I scribbled myself a ticket and was soon rolling northward, greeting
acquaintances at every station. The Zone is like Egypt; whoever moves
must travel by the same route. At Pedro Miguel and Cascadas armies of
locomotives--the "mules" of the man from Arkansas--stood steaming and
panting in the twilight after their day's labor and the wild race
homeward under hungry engineers. As far as Bas Obispo this busy,
teeming Isthmus seemed a native land; beyond, was like entering into
foreign exile. It is a common Zone experience that only the locality
one lives in during his first weeks ever feels like "home."
The route, too, was a new one. From Gorgona the train returned
crab-wise through Matachin and across the sand dyke that still holds
the Chagres out of the "cut," and halted at Gamboa cabin. Day was dying
as we rumbled on across the iron bridge above the river and away into
the fresh jungle night along the rock-ballasted "relocation." The
stillness of this less inhabited half of the Zone settled down inside
the car and out, the evening air of summer caressing almost roughly
through the open windows. The train continued its steady way almost
uninterruptedly, for though new villages were springing up to take the
place of the old sinking into desuetude and the flood along with the
abandoned line, there were but two where once were eight. We paused at
the new Frijoles and the box-car town of Monte Lirio and, skirting on a
higher level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick jungled and
forested hills what is some day to be Gatun Lake, drew up at 7:30 at
Gatun.
I wandered and inquired for some time in a black night--for the moon
was on the graveyard shift that week--before I found Gatun police
station on the nose of a breezy knoll. But for "Davie," the desk-man,
who it turned out was also to be my room-mate, and a few wistful-eyed
negroes in the steel-barred room in the center of the building, the
station was deserted. "Circus," said the desk-man briefly. When I
mentioned the matter of weapons he merely repeated the word with the
further information that only the station commander could issue them.
There was nothing to do therefore but to ramble out armed with a lead
pencil into a virtually unknown town riotous with liquor and negroes
and the combination of Saturday night, circus time, and the aftermath
of pay-day, and to strut back and forth in a way to suggest that I was
a perambulating arsenal. But though I wandered a long two hours into
every hole and corner where trouble might have its breeding-place,
nothing but noise took place in my sight and hearing. I turned
disgustedly away toward the tents pitched in a grassy valley between
the two Gatuns. At least there was a faint hope that the equestrienne
might assault the ring-master.
I approached the tent flap with a slightly quickening pulse. World-wide
and centuries old as is the experience, personally I was about to
"spring my badge" for the first time. Suppose the doortender should
refuse to honor it and force me to impress upon him the importance of
the Z. P.--without a gun? Outwardly nonchalant I strolled in between
the two ropes. Proprietor Shipp looked up from counting his winnings
and opened his mouth to shout "ticket!" I flung back my coat, and with
a nod and a half-wink of wisdom he fell back again to computing his
lawful gains.
By the way, are not you who read curious to know, even as I for long
years wondered, where a detective wears his badge? Know then that long
and profound investigation among the Z. P. seems to prove conclusively
that as a general and all but invariable rule he wears it pinned to the
lining of his coat, or under his lapel, or on the band of his trousers,
or on the breast of his shirt, or in his hip pocket, or up his sleeve,
or at home on the piano, or riding around at the end of a string in the
baby's nursery; though as in the case of all rules this one too has its
exceptions.
Entertainments come rarely to Gatun. The one-ringed circus was packed
with every grade of society from gaping Spanish laborers to haughty
wives of dirt-train conductors, among whom it was not hard to
distinguish in a far corner the uniformed sergeant in command of Gatun
and the long lean corporal tied in a bow-line knot at the alleged wit
of the versatile but solitary clown who changed his tongue every other
moment from English to Spanish. But the end was already near;
excitement was rising to the finale of the performance, a wrestling
match between a circus man and "Andy" of Pedro Miguel locks. By the
time I had found a leaning-place it was on--and the circus man of
course was conquered, amid the gleeful howling of "rough-necks," who
collected considerable sums of money and went off shouting into the
black night, in quest of a place where it might be spent quickly. It
would be strange indeed if among all the thousands of men in the prime
of life who are digging the canal at least one could not be found who
could subjugate any champion a wandering circus could carry among its
properties. I took up again the random tramping in the dark unknown
night; till it was two o'clock of a Sunday morning when at last I
dropped my report-card in the train-guard box and climbed upstairs to
the cot opposite "Davie," sleeping the silent, untroubled sleep of a
babe.
