch, manned by negro prisoners, with "the Admiral" in a
cushioned arm-chair at the wheel, was soon scudding away across the
sunlit harbor, the breakwater building of the spoil of Culebra "cut" on
our left, ahead the cluster of small islands being torn to pieces for
Uncle Sam's fortifications. The steamer being not yet sighted, we put
in at Naos Island, where the bulky policeman in charge led us to dinner
at the I. C. C. hotel, during which the noonday blasting on the Zone
came dully across to us. Soon after we were landing at the cement
sidewalk of the island--where I had been a prisoner for a day in
January as my welcome to U. S. territory--and were being greeted by the
pocket edition doctor and the bay-windowed German who had been my
wardens on that occasion.

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

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

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

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

The doctor and his assistant were already being rowed out to the
steamer that was to bring the victims. They were to be lodged in a room
across the corridor from the conspirators, which corridor it would be
our simple duty to patrol with a view to intercepting any exchange of
stray lead. We fell to planning such division of the twenty-four hours
as should give me the most talkative period. The Lieutenant took the
trouble further to convince the trio of my total ignorance of Spanish
by a distinct and elaborate explanation, in English, of the difference
between the words "muchacho" and "muchacha." Then we wandered down past
the grimy steerage station to the shore end of the little wharf to
await the doctor and our proteges.

The ocean breeze swept unhampered across the island; on its rocky shore
sounded the dull rumble of waves, for the sea was rolling a bit now.
The swelling tide covered inch by inch a sandy ridge that connected us
with another island, gradually drowning beneath its waters several
rusty old hulls. A little rocky wooded isle to the left cut off the
future entrance to the canal. Some miles away across the bay on the
lower slope of a long hill drowsed the city of Panama in brilliant
sunshine; and beyond, the hazy mountainous country stretched
southwestward to be lost in the molten horizon. On a distant hill some
Indian was burning off a patch of jungle to plant his corn.

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

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

And just then the quarantine launch swung around the neighboring
island. I tightened my horse belt and dragged the "Colt" around within
easy reach; and a moment later the doctor and his bulking understudy
stepped ashore--alone.

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

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

A half-hour later we were pitching across the bay toward Ancon hill,
scaled bare on one end by the work of fortification like a Hindu
hair-cut. The water came spitting inboard now and then, and dejected
silence reigned within the craft. But spirits gradually revived and
before we could make out the details of the wharf the Corporal's hearty
genuine laughter and the Lieutenant's rousing carcajada were again
drifting across the water. At Balboa I unburdened myself of my shooting
hardware and, catching the labor-train, was soon mounting the graveled
walk to Ancon police station. In the second-story squad-room of the
bungalow were eight beds. But there were more than enough policemen to
go round, and the legal occupant of the bunk I fell asleep in returned
from duty at midnight and I transferred to the still warm nest of a man
on the "grave-yard" shift.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wormed my way through the fawning, neck-craning, many-shaded mob of
political henchmen and obsequious petitioners into the sacred hushed
precincts of Panama police headquarters. A paunched "Spigoty" with a
shifty eye behind large bowed glasses, vainly striving to exude dignity
and wisdom, received me with the oily smirk of the Panamanian
office-holder who feels the painful necessity of keeping on outwardly
good terms with all Americans. I flashed my badge and mentioned a name.
A few moments later there was presented to me a sturdy, if somewhat
flabby, young Spaniard carefully dressed and perfumed. We bowed like
life-long acquaintances and, stepping down to the street, entered a
cab. The prisoner, which he was now only in name, was a muscular fellow
with whom I should have fared badly in personal combat. I was wholly
unarmed, and in a foreign land. All those sundry little unexplained
points of a policeman's duty were bubbling up within me. When the
prisoner turned to remark it was a warm day should I warn him that
anything he said would be used against him? When he ordered the driver
to halt before the "Panazone" that he might speak to some friends
should I fiercely countermand the order? What was my duty when the
friends handed him some money and a package of cigars? Suppose he
should start to follow his friends inside to have a drink--but he
didn't. We drove languidly on down the avenue and up into Ancon, where
I heaved a genuine sigh of relief as we crossed the unmarked street
that made my badge good again. The prisoner was soon behind padlocks
and the money and cigars in the station safe. These and him and the
transfer card I took again with me into the foreign Republic in time
for the evening train. But he seemed even more anxious than I to
attract no attention, and once in Empire requested that we take the
shortest and most inconspicuous route to the police station; and my
responsibility was soon over.

