"To Colonel Gunther?" Alfaro was dum-founded. "Will he let you talk to him? Will he bother himself with this affair of ours?"
"You bet he will. And let me tell you, a steam-shovel man with the high record for excavating in the Cut can go straight to the colonel on business a whole lot less important than this."
"Can we see him to-night?"
"No. There is no train to Culebra. But, lucky for us, to-morrow is Sunday, and he holds open court in his office, early in the morning. It is then that any man on the job with a kick, growl, or grievance can talk it over with the colonel. I will go to your hotel with you, Alfaro, and we will hop aboard the first train out. It will be only a few hours lost and that condemned old junk-heap of a Juan Lopez will not be many miles on her way to San Salvador."
Greatly comforted, the Colombian exclaimed with much feeling: "Next to the colonel, I think you are the biggest man on the Isthmus, Señor Devlin."
"I can handle a steam-shovel with any of them, and I aim to stand by my friends," was the self-satisfied reply.
Before eight o'clock next morning they were waiting in a large, plainly furnished room of a barn-like office building perched on the hill-side of Culebra. The walls were covered with maps and blue prints. At a desk heaped with papers sat the soldierly, white-haired ruler of forty thousand men, the supreme director of a four-hundred-million-dollar undertaking. His cheek was ruddy, his smile boyish, and he appeared to be at peace with all the world.
He had come to listen to complaints, no matter how trivial, to pass judgment, to give advice, like a modern Caliph of Bagdad. It was a cog in the machinery of his wonderful organization. Dissatisfaction had been checked as soon as the colonel set apart the one forenoon of the week in which his men were not at work in order that they might "talk it over with him." As Jack Devlin entered the office he was humming under his breath the refrain of a popular song composed by an Isthmian bard:
"Don't hesitate to state your case,
The boss will hear you through,