WHERE can you buy beer in Cristobal?
All this and more I learned in the swivel-chair waiting for orders, reading the latest novel that had found its way to Ancon station, and receiving frequent a.s.surances that I should be quite busy enough once I got started. Opposite sat Lieutenant Long pouring choice bits of sub-station orders into the "phone:
"Don"t you believe it. That was no accident. He didn"t lose everything he had in every pocket rolling around drunk in the street. He"s been systematically frisked. Sabe frisked? Get on the job and look into it."
For the Lieutenant was one of those scarce and enviable beings who can live with his subordinates as man to man, yet never find an ounce of his authority missing when authority is needed.
Now and then a Z. P. story whiled away the time. There was the sad case of Corporal ---- in charge of ---- station. Early one Sunday afternoon the Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the railroad.
Naturally the day was hot. The Corporal sent a policeman to arrest the inhuman wretch for cruelty to animals. When he had left the culprit weeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the goat, tied in the shade under the police station.
"Poor little beast," said the sympathetic Corporal, as he set before it a generous pan of ice-water fresh from the police station tank. The goat took one long, eager, grateful draught, turned over on its back, curled up like the sensitive-plants of Panama jungles when a finger touches them, and departed this vale of tears. But Corporal ---- was an artist of the first rank. Not only did he "get away with it" under the very frowning battlements of the judge, but sent the Spaniard up for ten days on the charge against him. Z. P."s who tell the story a.s.sert that the Spaniard did not so much mind the sentence as the fact that the Corporal got his goat.
Then there was "the Mystery of the Knocked-out n.i.g.g.e.rs." Day after day there came reports from a spot out along the line that some negro laborer strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner suddenly lay down, threw a fit, and went into a comatose state from which he recovered only after a day or two in Ancon or Colon hospitals. The doctors gave it up in despair. As a last resort the case was turned over to a Z. P. sleuth. He chose him a hiding-place as near as possible to the locality of the strange manifestation. For half the morning he sweltered and swore without having seen or heard the slightest thing of interest to an old "Zoner." A dirt-train rumbled by now and then. He strove to amuse himself by watching the innocent games of two little Spanish switch-boys not far away. They were enjoying themselves, as guileless childhood will, between their duties of letting a train in and out of the switch. Well on in the second half of the morning another diminutive Iberian, a water-boy, brought his compatriots a pail of water and carried off the empty bucket. The boys hung over the edge of the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their home-made drinking-can, no doubt, and went on playing.
By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in the distance. Now and then as he advanced he sang a s.n.a.t.c.h of West Indian ballad. As he espied the "switcheros" a smile broke out on his features and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-pail. In a working species of Spanish he made some request of the boys, the while wiping his ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys protested. Evidently they had lived on the Zone so long they had developed a color line. The negro pleaded. The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still shook their heads. One of them was idly tapping the ground with a broom-handle that had lain beside him. The negro glanced up and down the track, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the boys" drinking vessel, of which the wire hooked over the pail was not after all the handle, and stooped to dip up a can of water. The little fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing a useless protest, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the rail in front of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent the can of water some rods down the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thin air above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after trying a moment in vain to kick the railroad out by the roots, lay still.
By this time the sleuth was examining the broom-handle. From its split end protruded an inch of telegraph wire, which chanced also to be the same wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized bucket. Close in front of the innocent little fellows ran a "third rail!"
Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended. There was thrust into my hands a typewritten-sheet and I caught the next thing on wheels out to Corozal for my first investigation. It was one of the most commonplace cases on the Zone. Two residents of my first dwelling-place on the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150 in U. S. gold.
Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. Every bachelor quarters on the Isthmus, completely screened in, is entered by two or three screen-doors, none of which is or can be locked. In the building are from twelve to twenty-four wide-open rooms of two or three occupants each, no three of whom know one another"s full names or anything else, except that they are white Americans and ipso facto (so runs Zone philosophy) above dishonesty. The quarters are virtually abandoned during the day. Two negro janitors dawdle about the building, but they, too, leave it for two hours at mid-day. Moreover each of the forty-eight or more occupants probably has several friends or acquaintances or enemies who may drift in looking for him at any hour of the day or night. No negro janitor would venture to question a white American"s errand in a house; Panama is below the Mason and Dixon line.