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

Years ago when things were yet in primeval chaos and the memorable
sixth of February of 1904 was still well above the western horizon
there was gathered together for the protection of the newly-born Canal
Strip a band of "bad men" from our ferocious Southwest, warranted to
feed on criminals each breakfast time, and in command of a man-eating
rough-rider. But somehow the bad men seemed unable to transplant to
this new and richer soil the banefulness that had thrived so
successfully in the land of sage-brush and cactus. The gourmandizing
promised to be chiefly at the criminal tables; and before long it was
noted that the noxious gentlemen were gradually drifting back to their
native sand dunes, and the rough-riding gave way to a more orderly
style of horsemanship. Then bit by bit some men--just men without any
qualifying adjective whatever--began to get mixed up in the matter; one
after another army lieutenants were detailed to help the thing along,
until by and by they got the right army lieutenant and the right men
and the Z. P. grew to what it is to-day,--not the love, perhaps, but
the pride of every "Zoner" whose name cannot be found on some old
"blotter."

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

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

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

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

Obviously, you will say, a force recruited from such dissimilar sources
must be a thing of wide and sundry experience. And obviously you are
right. Could a man catch up the Z. P. by the slack of the khaki riding
breeches and shake out their stories as a giant in need of carfare
might shake out their loose change, then might he retire to some sunny
hillside of his own and build him a sound-proof house with a swimming
pool and a revolving bookcase and a stable of riding horses, and cause
to be erected on the front lawn a kneeling-place where publishers might
come and bow down and beat their foreheads on the pavement.

There are men in the Z. P. who in former years have played horse with
the startled markets of great American cities; men whose voices will
boom forth in the pulpit and whisper sage councils in the professional
in years to come; men whom doting parents have sent to Harvard--on whom
it failed to take, except on their clothes--men who have gone down into
the Valley of the Shadow of Death and crawled on hands and knees
through the brackish red brook that runs at the bottom and come out
again smiling on the brink above. Careers more varied than Mexican
sombreros one might hear in any Z. P. squad-room--were not the Z. P. so
much more given to action than to autobiography.

They bore little resemblance to what I had expected. My mental picture
of an American policeman was that conglomerate average one
unconsciously imbibes from a distant view of our city forces, and by
comparison with foreign,--a heavy-footed, discourteous, half-fanatical,
half-irreligious clubber whose wits are as slow as his judgment is
honest. Instead of which I found the Z. P. composed almost without
exception of good-hearted, well set up young Americans almost all of
military training. I had anticipated, from other experiences, a
constant bickering and a general striving to make life unendurable for
a new-comer. Instead I was constantly surprised at the good fellowship
that existed throughout the force. There were of course some healthy
rivalries; there were no angels among them--or I should have fled the
Isthmus much earlier; but for the most part the Z. P. resembled nothing
so much as a big happy family. Above all I had expected early to make
the acquaintance of "graft," that shifty-eyed monster which we who have
lived in large American cities think of as sitting down to dinner with
the force in every mess-hall. Graft? Why a Zone Policeman could not
ride on a P. R. R. train in full uniform when off duty without paying
his fare, though he was expected to make arrests if necessary and stop
behind with his prisoner. Compared indeed with almost any other spot on
the broad earth's surface "graft" eats slim meals on the Canal Zone.

