"The boss" and I initiated the Canal Zone Census that very night.
Legally it was to begin with the dawning of February, but there were
many labor camps in our district and the hours bordering on midnight
the only sure time to "catch 'em in." Up in House 47 I gathered
together the legion paraphernalia of this new occupation,--some two
hundred red cards a foot long and half as wide, a surveyor's field
notebook for the preservation of miscellaneous information, tags for
the tagging of canvassed buildings, tacks for the tacking of the same,
the necessary tack-hammer, the medium soft black pencil, above all the
awesome legal "Commission," impressively signed and sealed, wherein
none other than our weighty nation's chief himself did expressly
authorize me to search out, enter, and question ad libitum. All this
swung over a shoulder in a white canvas sack, that carried memory back
through the long years to my newsboy days, I descended to the town.
"The boss" was ready. It was nearly eleven when we crossed the silent
P. R. R. tracks and, plunging away into the night past great heaps of
abandoned locomotives huddled dim and uncertain in the thin moonlight
like ghosts of the French fiasco, dashed into a camp of the laborer's
village of Cunette, pitched on the very edge of the now black and
silent void of the canal. Eighteen thick-necked negroes in undershirts
and trousers gazed up white-eyed from a suspended card game at the long
camp table. But we had no time for explanations.
"Name?" I shouted at the coal-hued Hercules nearest at hand.
"David Providence," he bleated in trembling voice, and the great Zone
questionnaire was on.
We had enrolled the group before a son of wisdom among them surmised
that we were not, after all, plain-clothes men in quest of criminals;
and his announcement brought visible relief. Twice as many blacks were
sprawled in the two rows of double-sided, three-story bunks,--mere
strips of canvas on gas-pipes that could be hung up like swinging
shelves when not in use. Mere noise did not even disturb their dreams.
We roused them by pencil-jabs in the ribs, and they started up with
savage, animal-like grunts and murderous glares which instantly
subsided to sheepish grins and voiceless astonishment at sight of a
white face bending over them. Now and again open-mouthed guffaws of
laughter greeted the mumbled admission of some powerful buck that he
could not read, or did not know his age. But there was nothing even
faintly resembling insolence, for these were all British West Indians
without a corrupting "States nigger" among them. A half-hour after our
arrival we had tagged the barracks and dived into the next camp,
blacker and sleepier and more populous than the first. It was February
morning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and stepped under the
shower-bath that is always preliminary, on the Zone, to a night's
repose.
A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general destruction developed
gradually into full consciousness at four-thirty. House 47 was in
riotous uproar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign invasion was
pending; it was merely the houseful of engineers in their customary
daily struggle to catch the labor-train and be away to work by
daylight. When the hour's rampage had subsided I rose to switch off the
light and turned in again.
The rays of the impetuous Panama sun were spattering from them when I
passed again the jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and machinery,
reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by green jungle strands and
tropical creepers. By day the arch-roofed labor-camps were silent and
empty, but for a lonely janitor languidly mopping a floor. Before the
buildings a black gang was dipping the canvas and gas-pipe bunks one by
one into a great kettle of scalding water. But there are also "married
quarters" at Cunette. A row of six government houses tops the ridge,
with six families in each house, and--no, I dare not risk nomination to
an ever expanding though unpopular club by stating how many in a
family. I will venture merely to assert that when noon-time came I was
not well started on the second house, yet carried away more than sixty
filled-out cards.
More than two days that single row of houses endured, varied by nights
spent with "the boss" in the labor-camps of Lirio, Culebra way. Then
one morning I tramped far out the highway to the old Scotchman's
farm-house that bounds Empire on the north and began the long intricate
journey through the private-owned town itself. It was like attending a
congress of the nations, a museum exhibition of all the shapes and hues
in which the human vegetable grows. Tenements and wobbly-kneed shanties
swarming with exhibits monopolized the landscape; strange the room that
did not yield up at least a man and woman and three or four children.
Day after blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs,
ironing-boards, veranda railings, climbing creaking stairways, now and
again descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste and
ungraceful posture, burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes,
hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hidden
away behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into
dilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human being who
fell in my way. West Indian negroes easily kept the lead of all other
nationalities combined; negroes blacker than the obsidian cutlery of
the Aztecs, blonde negroes with yellow hair and blue eyes whose race
was betrayed only by eyelids and the dead whiteness of skin, and whom
one could not set down as such after enrolling swarthy Spaniards as
"white" without a smile.
