eeting required
by the social manual of the bush, and asked the three hundred and
sixty-five questions de rigueur regarding the honorable health of his
honorable horde of offspring, and his eye had fallen again on the red
cards in his hand, the fact struck him that the relative was of
precisely the same shade of complexion as himself. Could he set him
down as he had many a mere red-blooded person and thereby perhaps
establish a precedent that might result in his own mortification? Yet
could he stretch a shade--or several shades--and set him down as
"white"? No, there was the oath of office, and the government that
administered it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed. Long he sat
in deepest meditation. Being a Panamanian, he could not of course know
that Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census. Till at length, as the
sun was firing the western jungle tree-tops, a scintillating idea
rewarded his unwonted cogitation. He caught up the medium soft pencil
and wrote in aristocratic hand down across the sheet where other
information is supposed to find place:

"Color;--A very light mixture," and taking his leave with the requisite
seventy-five gestures and genuflexions, he drifted Empireward with the
dozen cards the day had yielded.

Which is why I was shocked next morning by the disrespectful report of
Renson that "my friend the boss had tied a can to the Spig's tail," and
our dainty and lamented comrade went back to the more fitting
blue-blood occupation of swinging a cane in the lobbies of Panama's
famous hostelries.

But what mattered such small losses? Had not "Scotty" been engaged to
fill the breach--or all of them, one or two breaches more or less made
small difference to "Scotty." He was a cozy little barrel of a man,
born in "Doombahrton," and for some years past had been dispensing good
old Dumbarton English in Panama's proudest educational institution. But
Panama's school vacation is during her "summer," her dry season from
February to April. What more natural then than that "Scotty" should
have concluded to pass his vacation taking census, for obviously--"a
mon must pick up a wee bit o' change wherever he can."

I seemed to have been appointed to a purely sight-seeing job. One
February noon I reported at the office to find that passes to Gatun had
been issued to five of us, "Scotty," "Mac," Renson, and Barter among
the number. The task in the "town by the dam site" it seemed, was
proving too heavy for the r