 Chapter 1, Part 1 of Zone Policeman 88. 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 bruise and three topped plazas compressed in a scallop of the sun gleaming Pacific, with its peaked and wooded islands to fire toboga 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 hat-band, and pushed open the screen door of the passageway that leads to police headquarters. Hmm, 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 a rising inflection of awakened interest. That puts another face on the matter. See his eyes wandered, with the faraway 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 Alcon to the far-green ridges of the youthful republic, ablaze with the unbroken tropical sunshine. The whir of a telephone bell broke in upon his meditation. In sharp, clear-cut phrases he answered the questions that came to him over the fire, 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 will like police work? I believe I should. The captain shuffled for a moment one of the several stacks of unfolded letters on his desk. —Well, it's the most thankless damned job in creation!—he went on almost extremely. 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, sir? Not that either. —Well, we usually require it, used 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 was burglary, he broke off abruptly, rising to reach a copy of the canal's own 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 armchair against the wall and felt a reading amid the clickety-click of typewriters, telephone calls even from far off Cologne on the Atlantic, and the constant going and coming of a negro orderly and shining 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 Australopanama 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 525 back to Corazelle, inquired the inspector. Mr. Blank, give him transportation to Colabora 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 foot 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 nervous 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 are sure you are and can, and you 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 Calabra tomorrow, said the inspector, as I bade the room good day and stepped forth with my most military stride in bearing, and report back here a Friday morning. I ascended to the world below, not by the long perspective of stairs that leads down and across the gully to the heart of Akan, but by a shortcut that took me quickly into a foreign land. The gravel 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 border are the same as those of crossing any village street. It was my first entrance into the land of the Panamanos, technically known on the zone as Spigottes, and, familiarly, with a tinge of despite as Spicks, because the first Americans to arrive in the land found a few natives in Cadman who claimed to speak it to English. 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 today there are many who complain of its unpleasant odors. To those who have lived in other tropical cities is sent as like the perfumes of Arabic, and none but those can, in any degree, realize what T. Osam has done for the place. Towards sunset I pass to a gateway with scores of fellow countrymen, all as composedly at home as in the heart of their native land. Across the platforms stood a train distinctively American in every feature, a billiouous 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 spaghetti, with his long greased hair, his finger-rings, and his effeminate gestures, and even a negro or two. Although 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 roadbed, the deep-voiced masculine whistle and set of the painful, periled 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 saw only 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 dread 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 737 from Coralzall, across another bit of the zone. Exactly thus should one first see the great work, piecemeal, 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 a few spicks on board to correct them, Peter McGill, Peter McGill! We were already moving on again, before I 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 girdleless 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 to behind, as if the site 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 screen 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 in 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 upon the scales within. At about ten-second intervals a monosyllable fell from the lips of the morose American as he delved into my personal makeup from crowned 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 plank I had brought, and handed 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 parkese than ventured to invoke a hint thereof from that furrow-browed being from the land of brusqueness. 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 Corzall. 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 Calabra, a mighty channel of 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-shells heaping the cars high with earth and rock. Everywhere were groups of little men, some working leisurely, some scrambling down into a rocky bit 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 Pittsburgh of smoke. All long-heralded sights, such as the nature of the world and the ocean, are at first glimpse disappointing. To this rule the great Calabra 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 loaded the spoil of the cut ground away towards the Pacific, and here men 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 Carlisle was prone to preach, with the same discipline and organization as an army in the field. And every now and then, to bear out a 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 Calabra, 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, passed an army encamped in wood and tin barracks on a hillside, with khaki uniformed soldiers a horse and a foot had livening all the roadway in the neighboring fields. Never a mile without its town. How different will all this be when the canal is finished and all its community has gone to Alaska, or has scattered itself 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 to lie. 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 stars and stripes flapping far above, until I came at last in sight of the renowned Chagres, seven miles above Calabra, 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 preconceived notion, and at length falling into a narrow jungle trail that pitched down to a dense-grown gully came upon a fenced compound with several zoned buildings on the banks of the Chagres, down to which sloped a broad green lawn. Here dwells hail and ruddy old Fritz, for long years keeper of the filovograph 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 an adventure in almost any land, all with a captivating accent and in the vocabulary of a man who was lived long among men in nature, nor are Fritz's 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, without far there is no progress, then all the world is at peace, all the world goes to sleep. CHAPTER I. PART II. OF ZONE POLICEMAN 88. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. ZONE POLICEMAN 88. A close-range study of the Panama Canal and its workers. By Harry A. Frank. CHAPTER I. PART II. 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 armchair 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 Clark 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 weren't 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 Cologne last night, and—here's where I get my case no pro-sed, 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 if-ness 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, uh, pay—edit Eddie, reaching for a cigarette, but changing his mind—the enumerators will be five dollars a day, and, uh, 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 usefulness 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 a 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, notebook and pencil in hand, authority to ramble around a month or more in sunshine and jungle, and paying me for the privilege. There are really two methods of seeing the canal zone, as an employee, or as a guest of the Trevoli, both of them at about five dollars a day, but at opposite ends of the thermometer. There remained a weekend 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 thereon too 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 automantine financial backing. In his greened 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 employee's hotels. At nearly twice the employee's price, the very attitude in which he is received says openly that he is admitted only on sufferance, permitted to eat only because if he starved to death our uncle would have the bother of burying him and his own police the arduous toil of making out an accident report. Meanwhile I must change my dwelling place. For the quartermaster of Corazal had need of all the rooms within his domain, need so imperative that seventeen Bonafide and rafi-employees were even then at bunking in the pool-room of Corazal 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 adverse to the transfer. The roommate with whom fate had cast me in House eighty-one was a pleasant enough fellow, a youth of unobjectionable personal manners, even though his eight-hour graft was in the sooty seat of esteem-crain 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 he had begun a retreat before the gentle night breeze, I was awakened from the first dose by my companion sitting suddenly up in his cot across the room. Say, I hope you're not nervous, he remarked. Not in moderately. One of my stunts is Nightmare. He went on, rising to switch on the electrical light. And when I get him I generally imagine my roommate is a burglar trying to go through my junk, and he reached under his pillow and brought to light a colt of forty-five calibre. Then crossing the room he pointed to three large irregularly splintered holes on the wall, some three or four inches above me, and which I had not seen simply because I had not chance to look that way. There's the last three. But I'm trying to break myself of them, 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 telephone consent on the ground that I was now virtually on the force, I took up my residence in Corazile police station. There's 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 dredging away at 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 Corazile 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 likely to resemble a morrow expedition in the Philippines. B. and I shared the big main room, for T., being the haughty station commander, occupied the parlour 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 the Corazile station so spic and span. Ah! To be sure there are 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 of mules to haul about all that dude, 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 Corazile and watched the unbroken deafening procession of dirt trains screamed by on their way to the Pacific, straining moguls dragging a furlong of liquorwood flats, swaying all of her dumps with their side chains clanking, as accession is incessant of empties grinding back again into the midst of the fray. On the tail of every train, launched an American conductor, but more like a minor, though his front and hind Negro breakmen were as apt to be in silk ties and patent leathers, to say nothing of the trainloads 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. It was constant and heavily laden today 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 weekend gave me time to get back in touch with affairs in the states among the newspaper files at the YMCA 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-stought with men'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 Honduran hut. The YMCA is the chief social center on the Isthmus. The rendezvous and leisure hour headquarters of the thousands that inhabit batch or quarters, except a few of the purely bar room type. 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 YM is a trifle lowbrow in its tastes, that the books on its shelves are apt to be popular novels rather than a reading matter, that its photographs are most frequently screeching vaudeville noises while the sledsack and Homer discs lie tucked away far down near the bottom of the stack. With a 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 the milliflores tunnel through a mole hill, past your concrete lighthouse among the astonished palms, and a giant hose of water wiping away the rock hills across the trestle-less bridge with its photographic glimpses of the canal before and behind for the limber neck, 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 three, house forty-seven, 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 roommates, 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 inventoryman would attempt to classify. Out the room was the usual clutter of all manner of things in the usual unarranged, unwomened, zone way, which the negro janitor feels at neither his duty nor privilege to bring to order, while on and about my cot and bureau were helter-skeltered the sun-dry 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 or drawer, I was settled, a full-fledged don't-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 ICC has very dexterously dodged the necessity of lining the zone with the offensive signs black and white. It 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. Tis a deep and sharp-drawn line. The story runs that Liza Lossum, not long arrived from Jamaica, entering the office of his own dentist, paused suddenly before the announcement, crownwork, gold and silver fillings, extractions wholly without pain. There was a deep disappointment in face and voice as she sat down with a flounce of her starched and snow-white skirt, gasping, Ah, doctor, does I have to have silver fillings? My roommates, 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 Collabor Range. Oens, 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 men snatched away to their appointed tasks, I sat a short hour in one of the black mission rocking-chairs on the screen 