n the Zone. Then there was the naughty poker game in bachelor
quarters number--well, never mind that detail--to keep an ear on in
case the pot grew large enough to make a worth-while violation of the
law that would warrant the summoning of the mounted patrolman.

Meanwhile "cases" stacked up about me. Now one took me out the hard U.
S. highway that, once out of sight of the last negro shanty, rambles
erratically off like the reminiscences of an old man through the
half-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilderness, rampant green with rooted
life and almost noisy with the songs of birds. Eventually within a
couple of hours it crossed Fox River with its little settlement and
descended to Mt. Hope police station, where there is a 'phone with
which to "get in touch" again and then a Mission rocker on the screened
veranda where the breezes of the near-by Atlantic will have you well
cooled off before you can catch the shuttle-train back to Gatun.

Or another led out across the lake by the old abandoned line that was
the main line when first I saw Gatun. It drops down beyond the station
and charges across the lake by a causeway that steam-shovels were
already devouring, toward forsaken Bohio. Picking its way across the
rotting spiles of culverts, it pushed on through the unpeopled jungle,
all the old railroad gone, rails, ties, the very spikes torn up and
carried away, while already the parrots screamed again in derision as
if it were they who had driven out the hated civilization and taken
possession again of their own. A few short months and the devouring
jungle will have swallowed up even the place where it has been.

If it was only the little typewritten slip reporting the disappearance
of a half-dozen jacks from the dam, every case called for full
investigation. For days to come I might fight my way through the
encircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to every native hut for
miles around to see if by any chance the lost property could have
rolled thither. More than once such a hunt brought me out on the
water-tank knoll at the far end of the dam, overlooking miles of
impenetrable jungle behind and above chanting with invisible life, to
the right the filling lake stretching across to low blue ranges dimly
outlined against the horizon and crowned by fantastic trees, and all
Gatun and its immense works and workers below and before me.

Times were when duty called me into the squalid red-lighted district of
Colon and kept m