They lived chiefly in windowless, six-by-eight rooms, always a cheap,
dirty calico curtain dividing the three-foot parlor in front from the
five-foot bedroom behind, the former cluttered with a van-load of
useless junk, dirty blankets, decrepit furniture, glittering gewgaws, a
black baby squirming naked in a basket of rags with an Episcopal
prayerbook under its pillow--relic of the old demon-scaring
superstitions of Voodoo worship. Every inch of the walls was
"decorated," after the artistic temperament of the race, with pages of
illustrated magazines or newspapers, half-tones of all things
conceivable with no small amount of text in sundry languages, many a
page purely of advertising matter, the muscular, imbruted likeness of a
certain black champion rarely missing, frequently with a Bible laid
reverently beneath it. Outside, before each room, a tin fireplace for
cooking precariously bestrided the veranda rail.
Often a tumble-down hovel where three would seem a crowd yielded up
more than a dozen inmates, many of whom, being at work, must be looked
for later--the "back-calls" that is the bete-noire of the census
enumerator. West Indians, however, are for the most part well
acquainted with the affairs of friends and room-mates, and enrolment of
the absent was often possible. Occasionally I ran into a den of
impertinence that must be frowned down, notably a notorious swarming
tenement over a lumber-yard. But on the whole the courtesy of British
West Indians, even among themselves, was noteworthy. Of the two great
divisions among them, Barbadians seemed more well-mannered than
Jamaicans--or was it merely more subtle hypocrisy? Among them all the
most unspoiled children of nature appeared to be those from the little
island of Nevis.
"You ain't no American?"
"Yes, ah is."
"Why, you de bery furst American ah eber see dat was perlite."
Which spoke badly indeed for the others, that not being one of the
virtues I strive particularly to cultivate.
But "perlite" or not, there can be no question of the astounding
stupidity of the West Indian rank and file, a stupidity amusing if you
are in an amusable mood, unendurable if you neglect to pack your
patience among your bag of supplies in the morning. Tropical patience,
too, is at best a frail child. The dry-season sun rarely even veiled
his face, and there were those among the enumerators who complained of
the taxing labor of all-day marching up and down streets and stairs and
Zone hills beneath it; but to me, fresh from tramping over the
mountains of Central America with twenty pounds on my shoulders, this
was mere pastime. Heat had no terrors for the enumerated, however.
Often in the hottest hour of the day I came upon negroes sleeping in
tightly closed rooms, the sweat running off them in streams, yet
apparently vastly enjoying the situation.
Sunday came and I chose to continue, though virtually all the Zone was
on holiday and even "the boss," after what I found later to be his
invariable custom, had broken away from his card-littered
dwelling-place on Saturday evening and hurried away to Panama, drawn
thither and held till Monday morning--by some irresistible attraction.
Sunday turns holiday completely on the Zone, even to hours of trains
and hotels. The frequent passengers were packed from southern white end
to northern black end with all nations in gladsome garb, bound
Panamaward to see the lottery drawing and buy a ticket for the
following Sunday, across the Isthmus to breezy Colon, or to one of a
hundred varying spots and pastimes. Others in khaki breeches fresh from
the government laundry in Cristobal and the ubiquitous leather leggings
of the "Zoner" were off to ride out the day in the jungles; still
others set resolutely forth afoot into tropical paths; a dozen or so,
gleaned one by one from all the towns along the line were even on their
way to church. Yet with all this scattering there still remained a
respectable percentage lounging on the screened verandas in pajamas and
kimonas, "Old Timers" of four or five or even six years' standing who
were convinced they had seen and heard, and smelt and tasted all that
the Zone or tropical lands have to offer.
Well on in the morning there was a general gathering of all the
ditch-digging clans of Empire and vicinity in a broad field close under
the eaves of the town, and soon there came drifting across to me at my
labor, hoarse, frenzied screams; sounding strangely incongruous beneath
the swaying palm-trees;
"Come on! Get down with his arm! Aaaaahrrr!"
