The Ne'er-Do-Well Part 27

"I never quite figured out who they are. Funny, by-the-way, how everybody says 'they' in referring to them."

"Oh, she's the whole team. Cortlandt's a nice fellow--but--Did you really think that she'd let you start at the bottom?"

"Why, yes."

"I guess you don't know her."

"You're right; I do not."

"Well, she knows everybody and everything in this country. She's the whole diplomatic service. Take the Colombian trouble, for instance--"

"What trouble?"

"When Panama seceded. She manipulated that, or at least Steve Cortlandt did under her direction. She was the brains of the whole affair, however, and those New York lawyers merely did what she told them. It was one of the cleverest exploits on record.

Colombia wouldn't let us build the Ca.n.a.l, so Panama seceded. War was declared, but the United States interfered in time to prevent bloodshed. One Chinaman was killed, I believe, by dropping a flat- iron on his toe, or something, and by the time the excitement had died out we had begun digging. She knows Central America like the palm of her hand. When she says Kirk Anthony wants a position, we hirelings jump about and see that he gets it. Oh, you'll have any job you want."

"Well!" The recipient of this good news congratulated himself silently. "I wish you'd tell me something more about her."

"There isn't time just now; our motor is waiting. But we have the whole afternoon ahead of us."

The two pa.s.sed through the railroad gates and took their places in the little car. When they were under way, Runnels went on: "I'm supposed to show you this end of the work and tell you what it all means."

"Then please start at the beginning. You see, I probably know less about it than anybody living."

"Of course you know the general lay-out?"

"I tell you I don't know a thing. There's no use four-flus.h.i.+ng."

Runnels smiled at this candor. "Well, the ditch will be about fifty miles long, and, roughly speaking, the work is in three parts--the dredging and harbor-building at sea-level on each end of the Ca.n.a.l, the lock-work, and the excavations on the upper levels. That dam you saw building at Gatun will form a lake about thirty miles long--quite a fish-pond, eh? When a west-bound s.h.i.+p arrives, for instance, it will be raised through the Gatun locks, three of them, and then sail along eighty-five feet above the ocean, across the lake and into a channel dug right through the hills, until it reaches the locks at Pedro Miguel. Then it will be lowered to a smaller lake five miles long, then down again to the level of the Pacific. An east-bound s.h.i.+p will reverse the process.

Get the idea?"

"Sure. It sounds easy."

"Oh, it's simple enough. That's what makes it so big. We've been working at it five years, and it will take five years more to complete it. Before we began, the French had spent about twenty years on the job. Now a word, so you will have the general scheme of operation in your head. The whole thing is run by the Isthmian Ca.n.a.l Commission--six men, most of whom are at war with one another. There are really two railroad systems--the I. C. C., built to haul dirt and rock and to handle materials in and out of the workings, and the Panama Railroad, which was built years ago during the California gold rush and bought by our government at the time of that terrible revolution I told you about. The latter is a regular system, hauls pa.s.sengers and freight, but the two work together. You will start in with the P. R. R., Mr. Anthony, under my despotic sway."

"I know a little about railroading."

"So much the better. There's a big railroad man by your name in the States. Are you related?"

"I believe so," Kirk answered, quietly. "Go ahead with the lesson."

"The Ca.n.a.l Zone is a strip of land ten miles wide running across the Isthmus--really an American colony, you know, for we govern it, police it, and all that. As for the work itself, well, the fellows at the two ends of the Ca.n.a.l are dredging night and day to complete their part, the lock-builders are laying concrete like mad to get their share done first, the chaps in the big cut are boring through the hills like moles and breaking steam-shovel records every week, while we railroad men take care of the whole shooting-match. Of course, there are other departments--sanitary, engineering, commissary, and so forth--all doing their share; but that is the general scheme. Everybody is trying to break records.