In practice any white American is welcome in any bachelor quarters and even to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though he be a total stranger to all the community. Add to this that the negro tailor"s runner often has permission to come while the owner is away for suits in need of pressing, that John Chinaman must come and claw the week"s washing out from under the bed where the "rough-neck" kicked it on Sat.u.r.day night, that there are a dozen other legitimate errands that bring persons of varying shades into the building, and above all that the bachelors themselves, after the open-hearted old American fashion, have the all but universal habit of tossing gold and silver, railroad watches and real-estate bonds, or anything else of whatever value, indifferently on the first clear corner that presents itself.
Precaution is troublesome and un-American. It seems a fling at the character of your fellow bachelors--and in the vast majority of Zone cases it would be. But it is in no sense surprising that among the many thousands that swarm upon the Isthmus there should be some not averse to increasing their income by taking advantage of these guileless habits and bucolic conditions. There are suggestions that a few--not necessarily whites--make a profession of it. No wonder "our chief trouble is burglary" and has been ever since the Z. P. can remember.
Summed up, the pay-day gold that has thus faded away is perhaps no small amount; compared with what it might have been under prevailing conditions it is little.
As for detecting such felonies, police officers the world around know that theft of coin of the realm in not too great quant.i.ties is virtually as safe a profession as the ministry. The Z. P. plain-clothes man, like his fellows elsewhere, must usually be content in such cases with impressing on the victim his Sherlockian astuteness, gathering the available facts of the case, and return to typewrite his report thereof to be carefully filed away among headquarters archives. Which is exactly what I had to do in the case in question, diving out the door, notebook in hand, to catch the evening train to Panama.
I was growing accustomed to Ancon and even to Ancon police-mess when I strolled into headquarters on Sat.u.r.day, the sixteenth, and the Inspector flung a casual remark over his shoulder:
"Better get your stuff together. You"re transferred to Gatun."
I was already stepping into a cab en route for the evening train when the Inspector chanced down the hill.
"New Gatun is pretty bad on Sat.u.r.day nights," he remarked. (All too well I remembered it.) "The first time a n.i.g.g.e.r starts anything run him in, and take all the witnesses in sight along."
"That reminds me; I haven"t been issued a gun or handcuffs yet," I hinted.
"h.e.l.l"s fire, no?" queried the Inspector. "Tell the station commander at Gatun to fix you up."
CHAPTER VI
I scribbled myself a ticket and was soon rolling northward, greeting acquaintances at every station. The Zone is like Egypt; whoever moves must travel by the same route. At Pedro Miguel and Cascadas armies of locomotives--the "mules" of the man from Arkansas--stood steaming and panting in the twilight after their day"s labor and the wild race homeward under hungry engineers. As far as Bas Obispo this busy, teeming Isthmus seemed a native land; beyond, was like entering into foreign exile. It is a common Zone experience that only the locality one lives in during his first weeks ever feels like "home."
The route, too, was a new one. From Gorgona the train returned crab-wise through Matachin and across the sand d.y.k.e that still holds the Chagres out of the "cut," and halted at Gamboa cabin. Day was dying as we rumbled on across the iron bridge above the river and away into the fresh jungle night along the rock-ballasted "relocation." The stillness of this less inhabited half of the Zone settled down inside the car and out, the evening air of summer caressing almost roughly through the open windows. The train continued its steady way almost uninterruptedly, for though new villages were springing up to take the place of the old sinking into desuetude and the flood along with the abandoned line, there were but two where once were eight. We paused at the new Frijoles and the box-car town of Monte Lirio and, skirting on a higher level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick jungled and forested hills what is some day to be Gatun Lake, drew up at 7:30 at Gatun.
I wandered and inquired for some time in a black night--for the moon was on the graveyard shift that week--before I found Gatun police station on the nose of a breezy knoll. But for "Davie," the desk-man, who it turned out was also to be my room-mate, and a few wistful-eyed negroes in the steel-barred room in the center of the building, the station was deserted. "Circus," said the desk-man briefly. When I mentioned the matter of weapons he merely repeated the word with the further information that only the station commander could issue them.