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

He would far rather be battling with sun, man, and vegetation in the
jungle. He is of those who genuinely and frankly have no desire to
become rich, and "successful," a lack of ambition that formal society
cannot understand and fancies a weakness.

I had still another police surprise during these swivel-chair days. I
discovered there was on the Zone a yellow tailor who made Beau Brummel
uniforms at $7.50, compared with which the $5 ready-made ones were mere
clothes. All my life long I had been laboring under the delusion that a
uniform is merely a uniform. But one lives and learns.

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

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

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

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

"Si, senor," replied the Spaniard.

By which it may be gathered that linguistic ability on the Zone is on a
par with that in other U. S. possessions. Of the seven of us assigned
to plain-clothes duty on this strip of seventy-two nationalities there
was a Colombian, a gentleman of Swedish birth, a Chinaman from
Martinique, and a Greek, all of whom spoke English, Spanish, and at
least one other language. Of the three native Americans two spoke only
their mother tongue. In the entire white uniformed force I met only
Lieutenant Long and the Corporal in charge of Miraflores who could
seriously be said to speak Spanish, though I am informed there were one
or two others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which seems also to be Uncle Sam's view of the matter. Far and away
more important than any of the plain-clothes equipment thus far
mentioned is the "expense account." It is unlike the others in that it
is not visible and tangible but a mere condition, a pleasant sensation
like the consciousness of a good appetite or a youthful fullness of
life. The only reality is a form signed by the czar of the Zone himself
tucked away among I. C. C. financial archives. That authorizes the man
assigned to special duty in plain clothes to be reimbursed money
expended in the pursuance of duty up to the sum of $60 per month;
though it is said that the interpretation of this privilege to the full
limit is not unlikely to cause flames of light, thunderous rumblings,
and other natural phenomena in the vicinity of Empire and Culebra. But
please note further; these expenditures may be only "for cab or boat
hire, meals away from home, and LIQUOR and CIGARS!" Plainly the
"gum-shoe" should be a bachelor.

Fortunately, however, the proprietor of the expense account is not
required personally to consume it each month. It is designed rather to
win the esteem of bar-tenders, loosen the tongues of suspects, libate
the thirsty stool-pigeon, and prime other accepted sources of
information. But beware! Exceeding care in filling out the account of
such expenditures at the month's end. Carelessness leads a hunted life
on the Canal Zone. Take, for instance, the slight error of my
friend--who, having made such expenditure in Colon, by a slip of the
pen, or to be nice, of the typewriter, sent in among three score and
ten items the following:

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

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

    WHERE can you buy beer in Cristobal?

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

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

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

Now and then a Z. P. story whiled away the time. There was the sad case
of Corporal ---- in charge of ---- station. Early one Sunday afternoon
the Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the railroad.
Naturally the day was hot. The Corporal sent a policeman to arrest the
inhuman wretch for cruelty to animals. When he had left the culprit
weeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the goat, tied in the shade
under the police station.

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

Then there was "the Mystery of the Knocked-out Niggers." Day after day
there came reports from a spot out along the line that some negro
laborer strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner suddenly lay
down, threw a fit, and went into a comatose state from which he
recovered only after a day or two in Ancon or Colon hospitals. The
doctors gave it up in despair. As a last resort the case was turned
over to a Z. P. sleuth. He chose him a hiding-place as near as possible
to the locality of the strange manifestation. For half the morning he
sweltered and swore without having seen or heard the slightest thing of
interest to an old "Zoner." A dirt-train rumbled by now and then. He
strove to amuse himself by watching the innocent games of two little
Spanish switch-boys not far away. They were enjoying themselves, as
guileless childhood will, between their duties of letting a train in
and out of the switch. Well on in the second half of the morning
another diminutive Iberian, a water-boy, brought his compatriots a pail
of water and carried off the empty bucket. The boys hung over the edge
of the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their home-made
drinking-can, no doubt, and went on playing.

