"The boss" and I initiated the Canal Zone Census that very night.
Legally it was to begin with the dawning of February, but there
were many labor camps in our district and the hours bordering on
midnight the only sure time to "catch 'em in." Up in House 47 I
gathered together the legion paraphernalia of this new
occupation,--some two hundred red cards a foot long and half as
wide, a surveyor's field notebook for the preservation of
miscellaneous information, tags for the tagging of canvassed
buildings, tacks for the tacking of the same, the necessary tack-
hammer, the medium soft black pencil, above all the awesome legal
"Commission," impressively signed and sealed, wherein none other
than our weighty nation's chief himself did expressly authorize me
to search out, enter, and question ad libitum. All this swung over
a shoulder in a white canvas sack, that carried memory back
through the long years to my newsboy days, I descended to the
town.

"The boss" was ready. It was nearly eleven when we crossed the
silent P. R. R. tracks and, plunging away into the night past
great heaps of abandoned locomotives huddled dim and uncertain in
the thin moonlight like ghosts of the French fiasco, dashed into a
camp of the laborer's village of Cunette, pitched on the very edge
of the now black and silent void of the canal. Eighteen thick-
necked negroes in undershirts and trousers gazed up white-eyed
from a suspended card game at the long camp table. But we had no
time for explanations.

"Name?" I shouted at the coal-hued Hercules nearest at hand.