without the insertion of nerves, though he is never lacking in
"nerve." He is a fine fellow in his way, but you sometimes wish his way
branched off from yours for a few hours, when bed-time or a mood for
quiet musing comes. He is a man you are glad to meet in a saloon--if
you are in a mood to be there--or tearing away at the cliffs of
Culebra; but there are other places where he does not seem exactly to
fit into the landscape.

House 47, I say, was a house of "rough-necks." That fact became
particularly evident soon after supper, when the seven phonographs were
striking up their seven kinds of ragtime on seven sides of us; and it
was the small hours before the poker games, carried on in much the same
spirit as Comanche warfare, broke up through all the house. Then, too,
many a "rough-neck" is far from silent even after he has fallen asleep;
and about the time complete quiet seemed to be settling down it was
four-thirty; and a jarring chorus of alarm-clocks wrought new upheaval.

Then there was each individual annoyance. Let me barely mention two or
three. Of my room-mates, "Mitch" had sat at a locomotive throttle
fourteen years in the States and Mexico, besides the four years he had
been hauling dirt out of the "cut." Youthful ambition "Mitch" had left
behind, for though he could still look forward to forty, railroad rules
had so changed in the States during his absence that he would have had
to learn his trade over again to be able to "run" there. Moreover four
years on the Zone does not make a man look forward with pleasure to a
States winter. So "Mitch," like many another "Zoner," was planning to
buy with the savings of his $210 a month "when the job is done" a chunk
of land on some sunny slope of a southern state and settle down for an
easy descent through old age. There was nothing objectionable about
"Mitch"--except perhaps his preference for late-hour poker. But he had
a way of stopping with one leg out of his trousers when at last all the
house had calmed down and cots were ceasing to creak, to make some such
wholly irrelevant remark as; "By ----, that ---- dispatcher give me 609
to-day and she wouldn't pull a greased string out of a knot-hole"--and
thereby always hung a tale that was sure to range over half the track
mileage of the States and wander off somewhere into the sandy cactus
wilderness of Chihuahua at least before "Mitch" succeeded in getting
out of the other trouser leg.

The cot directly across f