protection from the sun, for the drowsers are mostly negroes and
immune to that, as from young rocks that the dynamite blasts
frequently toss a quarter-mile. Then over it all hang heavy clouds
of soft-coal dust from trains and shovels, shifting down upon the
black, white and mixed, and the enumerator alike; a dirty, noisy,
perilous, enjoyable job.

Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or three gangs working
together at the same task. Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing
gangs, dynamite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with
shovel and pick and crowbar, gangs down on the floor of the canal,
gangs far up the steep walls of cut rock, gangs stretching away in
either direction till those far off look like upright bands of the
leaf-cutting ants of Panamanian jungles; gangs nearly all,
whatever their nationality, in the blue shirts and khaki trousers
of the Zone commissary, giving a peculiar color scheme to all the
scene.

Now and then the boss is a stony-eyed American with a black cigar
clamped between his teeth. More often he is of the same
nationality as the workers, quite likely from the same town, who
jabbers a little imitation English. Which is one of the reasons
why a force of "time inspectors" is constantly dodging in and out
over the job, time-book and pencil in hand, lest some fellow-
townsman of the boss be earning his $1.50 a day under the shade of
a tree back in the jungle. Here are Basques in their boinas,
preferring their native "Euscarra" to Spanish; French "niggers"
and English "niggers" whom it is to the interest of peace and
order to keep as far apart as possible; occasionally a few
sunburned blond men in a shovel gang, but they prove to be Teutons