I was barely settled in Gatun when the train-guard handed me one of
those frequent typewritten orders calling for the arrest of some
straggler or deserter from the marine camp of the Tenth Infantry. That
very morning I had seen "the boss" of census days off on his vacation
to the States--from which he might not return--and here I was coldly
and peremptorily called upon to go forth and arrest and deliver to Camp
Elliott on its hill "Mac," the pride of the census, with a promise of
$25 reward for the trouble. "Mac" desert? It was to laugh. But
naturally after six weeks of unceasing repetition of that pink set of
questions "Mac's" throat was a bit dry and he could scarcely be
expected to return at once to the humdrum life of camp without spending
a bit of that $5 a day in slaking a tropical thirst. Indeed I question
whether any but the prudish will loudly blame "Mac" even because he
spent it a bit too freely and brought up in Empire dispensary. Word of
his presence there soon drifted down to the wily plain-clothes man of
Empire district. But it was a hot noonday, the dispensary lies somewhat
up hill, and the uniformless officer of the Zone metropolis is rather
thickly built. Wherefore, stowing away this private bit of information
under his hat, he told himself with a yawn, "Oh, I'll drag him in later
in the day," and drifted down to a wide-open door on Railroad Avenue to
spend a bit of the $25 reward in off-setting the heat. Meanwhile "Mac,"
feeling somewhat recovered from his financial extravagance, came
sauntering out of the dispensary and, seeing his curly-headed friend
strolling a beat not far away, naturally cried out, "Hello, Eck!" And
what could Eck say, being a reputable Zone policeman, but:
"Why, hello, Mac! How they framin' up? Consider yourself pinched."
Which was lucky for "Mac." For Eck had once worn a marine hat over his
own right eye and, he knew from melancholy experience that the $25 was
no government generosity, but "Mac's" own involuntary contribution to
his finding and delivery; so managed to slip most of it back into
"Mac's" hands.
Long, long after, more than six weeks after in fact, I chanced to be in
Bas Obispo with a half-hour to spare, and climbed to the flowered and
many-roaded camp on its far-viewing hilltop that falls sheer away on
the east into the canal. In one of the airy barracks I found Renson,
cards in hand, clear-skinned and "fit" now, thanks to the regular life
of this adult nursery, though his lost youth was gone for good. And
"Mac"? Yes, I saw "Mac" too--or at least the back of his head and
shoulders through the screen of the guard-house where Renson pointed
him out to me as he was being locked up again after a day of shoveling
sand.
The first days in Gatun called for little else than patrol duty,
without fixed hours, interspersed with an occasional loaf on the
second-story veranda of the police-station overlooking the giant locks;
close at hand was the entrance to the canal, up which came slowly
barges loaded with crushed stone from Porto Bello quarry twenty miles
east along the coast or sand from Nombre de Dios, twice as distant,
while further still, spread Limon Bay from which swept a never-ending
breeze one could wipe dry on as on a towel. So long as he has in his
pocket no typewritten report with the Inspector's scrawl across it,
"For investigation and report," the plain-clothes man is virtually his
own commander, with few duties beside trying to be in as many parts of
his district at once as possible and the ubiquitous duty of "keeping in
touch with headquarters." So I wandered and mingled with all the life
of the vicinity, exactly as I should have done had I not been paid a
salary to do so. By day one could watch the growth of the great locks,
the gradual drowning of little green, new-made islands beneath the
muddy still waters of Gatun Lake, tramp out along jungle-flanked
country roads, through the Mindi hills, or down below the old railroad
to where the cayucas that floated down the Chagres laden with fruit
came to land on the ever advancing edge of the waters. With night
things grew more compact. From twilight till after midnight I prowled
in and out through New Gatun, spilled far and wide over its several
hills, watching the antics of negroes, pausing to listen to their
guitars and their boisterous merriment, with an eye and ear ever open
for the unlawful. When I drifted into a saloon to see who might be
spending the evening out, the bar-tender proved he had the advantage of
me in acquaintance by crying: "Hello, Franck! What ye having?" and
showing great solicitude that I get it. After which I took up the
starlit tramp again, to run perhaps into some such perilous scene as on
that third evening. A riot of contending voices rose from a building
back in the center of a block, with now and then the sickening thump of
a falling body. I approached noiselessly, likewise weaponless, peeped
in and found--four negro bakers stripped to the waist industriously
kneading to-morrow's bread and discussing in profoundest earnest the
object of the Lord in creating mosquitoes. Beyond the native town, as
an escape from all this, there was the back country road that wound for
a mile through the fresh night and the droning jungle, yet instead of
leading off into the wilderness of the interior swung around to
American Gatun on its close-cropped hills.