There was nothing to do therefore but to ramble out armed with a lead pencil into a virtually unknown town riotous with liquor and negroes and the combination of Sat.u.r.day night, circus time, and the aftermath of pay-day, and to strut back and forth in a way to suggest that I was a perambulating a.r.s.enal. But though I wandered a long two hours into every hole and corner where trouble might have its breeding-place, nothing but noise took place in my sight and hearing. I turned disgustedly away toward the tents pitched in a gra.s.sy valley between the two Gatuns. At least there was a faint hope that the equestrienne might a.s.sault the ring-master.
I approached the tent flap with a slightly quickening pulse. World-wide and centuries old as is the experience, personally I was about to "spring my badge" for the first time. Suppose the doortender should refuse to honor it and force me to impress upon him the importance of the Z. P.--without a gun? Outwardly nonchalant I strolled in between the two ropes. Proprietor Shipp looked up from counting his winnings and opened his mouth to shout "ticket!" I flung back my coat, and with a nod and a half-wink of wisdom he fell back again to computing his lawful gains.
By the way, are not you who read curious to know, even as I for long years wondered, where a detective wears his badge? Know then that long and profound investigation among the Z. P. seems to prove conclusively that as a general and all but invariable rule he wears it pinned to the lining of his coat, or under his lapel, or on the band of his trousers, or on the breast of his shirt, or in his hip pocket, or up his sleeve, or at home on the piano, or riding around at the end of a string in the baby"s nursery; though as in the case of all rules this one too has its exceptions.
Entertainments come rarely to Gatun. The one-ringed circus was packed with every grade of society from gaping Spanish laborers to haughty wives of dirt-train conductors, among whom it was not hard to distinguish in a far corner the uniformed sergeant in command of Gatun and the long lean corporal tied in a bow-line knot at the alleged wit of the versatile but solitary clown who changed his tongue every other moment from English to Spanish. But the end was already near; excitement was rising to the finale of the performance, a wrestling match between a circus man and "Andy" of Pedro Miguel locks. By the time I had found a leaning-place it was on--and the circus man of course was conquered, amid the gleeful howling of "rough-necks," who collected considerable sums of money and went off shouting into the black night, in quest of a place where it might be spent quickly. It would be strange indeed if among all the thousands of men in the prime of life who are digging the ca.n.a.l at least one could not be found who could subjugate any champion a wandering circus could carry among its properties. I took up again the random tramping in the dark unknown night; till it was two o"clock of a Sunday morning when at last I dropped my report-card in the train-guard box and climbed upstairs to the cot opposite "Davie," sleeping the silent, untroubled sleep of a babe.
I was barely settled in Gatun when the train-guard handed me one of those frequent typewritten orders calling for the arrest of some straggler or deserter from the marine camp of the Tenth Infantry. That very morning I had seen "the boss" of census days off on his vacation to the States--from which he might not return--and here I was coldly and peremptorily called upon to go forth and arrest and deliver to Camp Elliott on its hill "Mac," the pride of the census, with a promise of $25 reward for the trouble. "Mac" desert? It was to laugh. But naturally after six weeks of unceasing repet.i.tion of that pink set of questions "Mac"s" throat was a bit dry and he could scarcely be expected to return at once to the humdrum life of camp without spending a bit of that $5 a day in slaking a tropical thirst. Indeed I question whether any but the prudish will loudly blame "Mac" even because he spent it a bit too freely and brought up in Empire dispensary. Word of his presence there soon drifted down to the wily plain-clothes man of Empire district. But it was a hot noonday, the dispensary lies somewhat up hill, and the uniformless officer of the Zone metropolis is rather thickly built. Wherefore, stowing away this private bit of information under his hat, he told himself with a yawn, "Oh, I"ll drag him in later in the day," and drifted down to a wide-open door on Railroad Avenue to spend a bit of the $25 reward in off-setting the heat. Meanwhile "Mac,"
feeling somewhat recovered from his financial extravagance, came sauntering out of the dispensary and, seeing his curly-headed friend strolling a beat not far away, naturally cried out, "h.e.l.lo, Eck!" And what could Eck say, being a reputable Zone policeman, but:
"Why, h.e.l.lo, Mac! How they framin" up? Consider yourself pinched."