But my time was well chosen. In the Spanish camps above the canal,
still and silent with Sunday, men at no other time to be run to earth
were entrapped in their bunks, under their dwelling-places in the
shade, shaving, exchanging hair-cuts, washing workaday clothes,
reminiscing over far-off homes and pre-migratory days, or merely
loafing. The same cheery, friendly, quick-witted fellows they were as
in their native land, even the few Italians and rare Portuguese
scattered among them inoculated with their cheerfulness.
Came sudden changes to camps of Martiniques, a sort of wild, untamed
creature, who spoke a distressing imitation of French which even he did
not for a moment claim to be such, but frankly dubbed patois.
Restless-eyed black men who answered to their names only at the
question "Cummun t'appelle?" and give their age only to those who open
wide their mouths and cry, "Caje-vous?" Then on again to the no less
strange, sing-song "English" of Jamaica, the whining tones of those
whose island trees the conquesting Spaniards found
bearded--"barbados"--now and again a more or less dark Costa Rican,
Guatemalteco, Venezuelan, stray islanders from St. Vincent, Trinidad,
or Guadalupe, individuals defying classification. But the chief reward
for denying myself a holiday were the "back-calls" in the town itself
which I was able to check out of my field-book. Many a long-sought
negro I roused from his holiday siesta, dashing past the tawdry calico
curtains to pound him awake--mere auricular demonstration having only
the effect of lulling him into deeper child-like slumber. The surest
and often only effective means was to tickle the slumberer gently on
the soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate instrument such as
my tack-hammer, or a convenient broom-handle or flat-iron. Frequently I
came upon young negro men of the age and type that in white skins would
have been loafing on pool-room corners, reading to themselves in loud
and solemn voices from the Bible, with a far-away look in their eyes;
always I was surrounded by a never-broken babble of voices, for the
West Indian negro can let his face run unceasingly all the day through,
and the night, though he have never a word to say.
Thus my "enumerated" tags spread further and wider over the city of
Empire. I reached in due time the hodge-podge shops and stores of
Railroad Avenue. Chinamen began to drift into the rolls, there appeared
such names as Carmen Wah Chang, cooks and waitresses living in darksome
back cupboards must be unearthed, negro shoemakers were caught at their
stands on the sidewalks, shiny-haired bartenders gave up their
biographies in nasal monosyllables amid the slop of "suds" and the
scrape of celluloid froth-eradicators. Rare was the land that had not
sent representatives to this great dirt-shoveling congress. A Syrian
merchant gasped for breath and fell over his counter in delight to find
that I, too, had been in his native Zakleh, five Punjabis all but died
of pleasure when I mispronounced three words of their tongue.
Occasionally there came startling contrast as I burst unexpectedly into
the ancestral home of some educated native family that had withstood
all the tides of time and change and still lived in the beloved
"Emperador" of their forefathers. Anger was usually near the surface at
my intrusion, but they quickly changed to their ingrown politeness and
chatty sociability when addressed in their own tongue and treated in
their own extravagant gestures. It was almost sure to return again,
however, at the question whether they were Panamanians. Distinctly not!
They were Colombians! There is no such country as Panama.
Thus the enrolling of the faithful continued. Chinese laundrymen
divulged the secrets of their mysterious past between spurts of water
at steaming shirt-bosoms; Chinese merchants, of whom there are hordes
on the Zone, cueless, dressed and betailored till you must look at them
twice to tell them from "gold" employees, the flag of the new republic
flapping above their doors, the new president in their lapels, left off
selling crucifixes and breastpin medallions of Christ to negro women,
to answer my questions. One evening I stumbled into a nest of eleven
Bengali peddlers with the bare floor of their single room as bed,
table, and chairs; in one corner, surmounted by their little
embroidered skull-caps, were stacked the bundles with which they pester
Zone housewives, and in another their god wrapped in a dirty rag
against profaning eyes.