I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined among those ordered to
report for target test. A fine piece of luck was this for a man who had
scarcely fired a shot since, aged ten, he brought down with an air-gun
an occasional sparrow at three cents a head. We took the afternoon
train to Mt. Hope on the edge of Colon and trooped away to a little
plain behind "Monkey Hill," the last resting-place of many a "Zoner."
The Cristobal Lieutenant, father of Z. P., was in charge, and here
again was that same Z. P. absence of false dignity and the genuine
good-fellowship that makes the success of your neighbor as pleasing as
your own.
"Shall I borrow a gun, Lieutenant?" I asked when I found myself "on
deck."
"Well, you'll have to use your own judgment as to that," replied the
Lieutenant, busy pasting stickers over holes in the target.
The test was really very simple. All you had to do was to cling to one
end of a No. 38 horse-pistol, point it at the bull's-eye of a target,
hold it in that position until you had put five bullets into said
bull's-eye, repeat that twice at growing distances, mortally wound ten
times the image of a Martinique negro running back and forth across the
field, and you had a perfect score. Only, simple as it was, none did
it, not even old soldiers with two or three "hitches" in the army. So I
had to be content with creeping in on the second page of a seven-page
list of all the tested force from "the Chief" to the latest negro
recruit.
The next evening I drifted into the police station to find a group of
laborers from the adjoining camps awaiting me on the veranda bench,
because the desk-man "didn't sabe their lingo." They proved upon
examination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their story short, sad,
but by no means unusual. Upon returning from work one of the Italians
had found the lock hinges of his ponderously padlocked tin trunk
hanging limp and screwless, and his pay-day roll of some $30 missing
from the crown of a hat stuffed with a shirt securely packed away in
the deepest corner thereof. The Turk was similarly unable to account
for the absence of his $33 savings safely locked the night before
inside a pasteboard suitcase; unless the fact that, thanks to some sort
of surgical operation, one entire side of the grip now swung open like
a barn-door might prove to have something to do with the case. The $33
had been, for further safety's sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting a
burglar with a wheelbarrow.
The mysterious detective work began at once. Without so much as putting
on a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious crime. It was
the usual Zone type of laborers' barracks. A screened building of one
huge room, it contained two double rows of three-tier "standee" canvas
bunks on gas-pipes. Around the entire room, close under the sheet-iron
roof, ran a wooden platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked
high with the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper
suitcases containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more
workmen around the rough table below.
Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-camp
during working hours. Practically the West Indian janitors to whom is
left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not fallible. In the
course of the second day I unearthed a second Turk who, having chanced
the morning before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor and soap
preparatory to welcoming a fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had been
mildly startled to step on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given
length and proportions lying prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta.
The latter explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his
unconventional posture by asserting that he was the "mosquito man," and
shortly thereafter went away from there without leaving either card or
address.
By all my library training in detective work the next move obviously
was to find what color of cigarette ashes the Turk smoked. Instead I
blundered upon the absurdly simple notion of trying to locate the negro
of given length and proportions. The real "mosquito man"--one of that
dark band that spends its Zone years with a wire hook and a screened
bucket gathering evidence against the defenseless mosquito for the
sanitary department to gloat over--was found not to fit the model even
in hue. Moreover, "mosquito men" are not accustomed to carry their
devotion to duty to the point of crawling under trunks in their quest.
