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 canal, 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: "Hello, 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 prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta. The latter explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his unconventional posture by asserting 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 buttresses, 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-scraper 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.