Which was lucky for "Mac." For Eck had once worn a marine hat over his own right eye and, he knew from melancholy experience that the $25 was no government generosity, but "Mac"s" own involuntary contribution to his finding and delivery; so managed to slip most of it back into "Mac"s" hands.
Long, long after, more than six weeks after in fact, I chanced to be in Bas Obispo with a half-hour to spare, and climbed to the flowered and many-roaded camp on its far-viewing hilltop that falls sheer away on the east into the ca.n.a.l. In one of the airy barracks I found Renson, cards in hand, clear-skinned and "fit" now, thanks to the regular life of this adult nursery, though his lost youth was gone for good. And "Mac"? Yes, I saw "Mac" too--or at least the back of his head and shoulders through the screen of the guard-house where Renson pointed him out to me as he was being locked up again after a day of shoveling sand.
The first days in Gatun called for little else than patrol duty, without fixed hours, interspersed with an occasional loaf on the second-story veranda of the police-station overlooking the giant locks; close at hand was the entrance to the ca.n.a.l, up which came slowly barges loaded with crushed stone from Porto Bello quarry twenty miles east along the coast or sand from Nombre de Dios, twice as distant, while further still, spread Limon Bay from which swept a never-ending breeze one could wipe dry on as on a towel. So long as he has in his pocket no typewritten report with the Inspector"s scrawl across it, "For investigation and report," the plain-clothes man is virtually his own commander, with few duties beside trying to be in as many parts of his district at once as possible and the ubiquitous duty of "keeping in touch with headquarters." So I wandered and mingled with all the life of the vicinity, exactly as I should have done had I not been paid a salary to do so. By day one could watch the growth of the great locks, the gradual drowning of little green, new-made islands beneath the muddy still waters of Gatun Lake, tramp out along jungle-flanked country roads, through the Mindi hills, or down below the old railroad to where the cayucas that floated down the Chagres laden with fruit came to land on the ever advancing edge of the waters. With night things grew more compact. From twilight till after midnight I prowled in and out through New Gatun, spilled far and wide over its several hills, watching the antics of negroes, pausing to listen to their guitars and their boisterous merriment, with an eye and ear ever open for the unlawful. When I drifted into a saloon to see who might be spending the evening out, the bar-tender proved he had the advantage of me in acquaintance by crying: "h.e.l.lo, Franck! What ye having?" and showing great solicitude that I get it. After which I took up the starlit tramp again, to run perhaps into some such perilous scene as on that third evening. A riot of contending voices rose from a building back in the center of a block, with now and then the sickening thump of a falling body. I approached noiselessly, likewise weaponless, peeped in and found--four negro bakers stripped to the waist industriously kneading to-morrow"s bread and discussing in profoundest earnest the object of the Lord in creating mosquitoes. Beyond the native town, as an escape from all this, there was the back country road that wound for a mile through the fresh night and the droning jungle, yet instead of leading off into the wilderness of the interior swung around to American Gatun on its close-cropped hills.
I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined among those ordered to report for target test. A fine piece of luck was this for a man who had scarcely fired a shot since, aged ten, he brought down with an air-gun an occasional sparrow at three cents a head. We took the afternoon train to Mt. Hope on the edge of Colon and trooped away to a little plain behind "Monkey Hill," the last resting-place of many a "Zoner."
The Cristobal Lieutenant, father of Z. P., was in charge, and here again was that same Z. P. absence of false dignity and the genuine good-fellowship that makes the success of your neighbor as pleasing as your own.
"Shall I borrow a gun, Lieutenant?" I asked when I found myself "on deck."
"Well, you"ll have to use your own judgment as to that," replied the Lieutenant, busy pasting stickers over holes in the target.
The test was really very simple. All you had to do was to cling to one end of a No. 38 horse-pistol, point it at the bull"s-eye of a target, hold it in that position until you had put five bullets into said bull"s-eye, repeat that twice at growing distances, mortally wound ten times the image of a Martinique negro running back and forth across the field, and you had a perfect score. Only, simple as it was, none did it, not even old soldiers with two or three "hitches" in the army. So I had to be content with creeping in on the second page of a seven-page list of all the tested force from "the Chief" to the latest negro recruit.
