a fine fellow in his way, but you sometimes wish his way branched
off from yours for a few hours, when bed-time or a mood for quiet
musing comes. He is a man you are glad to meet in a saloon--if you
are in a mood to be there--or tearing away at the cliffs of
Culebra; but there are other places where he does not seem exactly
to fit into the landscape.

House 47, I say, was a house of "rough-necks." That fact became
particularly evident soon after supper, when the seven phonographs
were striking up their seven kinds of ragtime on seven sides of
us; and it was the small hours before the poker games, carried on
in much the same spirit as Comanche warfare, broke up through all
the house. Then, too, many a "rough-neck" is far from silent even
after he has fallen asleep; and about the time complete quiet
seemed to be settling down it was four-thirty; and a jarring
chorus of alarm-clocks wrought new upheaval.

Then there was each individual annoyance. Let me barely mention
two or three. Of my room-mates, "Mitch" had sat at a locomotive
throttle fourteen years in the States and Mexico, besides the four
years he had been hauling dirt out of the "cut." Youthful ambition
"Mitch" had left behind, for though he could still look forward to
forty, railroad rules had so changed in the States during his
absence that he would have had to learn his trade over again to be
able to "run" there. Moreover four years on the Zone does not make
a man look forward with pleasure to a States winter. So "Mitch,"
like many another "Zoner," was planning to buy with the savings of
his $210 a month "when the job is done" a chunk of land on some
sunny slope of a southern state and settle down for an easy
descent through old age. There was nothing objectionable about