mies, armed
or armless, but furthermore "not to share with any one any of the
information you gather as an enumerator, or show a census card, or keep
a copy of same." Yet, I trust I can spin this simple yarn of my Canal
Zone days without offense to Uncle Sam against the day when mayhap I
shall have occasion to apply to him again for occupation. For that
reason I shall take abundant care to give no information whatsoever in
the following pages.

CHAPTER II

"The boss" and I initiated the Canal Zone Census that very night.
Legally it was to begin with the dawning of February, but there were
many labor camps in our district and the hours bordering on midnight
the only sure time to "catch 'em in." Up in House 47 I gathered
together the legion paraphernalia of this new occupation,--some two
hundred red cards a foot long and half as wide, a surveyor's field
notebook for the preservation of miscellaneous information, tags for
the tagging of canvassed buildings, tacks for the tacking of the same,
the necessary tack-hammer, the medium soft black pencil, above all the
awesome legal "Commission," impressively signed and sealed, wherein
none other than our weighty nation's chief himself did expressly
authorize me to search out, enter, and question ad libitum. All this
swung over a shoulder in a white canvas sack, that carried memory back
through the long years to my newsboy days, I descended to the town.

"The boss" was ready. It was nearly eleven when we crossed the silent
P. R. R. tracks and, plunging away into the night past great heaps of
abandoned locomotives huddled dim and uncertain in the thin moonlight
like ghosts of the French fiasco, dashed into a camp of the laborer's
village of Cunette, pitched on the very edge of the now black and
silent void of the canal. Eighteen thick-necked negroes in undershirts
and trousers gazed up white-eyed from a suspended card game at the long
camp table. But we had no time for explanations.

"Name?" I shouted at the coal-hued Hercules nearest at hand.

"David Providence," he bleated in trembling voice, and the great Zone
questionnaire was on.

We had enrolled the group before a son of wisdom among them surmised
that we were not, after all, plain-clothes men in quest of criminals;
and his announcement brought visible relief. Twice as many blacks were
sprawled in the two rows of double-sided, three-story bunks,--mere
strips of canvas on gas-pipes that could be hung up like swi