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 in 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 Corazal Police Station. To be sure there were sheets for sale in Empire, at the commissary, where money has the purchasing power of cobblestones, 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 at the bed of the absent Mitch and gurgled, Just you make love to that man what got that bed. Him got plenty of 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 rail yards in a part of the town, where were tables of four, electric fans, and Ben to serve with butler formality. I found it worthwhile 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 distanced when I should receive the recruits hotel book, and soon grow as accustomed to the rest as having a coupon snatched from it by the yellow negro at the door. The whole Sam's boarding scale on the zone is widely varied. Three meals cost the non-employee a dollar fifty, the gold employee ninety cents, the white European laborer forty cents, and negroes in general thirty cents. That afternoon, when the sun had begun to bow its head on the thither side of the canal, I climbed to the newly labeled central 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, and he might be always on the job. Not until 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 chairman, 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 Basso Bispo, fluid with the working Spanish they had picked up from Mondano to Puerto Rico, and washed cheeked with the prospect of a full month on pass, to say nothing of the four dollars and forty cents a day which would be added to their daily military income of sixty cents. Then there were four of the darker few, Pan-Immadians and West Indians, and how rare our Spanish-speaking Americans on the zone was prued by the admittance of such complexions to the gold roll. Of native U.S. citizens there were but two of us. Afum 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 way of Americans. As for the other seven, each was assigned his drip 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 Trussellus Bridge over the canal to a great tree near Basel Bissebo, 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 which was such as to give pause and reflection. When you have once signed on as enumerator, you cannot cease to exercise your functions as such without justifiable cause under penalty of five hundred dollar 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 two thousand dollars, or sentenced to five years' imprisonment, or both. From there on the injunctions grew less nerve-wracking. 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 they are 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 rose, and swarmed upstairs to an empty courtroom, where a 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 4. On oath, I repeat, not merely to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies armed or armless, but furthermore, not to share with anyone any of the information you gather as an enumerator, or show a census-card, or keep a copy of the same. Yet I trust I can spin this simple yarn of my canal-zone days without offense to Uncle Sam, against the day when, may have, 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. End of Chapter 1 Part 2, Recording by Todd. Recording by Mickey Lee Rich. Lone Policeman, 88 A close-range study of the Panama Canal and its workers by Harry A. Frank, Chapter 2 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 them in. Up in House 47, I gathered together the Legion paraphernalia for this new occupation, some 200 red cards, a foot long and half as wide, a surveyors filled notebook for the preservation of miscellaneous information, tags for the tagging of canvas buildings, tags for the tagging of the same, the necessary tack hammer, the medium soft black pencil, above all the awesome legal commission, impressively signed and sealed, were in none other than our wady nation's chief himself to expressly authorize me to search out, enter, and question ad libidum. All this swung over a shoulder in a white canvas sack that carried memory back through the long years to my news boy days. I descended to the town. The boss was ready. It was nearly 11 when we crossed the silent PRR tracks and plunged 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 new 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-hewed Hercules nearest at hand. David Providence, he bleated in a 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 clothesmen and quest of criminals, and his announcement brought visible relief. Twice as many blacks were sprawled in the two rooms 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 a 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 state's 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 populist than the first. It was a 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 4.30. House 47 was in riotous uproar. No, neither conflagration or foreign invasion was pending. It was merely the house full of engineers and the customary daily struggle to catch the labor train and be a way to work by daylight. When the hours rampage had subsided, I rose to switch off the light and turn 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 archroofed 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 great kettle of scalding water. But there are also marriage porters 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 noontime came, I was not well started on the second house. Yet carried away more than 60 filled out cards. More than two days, that single row of houses endured, very by night spent with the boss in the labor camps of Lerio Calabraway. Then one morning, I tramped far out the highway to the old Scotchman's farmhouse that bounds Empire on the north and began the long intricate journey through the private own 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 neat 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 squatter's nests of ten cans and dry good boxes hidden away behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into dilapidated eardrums, delving into the past of every human being who fell in my way. West Indian Negroes easily kept the lead of all of the 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 scan, 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, littering Gugas, a black baby, squirming naked in a basket of rags with an episcopal prayer book 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 and sundry languages. Many a page purely of advertising matter, the muscular and brooded likeness of a certain black champion rarely missing, frequently with a Bible laid reverently beneath it. Outside, before each room, a ten fireplace for cooking precariously bestrided the veranda rail. Often a tumbled-down hovel, or three would seem a crowd, yielded up more than a dozen inmates, many of whom, being at work, must be looked for later, the bat calls, that is, the bed-noir of the census enumerator. West Indians, however, are for the most part well-acquainted with the affairs of friends and roommates, and enrollment of the absent was often