By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in the
distance. Now and then as he advanced he sang a snatch of West Indian
ballad. As he espied the "switcheros" a smile broke out on his features
and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-pail. In a working
species of Spanish he made some request of the boys, the while wiping
his ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys protested. Evidently they had
lived on the Zone so long they had developed a color line. The negro
pleaded. The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still shook
their heads. One of them was idly tapping the ground with a
broom-handle that had lain beside him. The negro glanced up and down
the track, snatched up the boys' drinking vessel, of which the wire
hooked over the pail was not after all the handle, and stooped to dip
up a can of water. The little fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing a
useless protest, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the rail in
front of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent the can of water some rods
down the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thin
air above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after trying
a moment in vain to kick the railroad out by the roots, lay still.

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

Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended. There was thrust
into my hands a typewritten-sheet and I caught the next thing on wheels
out to Corozal for my first investigation. It was one of the most
commonplace cases on the Zone. Two residents of my first dwelling-place
on the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150 in U. S. gold.

Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. Every bachelor
quarters on the Isthmus, completely screened in, is entered by two or
three screen-doors, none of which is or can be locked. In the building
are from twelve to twenty-four wide-open rooms of two or three
occupants each, no three of whom know one another's full names or
anything else, except that they are white Americans and ipso facto (so
runs Zone philosophy) above dishonesty. The quarters are virtually
abandoned during the day. Two negro janitors dawdle about the building,
but they, too, leave it for two hours at mid-day. Moreover each of the
forty-eight or more occupants probably has several friends or
acquaintances or enemies who may drift in looking for him at any hour
of the day or night. No negro janitor would venture to question a white
American's errand in a house; Panama is below the Mason and Dixon line.
In practice any white American is welcome in any bachelor quarters and
even to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though he be a total
stranger to all the community. Add to this that the negro tailor's
runner often has permission to come while the owner is away for suits
in need of pressing, that John Chinaman must come and claw the week's
washing out from under the bed where the "rough-neck" kicked it on
Saturday night, that there are a dozen other legitimate errands that
bring persons of varying shades into the building, and above all that
the bachelors themselves, after the open-hearted old American fashion,
have the all but universal habit of tossing gold and silver, railroad
watches and real-estate bonds, or anything else of whatever value,
indifferently on the first clear corner that presents itself.
Precaution is troublesome and un-American. It seems a fling at the
character of your fellow bachelors--and in the vast majority of Zone
cases it would be. But it is in no sense surprising that among the many
thousands that swarm upon the Isthmus there should be some not averse
to increasing their income by taking advantage of these guileless
habits and bucolic conditions. There are suggestions that a few--not
necessarily whites--make a profession of it. No wonder "our chief
trouble is burglary" and has been ever since the Z. P. can remember.
Summed up, the pay-day gold that has thus faded away is perhaps no
small amount; compared with what it might have been under prevailing
conditions it is little.

As for detecting such felonies, police officers the world around know
that theft of coin of the realm in not too great quantities is
virtually as safe a profession as the ministry. The Z. P. plain-clothes
man, like his fellows elsewhere, must usually be content in such cases
with impressing on the victim his Sherlockian astuteness, gathering the
available facts of the case, and return to typewrite his report thereof
to be carefully filed away among headquarters archives. Which is
exactly what I had to do in the case in question, diving out the door,
notebook in hand, to catch the evening train to Panama.

