f
the waters. Time and again they had to do their work all over again. Then
they decided to take the Chagres by the neck and choke it into
subjection."

"I'd like to see some one choke a river," Jimmie laughed. "You try to
choke a river and you'll find that the harder you clutch it the more
trouble it will make you."

"But they not only choked the Chagres," the stranger said, with a
captivating smile which went far toward giving him the complete confidence
of the boys, "they put it in chains. If you look on a detail map of the
Isthmus, you will see a white band stretching from Limon Bay to La Boca,
just below the hill of Ancon. That is the line of the canal. Then, across
this white band, you will see a crooked line, a turning and twisting line.
That is the river, which seems to change its mind about general direction
every few minutes. The engineers found this river in the habit of getting
up in the night and tearing their work in pieces."

"Why didn't they cut a straight channel for it?" asked Jimmie.

"That was tried, but finally the engineers decided to stop trying to make
the river behave itself, as a river, and turned their attention to
squelching it. They are going to turn it into a lake--the Lake of Gatun."

"I've heard something about that," Jimmie said. "Go on and tell us more
about it."

The stranger smiled pleasantly, but there was a sudden quickening of the
flame in his brilliant eyes which the boys did not notice.

"The upland portion of the Isthmus, the plateau, as it would be called in
Mexico, is fairly level from Gatun to the Culebra hills. It might, in
fact, be called a shallow basin, with hills shutting it in. Now do you see
what the Gatun dam is for?"

"Sure. To flood that basin and turn the Chagres into a lake," cried
Jimmie.

"That is just what will be done. The Panama canal will be a lake most of
the way. The locks will float the vessels up to the lake and down to the
canal again. The hills, and forests, and farms of the basin will be under
water."

"And the mines," Jimmie said, thinking of the talk he had had with Peter
concerning the emerald mines. "The lake will flood them, too."

"There are no mines there any more," the stranger said, lightly, but there
was a quality in his voice which almost asked a question instead of making
a statement of fact.

"I've been wondering if there wasn't mines down there," Jimmie added, in a
moment.

"What kind of mines?" asked the stranger.

Ji