“If you boys had been one year old when the Panama Canal was first mentioned,” he managed to say, choking back his laughter, “you would now stand at the venerable age of four hundred and sixteen years.”
“I guess you get your history in the dream book,” Jimmie cried.
“Nixy dream book,” declared Peter, with the dignity which comes of much knowledge. “The Spaniards who lived in the Province of New Granada, on the Isthmus of Darien, as it was then called, planned a ship canal across the neck in the year 1518, and there has been talk of the big ditch ever since.”
“Then it takes a long time to get at the job,” suggested Jimmie. “The trench could have been scooped out with a teaspoon in less than four hundred years.”
“Wait until you get down there! You’ll see what impression your teaspoon would make. I’ve been reading up since I’ve returned to New York, and know something about the size of the job. The canal will cost millions more than Congress figured on, and the job is going ahead without graft, at that.”
“Still,” Harry Stevens interrupted, “it would have been a wise move to have annexed a lot of that land.”
“If your speculation had developed when the first talk of the canal was heard,” Peter went on, “you would have had to do business with King Ferdinand, of Spain. He would have put the soil on the bargain counter for you one day and shot you up the next. That wouldn’t have been so cheerful.”
“Nice party to do business with,” laughed Harry.
“He was next to his king job, all right,” Peter continued. “He was there with the gunpowder when any subject stood to put anything over on him. He caused Columbus to be returned to Spain in chains, and permitted one of his officials to shoot up the first white man who ever looked out on the Pacific from the divide of the Isthmus. He carried things by a large majority, did Ferdinand.”
“It was his queen who put her jewels in soak to buy a ship for Columbus,” commented Jack Bosworth. “I read about it when I was laid up with my broken arm. You remember the time the horse climbed into my motor car?”