For a few days following, the hunt led me through all Gatun and
vicinity. Now I found myself racing across the narrow plank bridges
above the yawning gulf of the locks, with far below tiny men and toy
trains, now in and out among the cathedral-like flying buttresses,
under the giant arches past staring signs of "DANGER!" on every
hand--as if one could not plainly hear its presence without the
posting. I descended to the very floor of the locks, far below the
earth, and tramped the long half-mile of the three flights between
soaring concrete walls. Above me rose the great steel gates, standing
ajar and giving one the impression of an opening in the Great Wall of
China or of a sky-scraper about to be swung lightly aside. On them
resounded the roar of the compressed-air riveters and all the way up
the sheer faces, growing smaller and smaller as they neared the sky,
were McClintic-Marshall men driving into place red-hot rivets, thrown
at them viciously by negroes at the forges and glaring like comets'
tails against the twilight void.
The chase sent me more than once stumbling away across rock-tumbled
Gatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for long centuries,
eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun with its proud
church and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peruvian viceroys
and "Forty-niners" were wont to pause from their arduous journeyings.
They call it a dam. It is rather a range of hills, a part and portion
of the highlands that, east and west, enclose the valley of the
Chagres, its summit resembling the terminal yards of some great city.
There was one day when I sought a negro brakeman attached to a given
locomotive. I climbed to a yard-master's tower above the Spillway and
the yard-master, taking up his powerful field-glasses, swept the
horizon, or rather the dam, and discovered the engine for me as a
mariner discovers an island at sea.
"Er--would you be kind enough to tell us where we can find this Gatun
dam we've heard so much about?" asked a party of four tourists, half
and half as to sex, who had been wandering about on it for an hour or
so with puzzled expressions of countenance. They addressed themselves
to a busy civil engineer in leather leggings and rolled up shirt
sleeves.
"I'm sorry I haven't time to use the instrument," replied the engineer
over his shoulder, while he wig-wagged his orders to his negro helpers
scattered over the landscape, "but as nearly as I can tell with the
naked eye, you are now standing in the exact center of it."
The result of all this sweating and sight-seeing was that some days
later there was gathered in a young Barbadian who had been living for
months in and about Gatun without any visible source of income
whatever--not even a wife. The Turk and the camp janitor identified him
as the culprit. But the primer lesson the police recruit learns is that
it is one thing to believe a man guilty and quite another to convince a
judge--the most skeptical being known to zoology--of that perfectly
apparent fact. With the suspect behind bars, therefore, I continued my
underground activities, with the result that when at length I took the
train at New Gatun one morning for the court-room in Cristobal I loaded
into a second-class coach six witnesses aggregating five nationalities,
ready to testify among other things to the interesting little point
that the defendant had a long prison record in Barbados.
When the echo of the black policeman's "Oye! Oye!" had died away and
the little white-haired judge had taken his "bench," I made the
discovery that I was present not in one, but in four capacities,--as
arresting officer, complainant, interpreter, and to a large extent
prosecuting attorney. To swear a Turk who spoke only Turkish through
another Turk, who mangled a little Spanish, for a judge who would not
recognize a non-American word from the voice of a steam-shovel, with a
solemn "So Help Me God!" to clinch and strengthen it when the witness
was a follower of the prophet of Medina--or nobody--was not without its
possibilities of humor. The trial proceeded; the witnesses witnessed in
their various tongues, the perspiring arresting officer reduced their
statements to the common denominator of the judge's single tongue, and
the smirking bullet-headed defendant was hopelessly buried under the
evidence. Wherefore, when the shining black face of his lawyer,
retained during the two minutes between the "Oye!" and the opening of
the case, rose above the scene to purr:
"Your Honor, the prosecution has shown no case. I move the charge
against my client be quashed."
I choked myself just in time to keep from gasping aloud, "Well, of all
the nerve!" Never will I learn that the lawyer's profession admits
lying on the same footing with truth in the defense of a culprit.
"Cause shown," mumbled the Judge without looking up from his writing,
"defendant bound over for trial in the circuit court."
A week later, therefore, there was a similar scene a story higher in
the same building. Here on Thursdays sits one of the three members of
the Zone Supreme Court. Jury trial is rare on the Isthmus--which makes
possibly for surer justice. This time there was all the machinery of
court and I appeared only in my legal capacity. The judge, a man still
young, with an astonishingly mobile face that changed at least once a
minute from a furrowy scowl with great pouting lips to a smile so broad
it startled, sat in state in the middle of three judicial arm-chairs,
and the case proceeded. Within an hour the defendant was standing up,
the cheery grin still on his black countenance, to be sentenced to two
years and eight months in the Zone penitentiary at Culebra. A deaf man
would have fancied he was being awarded some prize. One of the
never-ending surprises on the Zone is the apparent indifference of
negro prisoners whether they get years or go free. Even if they testify
in their own behalf it is in a listless, detached way, as if the matter
were of no importance anyway. But the glance they throw the innocent
arresting officer as they pass out on their way to the barb-wire
enclosure on the outskirts of the Zone capital tells another story.
