ds himself
announcing that his wife has been living on the Zone with him since
1907; and that she was born in New England! Thus is he tripped over his
own clothes-line. For New England girls do not marry at fifteen; mother
would not let them even if they would.

I, too, had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescript
cabins on the upper rim of Paraiso that seem on the very verge of
pitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the jar of
the next explosion, when one sunny mid-afternoon I caught sight of
Renson dejectedly trudging down across what might be called the
"Maiden" of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge-hall. I took leave of
my ebony hostess and descended. Renson's troubles were indeed
disheartening. Back in the jungled fringe of the town he had fallen
into a swarm of Martiniques, and Renson's French being nothing more
than an unstudied mixture of English and Spanish, he had not gathered
much information. Moreover negro women from the French isles are enough
to frighten any virtuous young Marine.

"What's the sense o' me tryin' to chew the fat in French?" asked
Renson, with tears in his voice. "I ain't in no condition to work at
this census business any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed before three
in the morning this week"--in his air was open suggestion that it was
some one else's fault--"Some day I'll be gettin' in bad, too. This
mornin' a fool nigger woman asked me if I didn't want her black
pickaninny I was enumeratin', thinkin' it was a good joke. You know how
these bush kids is runnin' around all over the country before a white
man's brat could walk on its hind legs. 'Yes,' I says, 'if I was goin'
alligator huntin' an' needed bait!' I come near catchin' the brat up by
the feet an' beatin' its can off. I'm out o' luck any way, an'--"

The fact is Renson was aching to be "fired." More than thirty days had
he been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he returned
to the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out of cigarettes. I
slipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes grew--for Renson was
as tractable as a child, rightly treated--and set him to taking
Jamaican tenements in the center of town, while I struck off into the
jungled Martinique hills myself.

There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a close. My
first pay-day had already come and gone and I had strolled up the
gravel walk one noon-day to the Disembursing Office with my