possible. Occasionally, I ran into a den of impertinence that must be frowned down, notably an notorious warming tenement over a lumberyard. But on the whole, the courtesy of the British West Indians, even among themselves, was noteworthy. Of the two great divisions among them, Barbadian 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. Yeah, I is. Why, you do bear the first American eye of a sea that was perlite, which spoke badly indeed for the others, for 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 patients among your bag of supplies in the morning. Tropical patients, 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 20 pounds on my shoulder, this was mere pastime. Heat had no terrors for the enumerated, however. Even in the hottest hour of the day, I came upon Negroes sleeping in tightly closed rooms, the sweat running off of them in streams, yet apparently vastly enjoying the situation. Sunday came, and I chose to continue. The virtually all the zones was on holiday, and even the boss, after what I found later, to be his invariable custom, had broken away from his card-lettering 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 Glatsongarb bound Panama Ward to see the lottery drawing and buy a ticket for the following Sunday across the Isthmus to Bresikolan or to one of a hundred ferrying spots and pastimes. Others in khaki breeches fresh from the government laundry and crystal bowl 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 screen verandas in pajamas and kimonos. Old timers, a 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 east of town and soon they came drifting across to me at my labor horse frenzied screams sounding strangely incongruous beneath the swaying palm trees. Come on, get down with his arm. But my time was well chosen and the Spanish camps above the canal still and silent was Sunday. Men at no other time to be run to earth were entrapped in their bunks under their dwelling place in the shade shaving exchanging haircuts, 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 were inoculated with their cheerfulness. Came sudden changes to camps of Martiniques a sort of wild untamed creature who spoke the 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, commune-to-pelle, and give their age only to those who open wide mouth and cry, que agis-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 islander from Saint 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 away, mere a regular demonstration, having only the effect of lulling him into deeper childlike slumber. The surest and often only effective means was to tickle the slumber gently on the soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate instruments such as my tack hammer or convenient broom handle or flat iron. Frequently I came upon young negro man 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 faraway 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 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 hodgepodge shops and stores railroad avenue. China men began to drift into the rolls. There appeared such names as Carmen Wacheng. Cooks and waitresses living in dark, some back cupboards must be unearthed. Negro shoemakers were caught at their stands on the sidewalks. Shiny haired bartenders gave up their biographies and 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 at his counter in delight to find out that I too had been in his native, Zakhle. 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 emperor 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 and steaming shirt bosoms, Chinese merchants of whom there were hordes on the zone, queueless, dressed and be tailored till you must look at them twice to tell them from gold employees, the flag of the new republic flapping over their doors, the new president and their lapels left off selling crucifixes and breast-pin medallions of Christ to Negro women to answer my questions. One evening I stumbled into a nest of 11 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 pestered their own 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 Chinese, 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 our first meeting had insisted on being enrolled under that pseudonym, alleging it his real name. Upstairs above his door, all was supple girl 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 Joss House, where dwelt only grinning wooden aisles not counted as zone residents by the materialistic census officials. On the it's must 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 by valve 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 Stuart to Skoljans, filed by me whispering autobiography. The police station on it's knoll felt like the rest. I went to jail and sat down a large score of black men and pair of European whites back from a day 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 if it were not that policeman, white and black, sleep on all sides of them. Crowded, old Empire not only faces her streets but even her backyards 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, somewhat the letters US painted upon them, which site gave some three day investigator material to charge the ICC with untold waste and 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 winches withdrew a dripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with a sympathetic giggle and picaninis ran out to meet me as a returned enquest of one missing inmate in a house of 50. For the few laborers still uncaught, I took the 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 dark brethren. In all Negrodom, the conviction became general that this individual detailing, catatizing and house branding was really a government scheme to get lists of persons due for deportation, either for lack of work as the canal near completion or for looseness of marital relations. Hardly, a tenement did I enter but laughing voices bandied back and forth and they're echoed and re-echoed through the building. Such remark says, well, they go send us home, Penelope, or you impossible better hurry up and get married, Ambrosia. Several dusky females regularly ran away when I approached. One at least I came seeking in vain nine times and found her the 10th time behind a garbage barrel. Many fancy 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 exercise 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 pencil 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 to ask Barris Ford Planginette if he were a British subject. Naturally, the mother of Hazermaneth Cumberbard Smith baptized that very weak had to claw out the family Bible from among the bedclothes and look up the name on the flyleaf. To the enumerator who must set down concise and exact answers to each of his questions, 50 or 60 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 bucksome jet black woman addressed. Enumerator on a venture. What's the man's name? He named Rasmuth Eagleston. What's his metal check number? Lord Masta, I don't know he check number. Haven't you a commissary book with it in? Lord, no, my love. Commissary book him finished already before last week. Is