There are members of the Z. P. who sleep with a gun under their pillow
because of that look or a muttered word. But even were I nervous I
should have been little disturbed at the glare in this case, for it
will probably be a long walk from Culebra penitentiary to where I am
thirty-two months from that morning.
A holiday air brooded over all Gatun and the country-side. Workmen in
freshly washed clothing lolled in the shade of labor-camps, black
Britishers were gathering in flat meadows fitted for the national game
of cricket, far and wide sounded the care-free laughter and chattering
of negroes, while even within Gatun police station leisure and peace
seemed almost in full possession.
The morning "touch" with headquarters over, therefore, I scrambled away
across the silent yawning locks and the trainless and workless dam to
the Spillway, over which already some overflow from the lake was
escaping to the Caribbean. My friends "Dusty" and H---- had carried
their canoe to the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down the
river. It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancer
could not equal; just the weather for a perfect "day off." A
plain-clothes man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off. Some
one might run away with the Administration Building on the edge of the
Pacific and the telephone wires be buzzing for me--with the sad result
that a few days later there would be posted in Zone police stations
where all who turned the leaves might read:
Special Order No. ....
Having been found Guilty of charges of
Neglect of Duty
preferred against him by his commanding officer
First-class Policeman No. 88
is hereby fined $2.
Chief of Division.
But shades of John Aspinwall! Should even a detective work on such a
Sunday? Surely no criminal would--least of all a black one. Moreover
these forest-walled banks were also part of my beat.
The sun was hot, yet the air of that ozone-rich quality for which
Panama is famous. For headgear we had caps; and did not wear those,
though barely a few puffy, snow-white clouds ventured out into the vast
chartless sky all the brilliant day through. Then the river; who could
describe this lower reach of the Chagres as it curves its seven deep
and placid miles from where Uncle Sam releases it from custody, to the
ocean. Its jungled banks were without a break, for the one or two
clusters of thatch and reed huts along the way are but a part of the
living vegetation. Now and then we had glimpses across the tree-tops of
brilliant green jungle hills further inland, everywhere were huge
splendid trees, the stack-shaped mango, the soldier-erect palm heavy,
yet unburdened, with cocoanuts. Some fish resembling the porpoise rose
here and there, back and forth above the shadows winged snow-white
cranes so slender one wondered the sea breeze did not wreck them. Above
all the quiet and peace and contentment of a perfect tropical day
enfolded the landscape in a silence only occasionally disturbed by the
cry of a passing bird. Once a gasoline launch deep-laden with
Sunday-starched Americans, snorted by, bound likewise to Fort Lorenzo
at the river's mouth; and we lay back in our soft, rumpled khaki and
drowsily smiled our sympathy after them. When they had drawn on out of
earshot life began to return to the banks and nature again took
possession of the scene. Alligators abounded once on this lower
Chagres, but they have grown scarce now, or shy, and though we sat with
H----'s automatic rifle across our knees in turns we saw no more than a
carcass or a skeleton on the bank at the foot of the sheer wall of
impenetrable verdure.
Till at length the sea opened on our sight through the alley-way of
jungle, and a broad inviting cocoanut grove nodded and beckoned on our
left. Instead we paddled out across the sandbar to play with the surf
of the Atlantic, but found it safer to return and glide across the
little bay to the drowsy straw and tin village. Here--for the mouth of
the Chagres like its source lies in a foreign land--a solitary
Panamanian policeman in the familiar Arctic uniform enticed us toward
the little thatched office, and house, and swinging hammock of the
alcalde to register our names, and our business had we had any. So
deep-rooted was the serenity of the place that even when "Dusty," in
all Zone innocence, addressed the white-haired little mulatto as
"hombre" he lost neither his dignity nor his temper.