Many days had passed before I landed the first Zone resident I could
not enroll unassisted. He was a heathen Chinee newly arrived, who spoke
neither Spanish nor English. It was "Chinese Charlie" who helped me
out. "Chinese Charlie" was a resident of the Zone before the days of de
Lesseps and at our first meeting had insisted on being enrolled under
that pseudonym, alleging it his real name. Upstairs above his store all
was sepulchral silence when I mounted to investigate--and I came
quickly and quietly down again; for the door had opened on the gaudy
Oriental splendor of a joss-house where dwelt only grinning wooden
idols not counted as Zone residents by the materialistic census
officials. On the Isthmus as elsewhere "John" is a law-abiding
citizen--within limits; never obsequious, nearly always friendly, ready
to answer questions quite cheerily so long as he considers the matter
any of your business, but closing infinitely tighter than the
maltreated bivalve when he fancies you are prying too far.
In time I reached the Commissary--the government department store--and
enrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel, from steward
to scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography; the police station
on its knoll fell like the rest. I went to jail--and set down a large
score of black men and a pair of European whites, back from a day's
sweaty labor of road building, who lived now in unaccustomed
cleanliness in the heart of the lower story of a fresh wooden building
with light iron bars, easy to break out of were it not that policemen,
white and black, sleep on all sides of them. Crowded old Empire not
only faces her streets but even her back yards are filled with shacks
and inhabited boxes to be hunted out. On the hem of her tattered
outskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandoned
junk,--locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters "U.
S." painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day investigator
material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste); all now soon to be
removed by a Chicago wrecking company.
Then all the town must be done again--"back calls." By this time so
wide and varied was my acquaintance in Empire that wenches withdrew a
dripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with a sympathetic giggle,
and piccaninnies ran out to meet me as I returned in quest of one
missing inmate in a house of fifty. For the few laborers still uncaught
I took to coming after dark. But West Indians rarely own lamps, not
even the brass tax-numbers above the doors were visible, and as for a
negro in the dark--
Absurd rumors had begun early to circulate among the darker brethren.
In all negrodom the conviction became general that this individual
detailed catechising and house-branding was really a government scheme
to get lists of persons due for deportation, either for lack of work as
the canal neared completion or for looseness of marital relations.
Hardly a tenement did I enter but laughing voices bandied back and
forth and there echoed and reechoed through the building such remarks
as:
"Well, dey gon' sen' us home, Penelope," or "Yo an' Percival better
hurry up an' git married, Ambrosia."
Several dusky females regularly ran away whenever I approached; one at
least I came a-seeking in vain nine times, and found her the tenth
behind a garbage barrel. Many fancied the secret marks on the
"enumerated" tag--date, and initials of the enumerator--were intimately
concerned with their fate. So strong is the fear of the law imbued by
the Zone Police that they dared not tear down the dreaded placard, but
would sometimes sit staring at it for hours striving to penetrate its
secret or exorcise away its power of evil, and now and then some bolder
spirit ventured out--at midnight--with a pencil and put tails and extra
flourishes on the penciled letters in the hope of disguising them
against the fatal day.
Except for the chaos of nationalities and types on the Zone,
enumerating would have become more than monotonous. But the enumerated
took care to break the monotony. There was the wealth of nomenclature
for instance. What more striking than a shining-black waiter strutting
proudly about under the name of Levi McCarthy? There was no necessity
of asking Beresford Plantaganet if he were a British subject. Naturally
the mother of Hazarmaneth Cumberbath Smith, baptized that very week,
had to claw out the family Bible from among the bed-clothes and look up
the name on the fly-leaf.
To the enumerator, who must set down concise and exact answers to each
of his questions, fifty or sixty daily scenes and replies something
like these were delightful;
Enumerator (sitting down on the edge of a barrel): "How many living in
this room?"
Explosive laughter from the buxom, jet-black woman addressed.
Enumerator (on a venture): "What's the man's name?"
"He name 'Rasmus Iggleston."
"What's his metal-check number?"
"Lard, mahster, ah don' know he check number."
"Haven't you a commissary-book with it in?"
"Lard no, mah love, commissary-book him feeneesh already befo' las'
week."
"Is he a Jamaican?"
"No, him a Mont-rat, mahster." (Monsterratian.)
"What color is he?"
"Te! He! Wha' fo' yo as' all dem questions, mahster?"
"For instance."
"Oh, him jes' a pitch darker'n me."
"How old is he?"
(Loud laughter) "Law', ah don' know how ol' him are!"
"Well, about how old?"
"Oh, him a ripe man, mah love, him a prime man."