The next evening I drifted into the police station to find a group of laborers from the adjoining camps awaiting me on the veranda bench, because the desk-man "didn"t sabe their lingo." They proved upon examination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their story short, sad, but by no means unusual. Upon returning from work one of the Italians had found the lock hinges of his ponderously padlocked tin trunk hanging limp and screwless, and his pay-day roll of some $30 missing from the crown of a hat stuffed with a shirt securely packed away in the deepest corner thereof. The Turk was similarly unable to account for the absence of his $33 savings safely locked the night before inside a pasteboard suitcase; unless the fact that, thanks to some sort of surgical operation, one entire side of the grip now swung open like a barn-door might prove to have something to do with the case. The $33 had been, for further safety"s sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting a burglar with a wheelbarrow.
The mysterious detective work began at once. Without so much as putting on a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious crime. It was the usual Zone type of laborers" barracks. A screened building of one huge room, it contained two double rows of three-tier "standee" canvas bunks on gas-pipes. Around the entire room, close under the sheet-iron roof, ran a wooden platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked high with the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper suitcases containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more workmen around the rough table below.
Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-camp during working hours. Practically the West Indian janitors to whom is left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not fallible. In the course of the second day I unearthed a second Turk who, having chanced the morning before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor and soap preparatory to welcoming a fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had been mildly startled to step on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given length and proportions lying p.r.o.ne behind the stacked-up impedimenta.
The latter explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his unconventional posture by a.s.serting that he was the "mosquito man," and shortly thereafter went away from there without leaving either card or address.
By all my library training in detective work the next move obviously was to find what color of cigarette ashes the Turk smoked. Instead I blundered upon the absurdly simple notion of trying to locate the negro of given length and proportions. The real "mosquito man"--one of that dark band that spends its Zone years with a wire hook and a screened bucket gathering evidence against the defenseless mosquito for the sanitary department to gloat over--was found not to fit the model even in hue. Moreover, "mosquito men" are not accustomed to carry their devotion to duty to the point of crawling under trunks in their quest.
For a few days following, the hunt led me through all Gatun and vicinity. Now I found myself racing across the narrow plank bridges above the yawning gulf of the locks, with far below tiny men and toy trains, now in and out among the cathedral-like flying b.u.t.tresses, under the giant arches past staring signs of "DANGER!" on every hand--as if one could not plainly hear its presence without the posting. I descended to the very floor of the locks, far below the earth, and tramped the long half-mile of the three flights between soaring concrete walls. Above me rose the great steel gates, standing ajar and giving one the impression of an opening in the Great Wall of China or of a sky-sc.r.a.per about to be swung lightly aside. On them resounded the roar of the compressed-air riveters and all the way up the sheer faces, growing smaller and smaller as they neared the sky, were McClintic-Marshall men driving into place red-hot rivets, thrown at them viciously by negroes at the forges and glaring like comets"
tails against the twilight void.
The chase sent me more than once stumbling away across rock-tumbled Gatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for long centuries, eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun with its proud church and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peruvian viceroys and "Forty-niners" were wont to pause from their arduous journeyings.
They call it a dam. It is rather a range of hills, a part and portion of the highlands that, east and west, enclose the valley of the Chagres, its summit resembling the terminal yards of some great city.
There was one day when I sought a negro brakeman attached to a given locomotive. I climbed to a yard-master"s tower above the Spillway and the yard-master, taking up his powerful field-gla.s.ses, swept the horizon, or rather the dam, and discovered the engine for me as a mariner discovers an island at sea.
"Er--would you be kind enough to tell us where we can find this Gatun dam we"ve heard so much about?" asked a party of four tourists, half and half as to s.e.x, who had been wandering about on it for an hour or so with puzzled expressions of countenance. They addressed themselves to a busy civil engineer in leather leggings and rolled up shirt sleeves.
"I"m sorry I haven"t time to use the instrument," replied the engineer over his shoulder, while he wig-wagged his orders to his negro helpers scattered over the landscape, "but as nearly as I can tell with the naked eye, you are now standing in the exact center of it."