d humorous to play "Where Is My
Wandering Boy To-night?" on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at
poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states. Negro
wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo;
Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories
of the Spanish Main and Morgan's raid, of pieces of eight and
cutlasses ho! Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf;
huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle
with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and
suggests the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured.

Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about
the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where
fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests
who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military
socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston,
seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of
bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and
The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra
slide.

Colon! A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white,
warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high
endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched
with sudden rain like escaping steam, or languid under the desert
glare of the sky, where hangs a gyre of buzzards whose slow circles
are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom.

"Lord!" sighs Carl Ericson from Joralemon, "this is what I've wanted
ever since I was a kid."

* * * * *

At Pedro Miguel, which the Canal employees always called "Peter
McGill," he found work, first as an unofficial time-keeper; presently,
after examinations, as a stationery engineer on the roll of the I. C.
C. Within a month he showed no signs of his Bowery experiences beyond
a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks. He lived in quarters like a
college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and
cube-cut tobacco and college banners; clean youngsters dropping in for
an easy chat--and behind it all, the mystery of the Bush. His
room-mate, a conductor on the P. R. R., was a globe-trotter, and
through him Carl met the Adventurers, whom he had been questing ever
since he had run away from Oscar Ericson's woodshed. There was