“I was sittin’ in the cab, waitin’ to pull a string of dirt cars out of the borrow-pit at Gatun, when who comes a-hikin’ along the track but the Old Man. ‘Can you give me a drink of water?’ he says, and I draws him one from the cooler on the engine. He takes a swallow and says, ‘This is pretty warm for ice-water.’
“‘Yes, sir,’ I says, ‘we’re supposed to have ten pounds a day to put in it, but we’re not gettin’ more’n one.’ The colonel just hands back the cup and walks away, but, say, next mornin’ I drew an iceberg.”
A second man broke in:
“Yes, and somebody else got stung for that little graft, you can bet your pants. Remember that foreman at Peter Magill [Orthodox pronunciation of Pedro Miguel] who made his gang of Gallegos come across every pay-day? They picked one of the bunch who could handle the English to go up to Culebra, for a hablar [talk] with Uncle George. Zing! Mr. Foreman’s job dropped out from under him, and he dropped through, and the job swung back, and he wasn’t on it. He’s out making roads now with the rest of the chain-gang.”
“The day after I hit the isthmus in 1907,” put in a third man, “I got a cablegram from home, saying my wife was dead. And they wouldn’t let me go back to look after my babies; turned me down cold when I asked for a passage north, and all I had was my job here, and pay-day a month away. I heard there was a new chief engineer at Culebra, and I put it up to him. The colonel he signed a paper, and said:
“‘I’ve had too many letters from wives in the States whose husbands are down here neglecting their families. I’m glad to meet one of the other kind. Show Mr. Smith this, and he’ll give you a passage. Bring your family down with you, and I’ll give you a married-quarters.’”
Colonel Goethals is no longer the handsome, smooth-faced boy officer in full-dress uniform, shown in the well-known photograph taken when he was “the new chief engineer.” His latest portrait, here published for the first time, shows how the heavy responsibilities of the last five years have left their mark on him. His is a splendidly virile face, strong, kindly, and vigorously intellectual. He is appropriately shown in citizen’s clothes, for, except on the most formal occasions, he never wears his uniform. It was with the greatest difficulty that he was persuaded to sit for this picture, and he absolutely refuses to let himself be photographed at work either in his office or in the field.
“No,” said “Old Bill” May, chief clerk and Cerberus of the outer office, “the colonel isn’t one of those fellows who keep the photographer waiting till they can have a lot of extra papers brought in and dumped all over the desk, so folks can see how busy they are. Nobody’s got a camera into his room yet, and I’d hate to be caught trying it. Maybe you think you’re going to get a snap-shot of him to-morrow when he takes you over the Gatun Dam; but you ain’t.”
From a photograph, copyright, by Pach