lythe admitted. "You never tire of doing
big things."

His eyes had come back to a group of young engineers who had just
entered the car. The grimy sweat had dried on their sooty faces and
their hands were black and greasy. They wore no coats and their shirts,
wet from the perspiration drawn by the hot Panama sun, stuck to the
muscular shoulders.

They looked like tramps from their attire, but Olympians could not have
carried in their manner a blither confidence. These boys--I'll swear the
oldest could have been no more than twenty-five--had undertaken to cut
asunder what God has joined.

It did not matter to them in the least that they looked like coal
miners. The only thing of importance was the work, the big ditch. Yet I
knew that these were just such splendid fellows as our technical schools
are turning out by thousands.

A few years before their thoughts had been full of cotillions and girls
and the junior prom. The Isthmus had laid hold of them and hardened
their muscles and bronzed their faces and given them a toughness of
fiber that would last a lifetime.

They had taken on responsibility as if they had been born to it. A glow
of pride in them flushed me. I was proud of the country that could fling
out by hundreds of thousands such young fellows as these.

Empire, Gorgona, Gatun. From one to another we were hurried, passing
through jungles such as we of the North never dream exist. In that
humid climate vegetation is prodigal beyond belief, gorgeous with
spattered greens and yellows and crimsons bizarre enough to take the
breath.

We ate luncheon at Colon and were back across the Isthmus at Panama a
few hours later. After dinner we strolled around the city and saw the
Parque de la Catedral, the Plaza Santa Ana, and the old sea wall.

It did my heart good to see broad-shouldered, alert young Americans
walking with wholesome girls from home and making love to them in the
same fashion their friends were doing up in "God's country."

Bothwell and his bunch of pirates began to lose themselves in the
background of my mind. There was a dance at the hotel that evening.
Before I had waltzed twice with Evelyn her buccaneer cousin had
dissolved into a myth.

When Yeager came ashore next morning he brought a piece of news. Henry
Fleming had taken a boat during the night and escaped.

"If I run across him I'll curl his hair for him," Tom promised with a
look that made me think he would keep his word.

But I w