he Jamaican? No, him a malt rap master. Monsteration. What color is he? Te-he-he, what for you has all them questions, Masta? For instance, oh, him just a pitch darker me. How old is he? Loud laughter. Luh, I don't know how old him are. Well, about how old? Oh, him a rap man, my love, him a prime man. Is he older than you? Oh, yes, him older than me. And how old are you? Te-he-he, deed, I don't know how old I is. I gone lost my age paper. Is he married? Quickly and with a very great face. Oh, yes indeed, Masta, I his show-nough wife. Can he read? Pesitatingly, eh, a little 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? Hotly, him employed by the ICC. Yes, naturally, but what kind of work does he do? Is he a laborer? Quickly and very impressively, laborer? Oh no, my sweet Masta, he'd just shovel away the dirt before the steam shovel. All right, that'll do it for Rasmus, now your name. My name Mistress Jane Eagleston. How long have you lived in the canal zone? Oh, not too long, my love. Since when have you lived in this house? Oh, we don't come to this house too long, sir. Can you read and write? No, I don't stand to make a, I'll come to Panama when I'm small. Do you do any work besides your own housework? Evacuately, work? If I does any work, no, not any. A numerator looks hard from her to wash tub. I'll wash this a couple of gentlemen's clothes. Very good then. Now then, how many children? We don't get no children, sir. What? How did that happen? Loud, house-shaking laughter. Enumerator, looking at watch and finding at 1210. Well, good afternoon. Good evening, sir. Thank you, sir. Variations on the above might fill many pages. How old are you? Self-appointed interpreter of the same shade. He is how old is you? How old I are? I don't rather know my age, Master Mamanna told me. St. Lucian woman, evidently about 45, after deep thought, plainly anxious to be truthful as possible, as 20, sir. Oh, you're older than that, about 60, say? About that, sir. Are you married? Pushing the children out of the way. They're not as yet, my sweet master, but we go and be soon, sir. To a Barbadian woman of 40. Just you and your daughter live here? That's all, sir. Does your husband live here? Oh, I don't ever marry as yet, sir. An ant, the old saying about the partnership of life and hope. To a Dominican woman of 52, toothless and pitted with smallpox, are you married? With simpering smile, not as yet, my sweet master. To a Dominican 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 roommate's name? Well, we call him Ethel, but I don't know his right title. Per adventure, he will not work this evening, and you can ask him from himself. Do his parents live on the zone? Oh, yes, sir. He has one father and one mother. An answer, why himself, emphatically subject pronoun among Barbadians, didn't know if he'd get a job. To a six-foot black giant working at Night Hostler at Steam Shovels. Well, Josiah, I suppose you're a Jamaican. Oh, yes, boss. I'll work in Kingston 10 years as a barmaid. Married? No, boss. I was not exactly married. I was living 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 has 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 a man chastise his wife when she deserves and needs it? Dr. O, not on the canal zone, it's against the law. Negro, in great astonishment. Is that so, boss? Did I'll never do it again, boss? On the 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 patronizing the common public schools, Uncle Sam provided free-to-all-zone residents. The old man sat before some 20 wide-eyed children, one of whom stood slouch-shouldered, with a book in hand in the center of the room. And at regular intervals of not more than 20 seconds, he shouted high above all other noises of the neighborhood. You call that English? However you're going to learn talk properly like that, you'll tell me. Far back in the interior of an empire block, I came upon an old, old Negro woman, parchment-scanned and doddering, living alone in a stoop, shouldered, shanty of boxes and tin cans. I don't know how old I is, Master, was one of her replies. But I've borne six years before the Calawats give it. When did you come to Panama? I don't know, but a long time ago. Before the Americans, perhaps? Oh, long before. The French ain't only just beginning to dig. I was ashamed to say how wrong I've been here. Just why it was not evident, unless she fancied, she should long ago have been made her fortune and left. Is you American? Well, they're making sure have done wanting. They make this country civilized. Why, child, before they come, we have all the time here revolutions. I'll quote and count to how many revolutions we had. In every day they steal all what we have to even steal my clothes. I'll show glad for one, the Americans come. It was during my empire enumerating that I 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 set a Spaniard in worn but newly washed working clothes, book in hand. I sat down and falling unconsciously into the 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 bare suggestion of amusement in his voice caused me to look up quickly. My library, he said with a ghost of a weird smile, nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf made of pieces of dynamite boxes. Mine and my roommates. The shelf was filled with four real Barcelona paper editions of Hegel, Fitch, Spencer, Huxley, and a half dozen others accustomed to sit in the same company all dog-eared with much reading. Some ambitious foremen I'm used and went on with my queries. Occupation, pico y bala, he answered. Pick and shovel I exclaimed. And read those, no importa, he answered again with his elusive shadow of a smile. It doesn't matter. And as I arose to leave, Buenos dias, señor. 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 the Spain's most celebrated lawyers. I recalled that El Unico, the anarchist Spanish weekly, published in Mira Flores, contained 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 contrast, I suppose, that the thought of Tom, my roommate, suddenly flashed upon me. And I discovered myself chuckling at the picture. Tom, the roughneck, to whom all, such as Federico Malera with his pick and shovel were Miller 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 heirs of some American, ostensibly far above them. End of chapter two, recording by Mickey Lee Rich. Chapter three, part one of Zone Policeman 88. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Zone Policeman 88, a close-range study of the Panama Canal and its workers, by Harry A. Frank. Chapter three, part one. Meanwhile, my fellow enumerators were reporting troubles in the bush. I heard particularly those of two of the Marines, Mack and Rensen. Mary, good-natured, earnest by sports, even modest fellows, quite different from what I had hitherto pictured as an enlisted man. Mack 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-chattels 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 Mack for a mere roast about, 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 pumped Mack 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 Mack was not of the type of those who overworked the first-person pronoun, not because of foolish diffidence, but merely because it early occurred to him as a subject of conversation. Seventeen years in the Marine Corps, you were sure he was jolly when he first said it, had taken Mack to most places where warships go, from Key King and the islands to Cape Town and Buenos Aires, and given him not merely an acquaintance with the world, but, what is far more in acquisition, the gift of getting acquainted in almost any stratum of the world in the briefest possible space of time. Mack spoke not only his English and Italian, but a fluent island 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. Mack 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 Columbian and not subject to questioning by the agents of other powers. Rensen. Well, Rensen was in some way Mack's exact antithesis, and in some his twin brother. He was one of those youths who believed in spending prodigally and in all possible haste what little nature had given them. Wherefore, though he was younger than Mack appeared to be, he already looked older than Mack was. In Zoom parlance he had already laid a good share of the road to hell behind him. Yet such a cheery, likable chap was Rensen, 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 wattently to the inferior bow-wows. Rensen's bush troubles were legion. Not only were there the seducing brown spaghetti woman 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 Rensen sure to give battle and fall. It's no use being a man unless you're a hell of a man, was Rensen'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 wild one dark night and reported as its reason for postponing the enumerating. If you'd butt in on one of them Martinique Bou's 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 senses. Early one afternoon our Panamanian helpmate burst upon one of his numerous aristocratic relatives in his royal fashion 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 du regue regarding the honorable health of his honorable hoard of offspring, and his eye had fallen again on the red cards in his hand, the fact struck him that the relative was a 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 argous-eyed. Long he set in deepest meditation. Being a Panamanian he could not, of course, know that Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his senses. Till at length, as the sun was firing the western jungle treetops, a scintillating idea rewarded his unwanted 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 genuflections, he drifted empireward with a dozen cards the day had yield. Which is why I was shocked next morning by the disrespectful report of Rensen that my friend the boss had tied a can to this big 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 postelleries. 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 Dumbarton, and for some years past have been dispensing good old Dumbarton English in Panama's proudest educational institution. But Panama's school vacation is during her summer, for a dry season from February to April. What more natural, then, than that Scotty should have concluded to pass his vacation taking senses, for obviously a man must pick up a wee bit of chain where he can. I seemed to have been appointed to a purely sightseeing job. One February noon, I reported at the office to find that passes to Dumbarton have been issued to five of us. Scotty, Mack, Rensen, and Barter among the number. The task in the town by the dam side, it seemed, was proving too heavy for the regular enumerators of that district. We left by the 210 train. Cascadas and Balsa Bispo 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 Maduchin, when Mack solemnly attempted to spring on me the old tourist hoax of Suicided Chinaman as the derivation of the town's name. Through Gorgona, the Pittsburgh of the Zone with its acres of machine shops, rumbled a train and plunged beyond into a deep, if not exactly rank, endless jungle. The stations grew small and unimportant. Bela Monos and San Pablo were withering and wasting away. Rocca Legato, or Hanged Alligator, was barely more than a memory. Tabernilia was a mere heap of lumber being tumbled on flat cars bound for new service further Pacificward. Of Riholes there remained barely enough to shudder at, with the collectors nasal brawl of FRIHOLLEES! And everywhere the irrepressible tropical greenery was already rushing back to engulf the pygmy works of man. It seemed criminally wasteful to have built these entire towns a detailed machinery of a well-governed and fully-furnished city from police station to salt-sellers, only to tear them down again and utterly wipe them out four or five years after their founding. A forerunner of what, in a brief few years, will have happened to all the Zone. Nay, is not this the way of life itself? For soon, the spillway at Gatton is to close its gates and all this vast region will be flooded and come to be Gatton Lake. Villages that were old when Pizarro began his whine herding will be wiped out. Even this blended double-tracked railroad goes the way of the rest, for on February 15th, a bare few days away it was to be abandoned and where we were now racing north-westward 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 mangos, the banana, king of weeds, gigantic ferns, and well, who will say 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 Gatton climbing up a hillside on its edge and scattering over several more. To the left I caught my first sight of the world's famous locks and dam, and at 3.30 we descended at the stone station, first milepost 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. They remained for me, but seven miles of the Ithmus, still unseen. On the cement platform was a great foregathering of the census clans from all districts, once we climbed to the broad port 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 blueish horizon. All the entrance to the canal, where soon great ships will enter, poked its way inland to the locks beside us. Across the treetops of the flat jungle, also seemingly close at hand, though the railroad takes seven miles, and thirty-five cents if you are no employee to reach it, was Cologne, the tops of whose low buildings were plainly visible above the vegetation. Not many zoners, I reflected, catch their first view of Cologne from the veranda of the administration building at Cologne. We had arrived, with time to spare. Fully an hour we loathed and yarned and spoke before whistle-blue, 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, paychecks in hand, its double head at the pay windows on the two sides of the veranda, its tail curpentining off down the hillside and away nearly to the edge of the mammoth locks. Packs of the yellow cards of Cristobal district in hand, her relief to eyes it 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 with us 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 another, where do you live? This was the overwhelming problem, in what language to address each victim? Vardar, speaking only his nasal New Jersey, took to picking out negroes, and even then often turned away in disgust when he landed a marth-nique or a Haitian. West Indian English alternated with a black platois that smelt at times fairly a French, muscular bullet-headed negroes appeared slowly and laboriously counting their money in their hats. Eagle-nosed Spaniards under the boinya of the Peronese, Spaniards from Castile speaking like a Gatling gun in action, now and again even a snappy-eyed Andalusian with his eslas slurred speech, slow, laborious Galegos, Italians and Portuguese in numbers, Columbians 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 who jabbered to the Ligwa Franca of Mediterranean ports. I got all who fell into my hands. Once I dragged forth a Hindu and chuttered 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 Hindustani. 