The policeman and a brown boy of merry breed went with us up the grassy
rise to the old fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were still the
massive, rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of prisoners of
the old brutal days; blind owls stared upon us; once the boy brought
down with his honda, or slung-shot, one of the bats that circled
uncannily above our heads. In dank corners were mounds of worthless
powder; the bakery that once fed the miserable dungeon dwellers had
crumbled in upon itself. Outside great trees straddled and split the
massive stone walls that once commanded the entrance to the Chagres,
jungle waved in undisputed possession in its earth-filled moat, even
the old cannon and heaped up cannon-balls lay rust-eaten and dejected,
like decrepit old men who have long since given up the struggle.
We came out on the nose of the fort bluff and had before and below us
and underfoot all the old famous scene, for centuries the beginning of
all trans-Isthmian travel,--the scalloped surf-washed shore with its
dwindling palm groves curving away into the west, the Chagres pushing
off into the jungled land. We descended to the beach of the outer bay
and swam in the salt sea, and the policeman, scorning the launch party,
squatted a long hour in the shade of a tree above in tropical patience.
Then with "sour" oranges for thirst and nothing for hunger--for Lorenzo
has no restaurant--we turned to paddle our way homeward up the Chagres,
that bears the salt taste of the sea clear to the Spillway. Whence one
verse only of a stanza by the late bard of the Isthmus struck a false
note on our ears;
Then go away if you have to,
Then go away if you will!
To again return you will always yearn
While the lamp is burning still.
You've drunk the Chagres water
And the mango eaten free,
And, strange though it seems,
It will haunt your dreams
This Land of the Cocoanut Tree.
No catastrophe had befallen during my absence. The same peaceful sunny
Sunday reigned in Gatun; new-laundered laborers were still lolling in
the shade of the camps, West Indians were still batting at interminable
balls with their elongated paddles in the faint hope of deciding the
national game before darkness settled down. Then twilight fell and I
set off through the rambling town already boisterous with church
services. Before the little sub-station a swarm of negroes was pounding
tamborines and bawling lustily:
Oh, yo mus' be a lover of de Lard
Or yo cahn't go t' Heaven when yo di-ie.
Further on a lady who would have made ebony seem light-gray bowed over
an organ, while a burly Jamaican blacker than the night outside stood
in the vestments of the Church of England, telling his version of the
case in a voice that echoed back from the town across the gully, as if
he would drown out all rival sects and arguments by volume of sound.
The meeting-house on the next corner was thronged with a singing
multitude, tamborines scattered among them and all clapping hands to
keep time, even to the pastor, who let the momentum carry on and on
into verse after verse as if he had not the self-sacrifice to stop it,
while outside in the warm night another crowd was gathered at the edge
of the shadows gazing as at a vaudeville performance. How well-fitted
are the various brands of Christianity to the particular likings of
their "flocks." The strongest outward manifestation of the religion of
the West Indian black is this boisterous singing. All over town were
dusky throngs exercising their strong untrained voices "in de Lard's
sarvice"; though the West Indian is not noted as being musical. Here a
preacher wanting suddenly to emphasize a point or clinch an argument
swung an arm like a college cheer leader and the entire congregation
roared forth with him some well-known hymn that settled the question
for all time.
I strolled on into darker High street. Suddenly on a veranda above
there broke out a wild unearthly screaming. Two negroes were engaged in
savage, sanguinary combat. Around them in the dim light thrown by a
cheap tenement lamp I could make out their murderous weapons--machetes
or great bars of iron--slashing wildly, while above the din rose
screams and curses:
Yo ---- Badgyan, ah kill yo!
I sped stealthily yet swiftly up the long steps, drawing my No. 38 (for
at last I had been issued one) as I ran and dashed into the heart of
the turmoil swallowing my tendency to shout "Unhand him, villain!" and
crying instead:
"Here, what the devil is going on here?"
Whereupon two negroes let fall at once two pine sticks and turned upon
me their broad childish grins with:
"We only playin', sar. Playin' single-sticks which we larn to de army
in Bahbaydos, sahgeant."