We don't think of anything except our own business. Each fellow believes the fate of the Ca.n.a.l depends upon him. We've lost interest in everything except this ditch, and while we realize that there is such a place as home, it has become merely a spot where we spend our vacations. They have wars and politics and theatres and divorces out there somewhere, but we don't care.

We've lost step with the world, we've dropped out. When the newspapers come, the first thing we look for is the Panama news.

We're obsessed by this job. Even the women and the children feel it--you'll feel it as soon as you become a cog in the machine.

Polite conversation at dinner is limited to tons of rock and yards of concrete. Oh, but I'm tired of this concrete talk."

"Try the abstract for a change."

"It's interesting at first, then it gets tiresome. Lord! It's fierce."

"The work, too?"

"Everything! Every day you do the same thing; every day you see the same faces, hear the same talk; even the breeze blows from the same direction all the time, and the temperature stays at the same mark winter and summer. Every time you go out you see the same coach-drivers, the same Spiggoty policemen leaning against the same things; every time you come in you eat the same food, drink the same liquor, sit in the same chair, and talk about the same topics. Everything runs too smoothly. The weather is too d.a.m.ned nice. The thermometer lacks originality. We're too comfortable.

Climate like that gets on a white man's nerves; he needs physical discomfort to make him contented. I'd give a forty-dollar dog to be good and cold and freeze my nose. Why, Doctor Gorgas has made us so sanitary that we can't even get sick. I'd hail an epidemic as a friend.

"It's even harder on the women folks, for they can't find anything to kick about, so they fuss with one another and with us. They have clubs, you know, to improve things, but there's nothing to improve. We had a social war recently over a b.u.t.ton. One clique wanted a club emblem that would cost a dollar and a half, while the other faction were in favor of a dollar b.u.t.ton. I tell you, it was serious. Then, too, we're all tagged and labelled like cans of salmon with the price-mark on--we can't four-flush. You can tell a man's salary by the number of rocking-chairs in his house, and the wife of a fellow who draws eighteen hundred a year can't a.s.sociate with a woman whose husband makes twenty-five hundred. They are very careful about such things. We go to the same dances on the same dates, we dance with the same people to the same tunes by the same band, and when we get off in some corner of the same veranda in search of the same old breeze, which we know is blowing at precisely the same velocity from the usual quarter, our partners tell us that Colonel So-and-So laid four hundred twenty-seven more cubic yards of concrete this week than last, or that Steam Shovel Number Twenty-three broke the record again by eighty yards. It's h.e.l.l!" He stopped, breathless.

"Why don't you quit?" suggested Anthony.

"Quit! What for? Good Lord! We LIKE it. Here we are at Pedro Miguel, by-the-way. We'll be into the Cut shortly."

To his left Anthony beheld another scene somewhat similar to the one at Gatun. Other movable steel cranes, with huge wide-flung arms, rose out of another chasm in which were extensive concrete workings. From a distance the towers resembled parts of a half- constructed cantilever bridge of tremendous height. Another army was toiling at the bottom of the pit, more cars shunted back and forth, more rock-crushers rumbled; but, before Kirk's eye had photographed more than a small part, the motor-car had sped past and was rolling out upon a bridge spanning the Ca.n.a.l itself. To the northward appeared an opening cut through the hills, and Runnels said, simply:

"Culebra!"

A moment later he announced: "We leave the P. R. R tracks here and switch in on the I. C. C. Now you'll begin to see something."