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER VI


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

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

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

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

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

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

Entertainments come rarely to Gatun. The one-ringed circus was packed
with every grade of society from gaping Spanish laborers to haughty
wives of dirt-train conductors, among whom it was not hard to
distinguish in a far corner the uniformed sergeant in command of Gatun
and the long lean corporal tied in a bow-line knot at the alleged wit
of the versatile but solitary clown who changed his tongue every other
moment from English to Spanish. But the end was already near;
excitement was rising to the finale of the performance, a wrestling
match between a circus man and "Andy" of Pedro Miguel locks. By the
time I had found a leaning-place it was on--and the circus man of
course was conquered, amid the gleeful howling of "rough-necks," who
collected considerable sums of money and went off shouting into the
black night, in quest of a place where it might be spent quickly. It
would be strange indeed if among all the thousands of men in the prime
of life who are digging the canal at least one could not be found who
could subjugate any champion a wandering circus could carry among its
properties. I took up again the random tramping in the dark unknown
night; till it was two o'clock of a Sunday morning when at last I
dropped my report-card in the train-guard box and climbed upstairs to
the cot opposite "Davie," sleeping the silent, untroubled sleep of a
babe.

I was barely settled in Gatun when the train-guard handed me one of
those frequent typewritten orders calling for the arrest of some
straggler or deserter from the marine camp of the Tenth Infantry. That
very morning I had seen "the boss" of census days off on his vacation
to the States--from which he might not return--and here I was coldly
and peremptorily called upon to go forth and arrest and deliver to Camp
Elliott on its hill "Mac," the pride of the census, with a promise of
$25 reward for the trouble. "Mac" desert? It was to laugh. But
naturally after six weeks of unceasing repetition of that pink set of
questions "Mac's" throat was a bit dry and he could scarcely be
expected to return at once to the humdrum life of camp without spending
a bit of that $5 a day in slaking a tropical thirst. Indeed I question
whether any but the prudish will loudly blame "Mac" even because he
spent it a bit too freely and brought up in Empire dispensary. Word of
his presence there soon drifted down to the wily plain-clothes man of
Empire district. But it was a hot noonday, the dispensary lies somewhat
up hill, and the uniformless officer of the Zone metropolis is rather
thickly built. Wherefore, stowing away this private bit of information
under his hat, he told himself with a yawn, "Oh, I'll drag him in later
in the day," and drifted down to a wide-open door on Railroad Avenue to
spend a bit of the $25 reward in off-setting the heat. Meanwhile "Mac,"
feeling somewhat recovered from his financial extravagance, came
sauntering out of the dispensary and, seeing his curly-headed friend
strolling a beat not far away, naturally cried out, "Hello, Eck!" And
what could Eck say, being a reputable Zone policeman, but:

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

Which was lucky for "Mac." For Eck had once worn a marine hat over his
own right eye and, he knew from melancholy experience that the $25 was
no government generosity, but "Mac's" own involuntary contribution to
his finding and delivery; so managed to slip most of it back into
"Mac's" hands.

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

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

I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined among those ordered to
report for target test. A fine piece of luck was this for a man who had
scarcely fired a shot since, aged ten, he brought down with an air-gun
an occasional sparrow at three cents a head. We took the afternoon
train to Mt. Hope on the edge of Colon and trooped away to a little
plain behind "Monkey Hill," the last resting-place of many a "Zoner."
The Cristobal Lieutenant, father of Z. P., was in charge, and here
again was that same Z. P. absence of false dignity and the genuine
good-fellowship that makes the success of your neighbor as pleasing as
your own.

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

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

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

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

The mysterious detective work began at once. Without so much as putting
on a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious crime. It was
the usual Zone type of laborers' barracks. A screened building of one
huge room, it contained two double rows of three-tier "standee" canvas
bunks on gas-pipes. Around the entire room, close under the sheet-iron
roof, ran a wooden platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked
high with the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper
suitcases containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more
workmen around the rough table below.

Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-camp
during working hours. Practically the West Indian janitors to whom is
left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not fallible. In the
course of the second day I unearthed a second Turk who, having chanced
the morning before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor and soap
preparatory to welcoming a fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had been
mildly startled to step on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given
length and proportions lying prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta.
The latter explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his
unconventional posture by asserting that he was the "mosquito man," and
shortly thereafter went away fro

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