Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers by Harry Alverson Franck
page 61 of 214 (28%)
page 61 of 214 (28%)
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constant breeze are park benches where one can sit with the
Atlantic spreading away to infinity before, breaking with its ages-old, mysterious roll on the shore just as it did before the European's white sails first broke the gleaming skyline. Out to sea runs the growing breakwater from Toro Point, the great wireless tower, yet just across the bay on a little jutting, dense-grown tongue of land is the jungle hut of a jungle family as utterly untouched by civilization as was the verdant valley of Typee on the day Melville and Toby came stumbling down into it from the hills above. But meanwhile I was not getting the long hours of unbroken sleep the heavy mental toil of enumeration requires. Free government bachelor quarters makes strange bed-fellows--or at least room- fellows. Quartermasters, like justice, are hopelessly blind or I might have been assigned quarters upon the financial knoll where habits and hours were a bit more in keeping with my own. But a bachelor is a bachelor on the Zone, and though he be clerk to his highness "the Colonel" himself he may find himself carelessly tossed into a "rough-neck" brotherhood. House 47 was distinctly an abode of "rough-necks." A "rough-neck," it may be essential to explain to those who never ate at the same table with one, is a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed, cast-iron fellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, rock-tearing steam-shovel all day, wrestle the night through with various starred Hennessey and its rivals, and continue that round indefinitely without once failing to turn up to straddle his beam in the morning. He seems to have been created without the insertion of nerves, though he is never lacking in "nerve." He is |
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