Down into the Cut the little car went, and at last Anthony saw the active pulsating heart of this stupendous undertaking. The low range was severed by a gorge blasted out by human hands. It was a mountain valley in the making. High up on its sides were dirt and rock trains, dozens of compressed-air drills, their spars resembling the masts of a fleet of catboats at anchor--behind these, grimy, powerful steam shovels which rooted and grunted quite like iron hogs. Along the tracks at various levels flowed a constant current of traffic; long lines of empty cars crept past the shovels, then, filled to overflowing, sped away northward up the valley, to return again and again. Nowhere was there any idleness, nowhere a cold machine or a man at rest. On every hand was smoke and steam and sweat. The drills chugged steadily, the hungry iron hogs gouged out the trails the drills had loosened, the trains rolled past at intervals of a moment or so. Lines of electric wire, carried upon low wooden "shears," paralleled the tracks, bearing the white-hot sparks that rent the mountain. At every switch a negro flagman crouched beneath a slanting sheet of corrugated iron, seeking shelter alike from flying fragments and the blazing sun. From beneath the drills came occasional subterranean explosions; then geysers of muddy water rose in the air. Under the snouts of the steam shovels "dobe" shots went off as bowlders were riven into smaller fragments. Now and then an excited tooting of whistles gave warning of a bigger blast as the flagmen checked the flow of traffic, indicating with arms upraised that the ground was "coming up." Thereupon a brief lull occurred; men hid themselves, the work held its breath, as it were. But while the detonations still echoed, and before the flying missiles had ceased to shower, the human ants were moiling at their hills once more, the wheels were turning again, the jaws of the iron hogs were clanking.

Through this upheaval the motor-car penetrated, dodging trains of "flats," which moved sluggishly to afford them pa.s.sage up and down over the volcanic furrows at the bottom of the gorge or along some shelf beneath which the foundations were being dug. At times a shovel reached out its five-yard steel jaw and gently cleared the rails of debris, or boosted some bowlder from the path with all the skill of a giant hand and fingers. Up and down the canon rolled spasmodic rumblings, like broadsides from a fleet of battle-s.h.i.+ps.

"Somebody with a head for figures has estimated what it costs the government to send a motor-car like this through the Cut in working hours," Runnels said. "I don't remember the exact amount, but it was some thousands of dollars."

"Delays to trains, I suppose?"

"Yes. A minute here, thirty seconds there. Every second means a certain number of cubic yards unremoved, and holds back the opening of the Ca.n.a.l just so much. You have postponed a great event several minutes, Mr. Anthony."

"It's the first important thing I ever did."

"Our little nine-mile trip will cost Uncle Sam more than a brace of tickets from New York to 'Frisco and back again, including Pullmans and travelling expenses."

Mile after mile the sight-seers rolled on, past scenes of never- varying activity--past more shovels, more groups of drills, more dirt trains, more regiments of men--Runnels explaining. Kirk marvelling until he was forced to exclaim:

"I had no idea it was so big. It doesn't seem as if they'd ever finish it."

"Oh, we'll finish it if we're let alone. Every year, you know, we receive a batch of senators and congressmen who come down to 'inspect' and 'report.' Sometimes they spend as much as a week on the job, and frequently learn to distinguish which is the Gatun dam and which the Culebra cut, but not always. Some of them don't know yet. Nevertheless, they return to Was.h.i.+ngton and tell us how to proceed. Having discovered that the Panama climate is good and the wages high, they send down all their relatives. It's too bad Colonel Gorgas did away with the yellow fever.

"You see there is too much politics in it; we never know how long our jobs will last. If some senator whose vote is needed on an administration matter wanted my position for his wife's brother, he could get it. Suppose the president of the Clock-Winders' Union wanted to place his half-sister's husband with the P. R. R. He'd call at the White House and make his request. If he were refused, he'd threaten to call a strike of his union and stop every clock on the Isthmus. He'd get the job all right."

"Of course, that is an exaggeration."

"Not at all. It has been done--is being done right along. The half-sister's husband comes down here and takes a job away from some fellow who may be ent.i.tled to promotion."

"I suppose I'm an example."

Runnels looked at him squarely before answering, "You are," said he, "although I wasn't thinking of you when I spoke. It's something we all feel, however."

Anthony flushed as he answered: "I don't remember ever taking anything I wasn't ent.i.tled to, and I didn't think when I was shoved in here that I'd shove some other fellow out."