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Thomas Carlyle - "History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 2"

Various - "Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish"

Lucy Fitch Perkins - "The Eskimo Twins"

Zone Policeman 88

H >> Harry A. Franck >> Zone Policeman 88




Then all at once we were startled by a hearty hail from among the
trees and I looked up to see Y----, of the Smithsonian, fully
dressed, standing waist-deep in the water at the edge of the
forest, waving an insect trap in one hand.

"What the devil are you doing there?" I gasped.

"Doing? I'm taking a walk along the old Gatun-Chorrera trail, and
I fancy I 'll be about the last man to travel it. Come on up to
camp."

On a mango-shaped knoll thirty miles from Gatun that will also
soon be lake bottom, we found a native shack transformed into the
headquarters of a scientific expedition. We sat down to a frontier
lunch which called for none of the excuses made for it by Y----
when he appeared in his dripping full-dress and joined us without
even bothering to change his water-spurting shoes. In his boxes he
had carefully stuck away side by side an untold number of members
of the mosquito family. Queer vocation; but then, any vocation is
good that gives an excuse to live out in this wild tropical world.

By one we had Dr. O---- aboard and were waving farewell to the
camp. The return, of course, was not the equal of the outward
trip; even nature cannot duplicate so perfect a thing. But two
raging showers gave us views of the drowning jungle under another
aspect, and between them we awakened vast rolling echoes across
the silent flooded world by shooting at flocks of little birds
with an army rifle that would have killed an elephant.

It is not hard to realize why the bush native does not love the
American. Put yourself in his breechclout. Suppose a throng of
unsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all
the world you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside
world wanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from
somewhere you never heard of, to somewhere you did not know.
Suppose a representative of that unsympathetic government came
snorting down upon you one day in a wild fearful invention they
called a motor-boat, as you were lolling under the thatch roof
your grandfather built, and cried:

"Come on! Get out of here! We're going to burn your house and turn
this country into a lake."

Flood the land which was your great-grand-father's, the spot where
you used to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane
where your mother's courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree
under which she was wedded--if matters were ever carried to that
ceremonious length. What though this foreign nation gave you a bag
of peculiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never
seen a score of such coins in your life and barely knew the use of
them, being acquainted with life only as it is picked from a
mango-tree? The foreigners had cried, "Take this money and go buy
a farm somewhere else," and you looked around you and saw all the
world you had ever really known the existence of sinking beneath
the rising waters. Where would you go, think you, to buy that new
farm? Even if you fled and found another unknown land high and
dry, or a town, what could you do, having not the remotest idea
how to live in a town with only pieces of metal to get food out of
instead of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house your
grandfather built ever since you were born and dropped mangoes
whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would be some
peeved.

It was midafternoon when the white bulk of Gatun locks rose on the
horizon. Then the lake opened out, the great dam, that is rather a
connecting link between two ranges of hills, spread across all the
landscape, and at four I raced up the muddy steps behind the
station to a telephone. Five minutes later I was hurrying away
across locks and dam to the marshland beyond the Spillway to
inquire who, and wherefore, had attempted to burn up the I. C. C.
launch attached to dredge No.----.

My Canal Zone days were drawing rapidly to a close. I could have
remained longer without regret, but the world is wide and life is
short. Soon came the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back
across the Isthmus to clear up the last threads of my existence as
a "Zoner." Chiefly for old times' sake I dropped off at Empire.
But it was not the same Empire of the census. Almost all the old
crowd was gone; one by one they had "kissed the Zone good-by."
"The boss" of those days had never returned, "smiling Johnny" had
been transferred, even Ben had "done quit an' gone back to
Bahbaydos." The Zone is like a small section of life; as in other
places where generations are short one catches there a hint of
what old age will be. It was like wandering over the old campus
when those who were freshmen in our day had hawked their gowns and
mortarboards and gone their way; I felt like a man in his dotage
with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation about him.

I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far down below was the
same struggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the
"cut" with its jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still
stretching away endless in either direction. Here as in the world
at large generations of us may come and pass away, but the tearing
of the shovels at the rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains
for the Pacific goes unbrokenly on, as the world and its work will
continue without a pause when we are gone indeed.

Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor
will be submerged and forever hidden from view. The swift growth
of the tropics will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels,
and palm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will
seem almost a natural channel. Then blase travelers lolling in
their deck chairs will gaze about them and snort:

"Huh! Is that all we got for nine years' work and half a billion
dollars?" They will have forgotten the scrubbing of Panama and
Colon, forgotten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and
graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses and the
furnishing of them down to the last center table, they will not
recall the rebuilding of the entire P. R. R., nor scores of little
items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on
the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so
essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a
trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the canal is
the accomplishment of the United States in showing the natives how
life can be lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet
the lesson will not be learned, and on the heels of the last canal
builder will return all the old slovenliness and disease, and the
native will sink back into just what he would have been had we
never come.

I caught a dirt-train to Balboa. There the very town at which I
had landed on the Zone five months before was being razed to give
place to the permanent, reenforced-concrete city that is to be the
canal headquarters. Balboa police station was only a pile of
lumber, with a band of negroes drilling away the very rock on
which it had stood. I took a last view of the Pacific and her
islands to far Taboga, where Uncle Sam sends his recuperating
children to enjoy the sea baths, hill climbs, and unrivaled pine-
apples. It was never my good fortune to get to Taboga. With thirty
days' sick leave a year and countless ailments of which I might
have been cured free of charge and with the best of care, I could
not catch a thing. I had not even the luck of my friend--who, by
dint of cross-country runs in the jungle at noonday and similar
industrious efforts, worked up at last a temperature of 99 degrees
and got his week at Taboga. I stuck immovable at 98.6 degrees.

Soon after five I had bidden Ancon farewell and set off on the
last ride across the Isthmus. There was a memory tucked away in
every corner. Corozal hotel was still rattling with dishes,
Paraiso peeped out from its lap of hills, Culebra with its
penitentiary where burglarizing negroes go, sunk away into the
past. Railroad Avenue in Empire was still lined with my
"enumerated" tags; through an open door I caught a glimpse of a
familiar short figure, one foot resting lightly and familiarly on
a misapplied gas-pipe, the elbow crooked as if something were held
between the fingers. At Bas Obispo I strained my eyes in vain to
make out a familiar face in the familiar uniform, there was a
glimpse of "Old Fritz" water-gauge as we rumbled across the
Chagres, and the train churned away into the heavy green
uninhabited night.

Only once more was I aroused, as the lights of Gatun flashed up;
then we rolled past the noisy glaring corner of New Gatun and on
to Colon. In Cristobal police station I put badge and passes into
a heavy envelope and dropped them into the train-guard's box; then
turned in for my last night on the Zone. For the steamer already
had her fires up that would bear me, and him who was the studious
corporal of Miraflores, away in the morning to South America. My
police days were ended.

Then a last hand to you all, oh, Z. P. May you live long and
continue to do your duty frankly and unafraid. I found you men
when I expected only policemen. I reckon my days among you time
well spent and I left you regretting that I could stay no longer
with you--and when I leave any place with regret it must be
possessed of some exceeding subtle charm. But though the world is
large, it is also small.

"So I'll meet you later on,
In the place where you have gone,
Where--"

Well, say at San Francisco in 1915, anyway, Hasta luego.

THE END

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