had he been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he
returned to the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out of
cigarettes. I slipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes
grew--for Renson was as tractable as a child, rightly treated--and
set him to taking Jamaican tenements in the center of town, while
I struck off into the jungled Martinique hills myself.

There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a
close. My first pay-day had already come and gone and I had
strolled up the gravel walk one noon-day to the Disembursing
Office with my yellow pay certificate duly initialed by the
examiner of accounts, and was handed my first four twenty-dollar
gold pieces--for hotel and commissary books sadly reduce a good
paycheck. Already one evening I had entered the census office to
find "the boss" just peeling off his sweat-dripping undershirt and
dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a day mule-back on the
thither side of the canal; an utterly fruitless day, for not only
had he failed during eight hours of plunging through the
wilderness to find a single hut not already decorated with the
"enumerated" tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands on when
the noon-hour overhauled him far from the ministrations of "Ben"
and the breeze-swept veranda of Empire hotel.

It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson's linguistic
troubles that "the boss" came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy
mule. In his eagerness to "clean up" the territory we fell to
corraling negroes everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying
their supplies at the commissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside
trees, anywhere and everywhere, until at last in his excitement
"the boss" let his medium soft pencil slip by the column for color