The morning "touch" with headquarters over, therefore, I scrambled away across the silent yawning locks and the trainless and workless dam to the Spillway, over which already some overflow from the lake was escaping to the Caribbean. My friends "Dusty" and H—— had carried their canoe to the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down the river. It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal; just the weather for a perfect "day off." A plain-clothes man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off. Some one might run away with the Administration Building on the edge of the Pacific and the telephone wires be buzzing for me—with the sad result that a few days later there would be posted in Zone police stations where all who turned the leaves might read:
Special Order No. ....
Having been found Guilty of charges of
Neglect of Duty
preferred against him by his commanding officer
First-class Policeman No. 88
is hereby fined $2.
Chief of Division.
But shades of John Aspinwall! Should even a detective work on such a Sunday? Surely no criminal would—least of all a black one. Moreover these forest-walled banks were also part of my beat.
The sun was hot, yet the air of that ozone-rich quality for which Panama is famous. For headgear we had caps; and did not wear those, though barely a few puffy, snow-white clouds ventured out into the vast chartless sky all the brilliant day through. Then the river; who could describe this lower reach of the Chagres as it curves its seven deep and placid miles from where Uncle Sam releases it from custody, to the ocean. Its jungled banks were without a break, for the one or two clusters of thatch and reed huts along the way are but a part of the living vegetation. Now and then we had glimpses across the tree-tops of brilliant green jungle hills further inland, everywhere were huge splendid trees, the stack-shaped mango, the soldier-erect palm heavy, yet unburdened, with cocoanuts. Some fish resembling the porpoise rose here and there, back and forth above the shadows winged snow-white cranes so slender one wondered the sea breeze did not wreck them. Above all the quiet and peace and contentment of a perfect tropical day enfolded the landscape in a silence only occasionally disturbed by the cry of a passing bird. Once a gasoline launch deep-laden with Sunday-starched Americans, snorted by, bound likewise to Fort Lorenzo at the river's mouth; and we lay back in our soft, rumpled khaki and drowsily smiled our sympathy after them. When they had drawn on out of earshot life began to return to the banks and nature again took possession of the scene. Alligators abounded once on this lower Chagres, but they have grown scarce now, or shy, and though we sat with H——'s automatic rifle across our knees in turns we saw no more than a carcass or a skeleton on the bank at the foot of the sheer wall of impenetrable verdure.
Till at length the sea opened on our sight through the alley-way of jungle, and a broad inviting cocoanut grove nodded and beckoned on our left. Instead we paddled out across the sandbar to play with the surf of the Atlantic, but found it safer to return and glide across the little bay to the drowsy straw and tin village. Here—for the mouth of the Chagres like its source lies in a foreign land—a solitary Panamanian policeman in the familiar Arctic uniform enticed us toward the little thatched office, and house, and swinging hammock of the alcalde to register our names, and our business had we had any. So deep-rooted was the serenity of the place that even when "Dusty," in all Zone innocence, addressed the white-haired little mulatto as "hombre" he lost neither his dignity nor his temper.
The policeman and a brown boy of merry breed went with us up the grassy rise to the old fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were still the massive, rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of prisoners of the old brutal days; blind owls stared upon us; once the boy brought down with his honda, or slung-shot, one of the bats that circled uncannily above our heads. In dank corners were mounds of worthless powder; the bakery that once fed the miserable dungeon dwellers had crumbled in upon itself. Outside great trees straddled and split the massive stone walls that once commanded the entrance to the Chagres, jungle waved in undisputed possession in its earth-filled moat, even the old cannon and heaped up cannon-balls lay rust-eaten and dejected, like decrepit old men who have long since given up the struggle.
We came out on the nose of the fort bluff and had before and below us and underfoot all the old famous scene, for centuries the beginning of all trans-Isthmian travel,—the scalloped surf-washed shore with its dwindling palm groves curving away into the west, the Chagres pushing off into the jungled land. We descended to the beach of the outer bay and swam in the salt sea, and the policeman, scorning the launch party, squatted a long hour in the shade of a tree above in tropical patience. Then with "sour" oranges for thirst and nothing for hunger—for Lorenzo has no restaurant—we turned to paddle our way homeward up the Chagres, that bears the salt taste of the sea clear to the Spillway. Whence one verse only of a stanza by the late bard of the Isthmus struck a false note on our ears;
Then go away if you have to,
Then go away if you will!
To again return you will always yearn
While the lamp is burning still.
You've drunk the Chagres water
And the mango eaten free,
And, strange though it seems,
It will haunt your dreams
This Land of the Cocoanut Tree.
No catastrophe had befallen during my absence. The same peaceful sunny Sunday reigned in Gatun; new-laundered laborers were still lolling in the shade of the camps, West Indians were still batting at interminable balls with their elongated paddles in the faint hope of deciding the national game before darkness settled down. Then twilight fell and I set off through the rambling town already boisterous with church services. Before the little sub-station a swarm of negroes was pounding tamborines and bawling lustily:
Oh, yo mus' be a lover of de Lard
Or yo cahn't go t' Heaven when yo di-ie.