bles "in the bush."
I heard particularly those of two of the Marines, "Mac" and Renson,
merry, good-natured, earnest-by-spurts, even modest fellows quite
different from what I had hitherto pictured as an enlisted man.

"Mac" was a half and half of Scotch and Italian. Naturally he was
constantly effervescing, both verbally and temperamentally, his
snapping black eyes were never still, life played across his excitable,
sunny boyish face like cloud shadows on a mountain landscape, whoever
would speak to him at any length must catch him in a vice-like grip and
hold his attention by main force. He spoke with a funny little
almost-foreign accent, was touching on forty, and was the youngest man
at that age in the length and breadth of the Canal Zone.

At first sight you would take "Mac" for a mere roustabout, like most
who go a'soldiering. But before long you'd begin to wonder where he got
his rich and fluent vocabulary and his warehouse of information. Then
you'd run across the fact that he had once finished a course in a
middle-western university--and forgotten it. The schools had left
little of their blighting mark upon him, yet "pump" "Mac" on any
subject from rapid-fire guns to grand opera and you'd get at least a
reasonable answer. Though you wouldn't guess the knowledge was there
unless you did pump for it, for "Mac" was not of the type of those who
overwork the first person pronoun, not because of foolish diffidence
but merely because it rarely occurred to him as a subject of
conversation. Seventeen years in the marine corps--you were sure he was
"jollying" when he first said it--had taken "Mac" to most places where
warships go, from Pekin and "the Islands" to Cape Town and Buenos
Ayres, and given him not merely an acquaintance with the world
but--what is far more of an acquisition--the gift of getting acquainted
in almost any stratum of the world in the briefest possible space of
time.

"Mac" spoke not only his English and Italian but a fluent "Islands"
Spanish; he knew enough French to talk even to Martiniques, and he
could moreover make two distinct sets of noises that were understood by
Chinese and Japanese respectively. He was a man just reckless enough in
all things to be generous and alive, yet never foolishly wasteful
either of himself or his meager substance. "Mac" first rose to fame in
the census department by appearing one afternoon at Empire police
station dragging a "bush" native by the scruff of the ne