the creaking of Turks attempting to
talk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating "French" of
Martinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I will
NOT run the risk of talking Russian. It was the second and last case
during my census days when I was forced to call for interpretative
assistance.

At best we caught only a small percentage at each table before the
crowd had wolfed and melted away. An odd half dozen more, perhaps, we
found stretched out in the shade under the mess-hall and neighboring
quarters before the imperative screech of the labor-train whistle ended
a scene that must be several times repeated, and now left us silent and
alone, to wander wet and weary to the nearest white bachelor quarters,
there to lie on our backs an hour or more till the polyglot jumble of
words in the back of our heads had each climbed again to its proper
shelf.

Speaking of white bachelor quarters, therein lay the enumerator's
greatest problem. The Spaniard or the Jamaican is in nine cases out of
ten fluently familiar with his companion's antecedents and pedigree. He
can generally furnish all the information the census department calls
for. But it is quite otherwise with the American bachelor. He may know
his room-mate's exact degree of skill at poker, he probably knows his
private opinion of "the Colonel," he is sure to know his degree of
enmity to the prohibition movement; but he is not at all certain to
know his name and rarely indeed has he the shadow of a notion when and
in what particular corner of the States he began the game of existence.
So loose are ties down on the Zone that a man's room-mate might go off
into the jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for him
for a week. Especially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage of
"Zoners," with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating wherever
the job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of our past in our
own heads only. No wanderer of experience would dream of asking his
fellow where he came from. The answer would be too apt to be, "from the
last place." So difficult did this matter become that I gave up rushing
for the bus to Pedro Miguel each evening and the even more distressing
necessity of catching that premature 6:30 train each morning in Empire
and, packing a sheet and pillow and tooth-brush, moved down to Paraiso
that I might spend the first half of the night in quest of these
elusive bits of bachelor informa