check. Every here and there we caught labor's odds and ends,
diminutive "water-boys," likewise of varying nationality, a negro
switch-boy dozing under the bit of shelter he had rigged up of
jungle ferns, frightening many a black laborer speechless as we
pounced upon him emerging from his "soldiering" in the jungle;
occasionally even a native bushman on his way to market from his
palm-thatched home generations old back in the bush, who has
scarcely noticed yet that the canal is being dug, fell into our
hands and was inexorably set down in spite of all protest unless
he could prove beyond question that he had already been "taken" or
lived beyond the Zone line.

Thus we scribbled incessantly on, even through the noon hour,
dragging gangs one by one away from their tasks, shaking laborers
out of the brief after-lunch siesta in a patch of shade. "The
boss" was hampered by having only two languages where ten were
needed. In the early afternoon he went on to Paraiso to feed
himself and the traction power, while I held the fort. Soon after
rain fell, a sort of advance agent of the rainy season, a sudden
tropical downpour that ran in rivulets down across the pink card-
boards and my victims. Yet strange to note, the writing of the
medium soft pencil remained as clear and unsmudged as in the
driest weather, and so clean a rain was it that it did not even
soil my white cotton shirt. I continued unheeding, only to note
with surprise a few minutes later that the sun was shining on the
dense green jungle about me as brilliantly as ever and that I was
dry again as when I had set out in the morning.

"The boss" returned, and when I had eaten the crackers and the
bottle of pink lemonade he brought, we pushed on toward the