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 him by the slack of his labor-stained shirt lest he escape unenrolled. 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 a few questions, and there I was with my... Pumayanas? Postinton? Padremianas? Enrolling Greeks unassisted. Not only that, but hodlily acting as interpreter for my fellows. Not only without having studied the tongue achilles, but never even having graced a Greek letter for eternity. Quick tropical daylight descended, and still the labor-smeared line wound away out of sight in 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 Romanians, must understand because they were not English noises. Still we pounced upon the paid as upon a tackling dummy 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 a gentle courtesy, not only so that of the rowdy. He was the chustlest youth of the type that has grown so painfully prevalent in our land since the soft-hearted abolishment of the beach-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 sheep which was 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 rite of his ancestors to remotest ages. Then, too, there was his own policemen in dressy, news-dark khaki treading with dangling club in the ice eye of public appearance waiting all too eagerly for someone 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 Americans and the world, too, who smiled indulgingly down upon our helping and yanking like a Saint Bernard above the snapping puppy he knows well 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. Back to 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 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 serpent-hining tail squirmed for a time in distress and died away as the snake's tail dies after sundown. I turned in more than a hundred cards. Tomorrow the tail would revive to form the nucleus of a new serpent and we should return by the afternoon train to the locked city and so on for several days to come. It was after nine of a black payday we were hungry. The rowdy, familiar with a 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 upon 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 highest 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 payday night in Nougatant. 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 as singing, howling, swarming multitude as is rivaled almost nowhere else except it be on Broadway in the passing of the old year. But this mob, more ever, 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 Ji drifted by through the uproar holding his sap loosely as for ready use and often half-consciously hitching the heavy number thirty-eight colt under his khaki jacket a bit nearer the grasp of his right hand. I little knew how familiar every corner would be. A Chinese grocer sold us bread and cheese. Down on the further corner of the hub-up we entered a Spanish saloon and spread ourselves over the white bar, adding beer to our humble collation. Beyond the latticework that is the color line in zone dispensaries, West Indians are dancing wild crowded hold-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 spaghetti dimes. The Spanish bartender, who is never the tough his American counterparts drives to show himself, but merely a cheerly 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 auto-penis. Which must have been potent for it moved Scotty to unbutton an inner pocket and set up an entire bottle of almond tolato. So midnight was no great space off when we turned out again into the howling night and, having helped Rensen to reach his sleeping space, scattered to the bachelor quarters that had been found for us and laid down for the few hours that remained before the 551 should carry us back to Empire. End of Chapter 3, Part 1 Recording by Todd Chapter 3, Part 2 of Zone Policemen 88 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Zone Policemen 88 A close range study of the Panama canal and its wonders by Harry A. Frank Chapter 3, Part 2 At last I had crossed all the isthmus and heard the wash of the Caribbean at my feet. It was the Sunday following Argeton days and nearly a month since my landing on the Zone. The morning train from Empire left me at the lakeside 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 Cologne. 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 Mount 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 Cisco's zone breeze is born. There stands the famous statue of Columbus protecting the Indian maid, crude humor and 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 Lariat might perhaps have dragged me on board with a struggle. There is no more line of demarcation between Cristobal and Cologne than between Encon and Panama. A khaki-clad zone policeman patrols one sidewalk, a black one in the sweltering dark blue uniform and heavy winter helmet of the Republic of Panama long just 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 it 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 highballs merry-go-round where huge negro bucks are laughing and playing and riding away their months pay on the wooden horses like the children they are and so on to the edge of the sea. Unlike Panama Cologne is flat and square blocked 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. At one end is a cement swimming pool with the announcement only for gold employees of the ICC or PRR and guests of Washington Hotel. It is merely a softer way of saying that Americans with money can bathe here. Then beyond are the great hospitals second only to those of Encon the white wards build 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 verandas or in wheelchairs 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 whistleblast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotives rusting away in the jungle. Under the beautiful royal palms beyond all bent inward 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 Europeans 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 Taipi on the day Melville and Tobi 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 make strange bedfellows 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 clerked to his Highness the Colonel himself he may find himself carelessly tossed onto a roughneck brotherhood. House 47 was distinctly in a boat of roughnecks. A roughneck, it may be essential to explain to those who are eight 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 steamshovel all day rustle the night through with various dark 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 bedtime or a mood for quiet amusing comes in. He is a man you are glad to meet in a saloon, if you aren't a mood to be there, or tearing away at the cliffs of Calabra but there are other places where he does not seem exactly to fit into the landscape. House 47, I say, was a house of roughnecks. 