Came the morning of the sixth day without change. And then the diplomat’s cables to Lima had effect. A doctor had been appointed on a cabled order from Lima to make a real examination; he came out accompanied by a sanitary junta of very sour officials, climbed on board, and began his work. They pulled away and returned in the afternoon.
The young ship’s surgeon and the new doctor shouted the report across the water. Barring the three cases of malarial fever between decks we had a clean bill of health. The official boat drew a trifle nearer; in the stern sheets the port doctor scanned a formidable looking medical volume that lay open on his knees and the druggist bent his head over the same pages. Solemnly they accepted little test tubes that the ship’s surgeon passed across to them and examined them gravely. They turned a few pages of the book and asked a question. The new doctor answered it promptly. Again they shuffled the pages and came back with another; another answer, and then more hasty poring.
WHAT THE DIPLOMAT SAID WAS DIRECT AND VOLUBLE.
At length came their decision: it was true that the excellent doctors had described no such symptoms as were standardized for either yellow fever or the peste bubonica, but there was nothing to prevent those doctors from stating and confirming that which was not true; therefore be it resolved that we had yellow fever, but were concealing it! They were the incorruptible guardians of a nation’s health.
What the diplomat said was direct and voluble and carried perfectly across the calm evening sea: Heaven was a sad witness of his unpatriotic perfidy for he threatened them with a touch of patriotism direct from Lima upon the hour of his arrival—however distant or uncertain that might be. A little conference and they voted on our admission, two and two—could anything be fairer! Their honest hearts thanked Heaven for the thought of this simple and adroit deadlock that preserved their official activities and at the same time kept us in a profitable quarantine. Tersely it was pointed out by the diplomat that by virtue of the cabled commission the new doctor was a member of the board—vote again!
That evening we wandered through the dust and sand of Payta and rode grandly, and briefly, to the out-skirts of the town in the single mule-and-rope tram that skirted the beach. It is well in the troubled times of quarantine on the West Coast always to travel with an accredited diplomat on board.
A Wide, Dusty Canal Which in the Intervals Between Showers Serves as a Market
All next day the whirr and clatter of the steam-winches and the bang of cargo kept up and again we visited the dusty port, wading through the lines of Panama hat sellers that lined up to greet the landing of our small boat. Of hotel runners there were none, this being due to the fact that there was but one hotel to which the stray custom is bound to drift. At the hotel we saw a few palms and tropical blooms in tubs and in a carefully irrigated patio, for Payta is—like all that West Coast—rainless. As a cold matter of meteorological fact it does rain sometimes; I accidentally started an acrimonious discussion by a merely polite remark on the weather as to whether it had been nine, eleven, or fourteen years since the last rain. In apparent proof of this there is a wide, dusty canal bulkheaded with piling on either side which in these intervals between showers serves as a native market. Little red flags flutter from the chicherias where the opaque, yellow, Indian corn beer is sold, ranging in flavor and potency from warm buttermilk to the wicked “stone-fence” of New Jersey.