"Is he older than you?"
"Oh, yes, him older 'n me."
"And how old are you?"
"Te! He! 'Deed ah don' know how ol' ah is; ah gone los' mah age paper."
"Is he married?"
(Quickly and with very grave face) "Oh, yes indeed, mahster, Ah his
sure 'nough wife."
"Can he read?"
(Hesitatingly) "Er--a leetle, sir, not too much, sir." (Which generally
means he can spell out a few words of one syllable and make some sort
of mark representing his name.)
"What kind of work does he do?"
(Haughtily) "Him employed by de I. C. C."
"Yes, naturally. But what kind of work does he do. Is he a laborer?"
(Quickly and very impressively) "Laborer! Oh, no, mah sweet mahster, he
jes' shovel away de dirt befo' de steam shovel."
"All right. That 'll do for 'Rasmus. Now your name?"
"Mah name Mistress Jane Iggleston."
"How long have you lived on the Canal Zone?"
"Oh, not too long, mah love."
"Since when have you lived in this house?"
"Oh, we don' come to dis house too long, sah."
"Can you read and write?"
"No, ah don' stay in Jamaica. Ah come to Panama when ah small."
"Do you do any work besides your own housework?"
(Evasively) "Work? If ah does any work? No, not any."
Enumerator looks hard from her to washtub.
"Ah--er--oh, ah washes a couple o' gentlemen's clot'es."
"Very good. Now then, how many children?"
"We don' git no children, sah."
"What! How did that happen?"
Loud, house-shaking laughter.
Enumerator (looking at watch and finding it 12:10): "Well, good
afternoon."
"Good evenin', sah. Thank you, sah. Te! He!"
Variations on the above might fill many pages:
"How old are you?"
Self-appointed interpreter of the same shade; "He as' how old is yo?"
"How old _I_ are? Ah don rightly know mah age, mahster, mah mother
never tol' me."
St. Lucian woman, evidently about forty-five, after deep thought,
plainly anxious to be as truthful as possible: "Er--ah's twenty, sir."
"Oh, you're older than that. About sixty, say?"
"'Bout dat, sah."
"Are you married?"
(Pushing the children out of the way.) "N-not as yet, mah sweet
mahster, bu-but--but we go 'n' be soon, sah."
To a Barbadian woman of forty: "Just you and your daughter live here?"
"Dat's all, sir."
"Doesn't your husband live here?"
"Oh, ah don't never marry as yet, sah."
Anent the old saying about the partnership of life and hope.
To a Dominican woman of fifty-two, toothless and pitted with small-pox:
"Are you married?"
(With simpering smile) "Not as yet, mah sweet mahster."
To a Jamaican youth;
"How many people live in this room?"
"Three persons live here, sir."
"I stand grammatically corrected. When did you move here?"
"We remove here in April."
"Again I apologize for my mere American grammar. Now, Henry, what is
your room-mate's name?"
"Well, we calls him Ethel, but I don't know his right title.
Peradventure he will not work this evening [afternoon] and you can ask
him from himself."
"Do his parents live on the Zone?"
"Oh, yes, sah, he has one father and one mother."
An answer: "Why HIMSELF [emphatic subject pronoun among Barbadians]
didn't know if he'd get a job."
To a six-foot black giant working as night-hostler of steam-shovels:
"Well, Josiah, I suppose you're a Jamaican?"
"Oh, yes, boss, ah work in Kingston ten years as a bar-maid."
"Married?"
"No, boss, ah's not 'xactly married. Ah's livin' with a person."
A colored family:
Sarah Green, very black, has a child named Edward White, and is now
living with Henry Brown, a light yellow negro.
West Indian wit:
A shop-sign in Empire: "Don't ask for credit. He is gone on vacation
since January 1, 1912."
Laughter and carefree countenances are legion in the West Indian ranks,
children seem never to be punished, and to all appearances man and wife
live commonly in peace and harmony. Dr. O---- tells the following
story, however:
In his rounds he came upon a negro beating his wife and had him placed
under arrest. The negro: "Why, boss, can't a man chastize his wife when
she desarves and needs it?"
Dr. O----: "Not on the Canal Zone. It's against the law."
