West Indian janitors to whom is
left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not fallible. In the
course of the second day I unearthed a second Turk who, having chanced
the morning before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor and soap
preparatory to welcoming a fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had been
mildly startled to step on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given
length and proportions lying prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta.
The latter explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his
unconventional posture by asserting that he was the "mosquito man," and
shortly thereafter went away from there without leaving either card or
address.

By all my library training in detective work the next move obviously
was to find what color of cigarette ashes the Turk smoked. Instead I
blundered upon the absurdly simple notion of trying to locate the negro
of given length and proportions. The real "mosquito man"--one of that
dark band that spends its Zone years with a wire hook and a screened
bucket gathering evidence against the defenseless mosquito for the
sanitary department to gloat over--was found not to fit the model even
in hue. Moreover, "mosquito men" are not accustomed to carry their
devotion to duty to the point of crawling under trunks in their quest.

For a few days following, the hunt led me through all Gatun and
vicinity. Now I found myself racing across the narrow plank bridges
above the yawning gulf of the locks, with far below tiny men and toy
trains, now in and out among the cathedral-like flying buttresses,
under the giant arches past staring signs of "DANGER!" on every
hand--as if one could not plainly hear its presence without the
posting. I descended to the very floor of the locks, far below the
earth, and tramped the long half-mile of the three flights between
soaring concrete walls. Above me rose the great steel gates, standing
ajar and giving one the impression of an opening in the Great Wall of
China or of a sky-scraper about to be swung lightly aside. On them
resounded the roar of the compressed-air riveters and all the way up
the sheer faces, growing smaller and smaller as they neared the sky,
were McClintic-Marshall men driving into place red-hot rivets, thrown
at them viciously by negroes at the forges and glaring like comets'
tails against the twilight void.

The chase sent me more than once stumbling away across rock-tumbled
Gatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for