Thus I wandered on, in and out, till the night lost its youth and the
last train from Colon had dumped its merry crowd at the station, then
wound away along the still and deserted back road through the
night-chirping jungle between the two surviving Gatuns. There was a
spot behind the Division Engineer's hill that I rarely succeeded in
passing without pausing to drink in the scene, a scallop in the hills
where several trees stood out singly and alone against the myriad
starlit sky, below and beyond the indistinct valleys and ravines from
which came up out of the night the chorus of the jungle. Further on, in
American Gatun there was a seat on the steps before a bungalow that
offered more than a good view in both directions. A broad, U. S.-tamed
ravine sank away in front, across which the Atlantic breeze wafted the
distance-softened thrum of guitar, the tones of fifes and happy negro
voices, while overhead feathery gray clouds as concealing as a dancer's
gossamer hurried leisurely by across the brilliant face of the moon; to
the right in a free space the Southern Cross, tilted a bit awry,
gleamed as it has these untold centuries while ephemeral humans come
and pass their brief way.
It was somewhere near here that Gatun's dry-season mosquito had his
hiding-place. Rumor whispers of some such letter as the following
received by the Colonel--not the blue-eyed czar at Culebra this time;
for you must know there is another Colonel on the Zone every whit as
indispensable in his sphere:
GATUN, ... 26, 1912.
Dear Colonel:--
I am writing to call your attention to a gross violation of Sanitary
Ordinance No. 3621, to an apparent loop-hole in your otherwise
excellent department. The circumstances are as follows;
On the evening of ... 24, as I was sitting at the roadside between
Gatun and New Gatun (some 63 paces beyond house No. 226) there appeared
a MOSQUITO, which buzzed openly and for some time about my ears. It was
probably merely a male of the species, as it showed no tendency to
bite; but a mosquito nevertheless. I trust you will take fitting
measures to punish so bold and insolent a violation of the rules of
your department.
I am, sir, very truly yours,
(Mrs.) HENRY PECK.
P. S. The mosquito may be easily recognized by a peculiarly triumphant,
defiant note in his song,
I cannot personally vouch for the above, but if it was received any
"Zoner" will assure you that prompt action was taken. It is well so.
The French failed to dig the canal because they could not down the
mosquito. Of course there was the champagne and the other things that
come with it--later in the night. But after all it was the little
songful mosquito that drove them in disgrace back across the Atlantic.
Still further on toward the hotel and a midnight lunch there was one
house that was usually worth lingering before, though good music is
rare on the Zone. Then there was the naughty poker game in bachelor
quarters number--well, never mind that detail--to keep an ear on in
case the pot grew large enough to make a worth-while violation of the
law that would warrant the summoning of the mounted patrolman.
Meanwhile "cases" stacked up about me. Now one took me out the hard U.
S. highway that, once out of sight of the last negro shanty, rambles
erratically off like the reminiscences of an old man through the
half-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilderness, rampant green with rooted
life and almost noisy with the songs of birds. Eventually within a
couple of hours it crossed Fox River with its little settlement and
descended to Mt. Hope police station, where there is a 'phone with
which to "get in touch" again and then a Mission rocker on the screened
veranda where the breezes of the near-by Atlantic will have you well
cooled off before you can catch the shuttle-train back to Gatun.
Or another led out across the lake by the old abandoned line that was
the main line when first I saw Gatun. It drops down beyond the station
and charges across the lake by a causeway that steam-shovels were
already devouring, toward forsaken Bohio. Picking its way across the
rotting spiles of culverts, it pushed on through the unpeopled jungle,
all the old railroad gone, rails, ties, the very spikes torn up and
carried away, while already the parrots screamed again in derision as
if it were they who had driven out the hated civilization and taken
possession again of their own. A few short months and the devouring
jungle will have swallowed up even the place where it has been.
If it was only the little typewritten slip reporting the disappearance
of a half-dozen jacks from the dam, every case called for full
investigation. For days to come I might fight my way through the
encircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to every native hut for
miles around to see if by any chance the lost property could have
rolled thither. More than once such a hunt brought me out on the
water-tank knoll at the far end of the dam, overlooking miles of
impenetrable jungle behind and above chanting with invisible life, to
the right the filling lake stretching across to low blue ranges dimly
outlined against the horizon and crowned by fantastic trees, and all
Gatun and its immense works and workers below and before me.
