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 upon 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
a yellow varnished counter down on Railroad Avenue opposite Empire
Machine Shops. So it happened that "Shorty" was gradually winning the
title of a thirty-third degree "booze-fighter," and passengers on any
afternoon train who took the trouble to glance in at a wide-open door
just Atlanticward 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
legitimate 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
washtub with a question 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
sufferings of his fellows, compared with a Zone quartermaster. 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 first I
entered the dreaded precinct shielded behind "the boss" with his
contagious smile, and the musical quartermaster of Empire was
ov