xactly 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."

"Wel