Negro (in great astonishment): "Is dat so, boss. Den ah'll never do it
again, boss--on de Canal Zone."
One morning in the heart of Empire a noise not unlike that of a rocky
waterfall began to grow upon my ear. Louder and louder it swelled as I
worked slowly forward. At last I discovered its source. In a lower room
of a tenement an old white-haired Jamaican had fitted up a private
school, to which the elite among the darker brethren sent their
children, rather than patronize the common public schools Uncle Sam
provides free to all Zone residents. The old man sat before some twenty
wide-eyed children, one of whom stood slouch-shouldered, book in hand,
in the center of the room, and at regular intervals of not more than
twenty seconds he shouted high above all other noises of the
neighborhood:
"Yo calls dat Eng-leesh! How eber yo gon' l'arn talk proper lika dat,
yo tell me?"
Far back in the interior of an Empire block I came upon an old, old
negro woman, parchment-skinned and doddering, living alone in a
stoop-shouldered shanty of boxes and tin cans. "Ah don' know how ol' ah
is, mahster," was one of her replies, "but ah born six years befo' de
cholera diskivered."
"When did you come to Panama?"
"Ah don' know, but it a long time ago."
"Before the Americans, perhaps?"
"Oh, long befo'! De French ain't only jes' begin to dig. Ah's ashamed
to say how long ah been here" (just why was not evident, unless she
fancied she should long ago have made her fortune and left). "Is you a
American? Well, de Americans sure have done one thing. Dey mak' dis
country civilize. Why, chil', befo' dey come we have all de time here
revolutions. Ah couldn't count to how many revolutions we had, an'
ebery time dey steal all what we have. Dey even steal mah clothes. Ah
sure glad fo' one de Americans come."
It was during my Empire enumerating that I was startled one morning to
burst suddenly from the tawdry, junk-jumbled rooms of negroes into a
bare-floored, freshly scrubbed room containing some very clean cots, a
small table and a hammock, and a general air of frankness and
simplicity, with no attempt to disguise the commonplace. At the table
sat a Spaniard in worn but newly washed working-clothes, book in hand.
I sat down and, falling unconsciously into the "th" pronunciation of
the Castilian, began blithely to reel off the questions that had grown
so automatic.
"Name?"-;-Federico Malero. "Check Number?"--"Can you read?" "A little."
The barest suggestion of amusement in his voice caused me to look up
quickly. "My library," he said, with the ghost of a weird smile,
nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf made of pieces of
dynamite boxes, "Mine and my room-mates." The shelf was filled with
four--REAL Barcelona paper editions of Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley,
and a half-dozen others accustomed to sit in the same company, all
dog-eared with much reading.
"Some ambitious foreman," I mused, and went on with my queries:
"Occupation?"
"Pico y pala," he answered.
"Pick and shovel!" I exclaimed--"and read those?"
"No importa," he answered, again with that elusive shadow of a smile,
"It doesn't matter," and as I rose to leave, "Buenos dias, senor," and
he turned again to his reading.
I plunged into the jumble of negroes next door, putting my questions
and setting down the answers without even hearing them, my thoughts
still back in the clean, bare room behind, wondering whether I should
not have been wiser after all to have ignored the sharp-drawn lines and
the prejudices of my fellow-countrymen and joined the pick and shovel
Zone world. There might have been pay dirt there. A few months before,
I remembered, a Spanish laborer killed in a dynamite explosion in the
"cut" had turned out to be one of Spain's most celebrated lawyers. I
recalled that EL UNICO, the anarchist Spanish weekly published in
Miraflores contains some crystal-clear thinking set forth in a
sharp-cut manner that shows a real inside knowledge of the "job" and
the canal workers, however little one may agree with its philosophy and
methods.
Then it was due to the law of contrasts, I suppose, that the thought of
"Tom," my room-mate, suddenly flashed upon me; and I discovered myself
chuckling at the picture, "Tom, the Rough-neck," to whom all such as
Federico Malero with his pick and shovel were mere "silver men," on
whom "Tom" looked down from his high perch on his steam-shovel as far
less worthy of notice than the rock he was clawing out of the hillside.
How many a silent chuckle and how many a covert sneer must the Maleros
on the Zone indulge in at the pompous airs of some American ostensibly
far above them.