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 throughout the house. Then, too, many a roughneck is far from silent even after he has fallen asleep and about the time complete quiet seemed to be settling down. It was 4.30 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 roommates, Mitch had sat at a locomotive throttle fourteen years in the States in 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 State's winter. So Mitch, like many another zoner, was planning to buy with the savings of his two hundred and ten dollars a month when the job is done a chunk of land on some sunny slope of a southern State and settled 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 Creeke to make some such holy irrevolent remark as by that dispatcher gave me six oh nine today she wouldn't pull a grease string out of a knot hole and thereby always hung a tail that was assured 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 accosted my own, groaned, occasionally, under the coarse-grained bulk of Tom. Tom was a roughneck par excellence so much so that even in a household of them he was known as Tom the Roughneck which to Tom was high tribute. Some preferred to call him Tom the noisy. He was built like a steam-casin or an oil-barrel, though without fat with a neck that reminded you of a mirror-bull with his head down just before the escull and when he neglected to button his undershirt and not in frequent 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 when it came to argument Tom was invariably right not that he was oversupplied 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 it out and annihilated James Stuart Mill himself. Tom always should have had money for your roughneck 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 roughneck 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 an Ancon hospital taking the Keely cure and one summer evening he blew in again his cure affected 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 they 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 whatsoever beyond that of killing himself or an odd nigger or two. We had other treasures on exhibition in 47 there was Shorty for example Shorty was a jolly, ugly, open-handed four-eyed little snipe of a rough-neck 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 ICC 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 about 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 the yellow varnished counter down on Railroad Avenue opposite Empire machine shops. So it happened that Shorty was gradually winning the title of a 33-degree booze-fighter. And passengers on any afternoon train who took the trouble to glance in at a wide open door just at Letterwood 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 illegitimate 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 wash tub with questioned 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 suffering of his fellows compared with his own quarter-master. 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 1 I entered the dreaded precinct shielded behind the boss with his contagious smile and the musical quarter-master of umpire 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 Ismaean chunk heap across and a bit down the graveled street. It was a single room with no room made 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 and artist in his speciality. 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 halfway to the ceiling between his pillow and mine. By day he lay on his back in the right-hand seat of the locomotive cab with his hand on the throttle and the soles of his boots on the boilerplate. 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 CZ. And about 8 p.m. daily he retired within to lie on his back in a regulation ICC 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 Encon or Balboa Hill it would have been an even bet whether he would have rolled down sideways or edgewise. If his general type of bills and specifications would 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 laughter-provoking and kindly. His very presence seemed to promise to raise several degrees the merriment in that corner of House Thirty-Five. 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. That's a necessity of getting across to the cot 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 Thirty-Five. 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 into one merely fancied himself in the hog corral of a Chicago stockyard. At times the noises from his gorilla-like throat softened down into one merely fancied himself in the hog corral of a Chicago stockyard. At times the noises from his gorilla-like throat softened down into one merely fancied himself in the hog corral of a Chicago stockyard. At times the noises from his gorilla-like throat softened down into one merely fancied himself in the hog corral of a Chicago stockyard. At times the noises from his gorilla-like throat softened down into one merely fancied himself in the hog corral of a Chicago stockyard. At times the noises from his gorilla-like throat softened down into one merely fancied himself in the hog corral of a Chicago stockyard. At times the noises from his gorilla-like throat softened down into one merely fancied himself in the hog corral of a Chicago stockyard. At times the noises from his gorilla-like throat and kindly title. There were a few inexperienced inmates who had not yet entirely 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-eastern detracts except a 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 feed is still one of the proud memories of thirty-five. On Sundays when all the rest of the world was up and shaved and breakfasted and off on the eight-thirty-nine of a brilliant sunny day to Panama, the sloth would still be 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 recrossed the wooden bridge before the hotel and began to climb the graveled path behind, hoping against hope that we might find crepe on that door. From the night ahead would break out on our ears, 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 for many years. I never heard a man who knew him by night ask why. It was close upon criminal negligence on a part of the I.C.C. to overlook its opportunity in this matter. There were so many, many, uninhabited hilltops in the zone where a private sloth-dwelling might have been slapped together from the remains of falling towns at Catan 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 the push-ball figure, and thereby have improved the general appearance of the Canal Zone Force. End of Chapter 3, Part 2, Recording by Todd