Times were when duty called me into the squalid red-lighted district of
Colon and kept me there till the last train was gone. Then there was
nothing left but to pick my way through the night out along the P.R.R.
tracks to shout in at the yard-master's window, "How soon y' got
anything goin' up the line?" and, according to the answer, return to
read an hour or two in Cristobal Y.M.C.A. or push on at once into the
forest of box-cars to hunt out the lighted caboose. Night freights do
not stop at Gatun, nor anywhere merely to let off a "gum-shoe." But
just beyond New Gatun station is a grade that sets the negro fireman to
sweating even at midnight and the big Mogul to straining every nerve
and sinew, and I did not meet the engineer that could drag his long
load by so swiftly but that one could easily swing off on the road that
leads to the police station.
Even on the rare days when "cases" gave out there was generally
something to while away the monotony. As, one morning an American
widely known in Gatun was arrested on a warrant and, chatting merrily
with his friend, Policeman ----, strolled over to the station. There
his friend Corporal Macey subdued his broad Irish smile and ordered the
deskman to "book him up." The latter was reaching for the keys to a
cell when the American broke off his pleasant flow of conversation to
remark;
"All right, Corporal, I'm going over to the house to get a few things
and write a few letters. I'll be back inside of an hour."
Whereupon Corporal Macey, being a man of iron self-control, refrained
from turning a double back sommersault and mildly called the prisoner's
attention to a little point of Zone police rules he had overlooked.
If every other known form of amusement absolutely failed it was still
the dry, or tourist season, and poured down from the States hordes of
unconscious comedians, or investigators who rushed two whole days about
the Isthmus, taking care not to get into any dirty places, and rushed
home again to tell an eager public all about it. Sometimes the
sight-seers came from the opposite end of the earth, a little band of
South Americans in tongueless awe at the undreamed monster of work
about them, yet struggling to keep their fancied despite of the
"yanqui," to which the "yanqui" is so serenely indifferent. Priests
from this southland were especially numerous. The week never passed
that a group of them might not be seen peering over the dizzy precipice
of Gatun locks and crossing themselves ostentatiously as they turned
away.
One does not, at least in a few months, feel the "sameness" of climate
at Panama and "long again to see spring grow out of winter." Yet there
is something, perhaps, in the popular belief that even northern energy
evaporates in this tropical land. It is not exactly that; but certainly
many a "Zoner" wakes up day by day with ambitious plans, and just
drifts the day through with the fine weather. He fancies himself as
strong and energetic as in the north, yet when the time comes for doing
he is apt to say, "Oh, I guess I'll loaf here in the shade half an hour
longer," and before he knows it another whole day is charged up against
his meager credit column with Father Time.
There came the day early in April when the Inspector must go north on
his forty-two days' vacation. I bade him bon voyage on board the 8:41
between the two Gatuns and soon afterward was throwing together my
belongings and leaving "Davie" to enjoy his room alone. For Corporal
Castillo was to be head of the subterranean department ad interim, and
how could the digging of the canal continue with no detective in all
the wilderness of morals between the Pacific and Culebra? Thus it was
that the afternoon train bore me away to the southward. It was a
tourist train. A New York steamer had docked that morning, and the
first-class cars were packed with venturesome travelers in their stout
campaign outfits in which to rough it--in the Tivoli and the
sight-seeing motors--in their roof-like cork helmets and green veils
for the terrible Panama heat--which is sometimes as bad as in northern
New York.
The P.R.R. is one of the few railroads whose passengers may drop off
for a stroll, let the train go on without them, and still take it to
their destination. They have only to descend, as I did, at Gamboa cabin
and wander down into the "cut," climb leisurely out to Bas Obispo, and
chat with their acquaintances among the Marines lolling about the
station until the trains puffs in from its shuttle-back excursion to
Gorgona. The Zone landscape had lost much of its charm. For days past
jungle fires had been sweeping over it, doing the larger growths small
harm but leaving little of the greenness and rank clinging life of
other seasons. Everywhere were fires along the way, even in the towns.
For quartermasters--to the rage of Zone house-wives were sending up in
clouds of smoke the grass and bushes that quickly turn to
breeding-places of mosquitoes and disease with the first rains. Night
closed down as we emerged from Miraflores tunnel; soon we swung around
toward the houses, row upon row and all alight, climbed the lower slope
of Ancon hill, and at seven I descended in familiar, cab-crowded,
bawling Panama.