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 and dashed down the
abbreviation for "mixed" after the question, "Married or Single?" Which
may have been near enough the truth of the case, but suggested it was
time to quit. So we marked Paraiso "finished except for recalls" and
returned to Empire.

One by one our fellow-enumerators had dropped by the wayside, some by
mutual agreement, some without any agreement whatever. Renson was now
relieved from census duty, to his great joy, there remained but four of
us,--"the boss" and "Mac" in the office, "Scotty" and I outside. A deep
conference ensued and, as if I had not had good luck enough already, it
was decided that we two should go through the "cut" itself. It was like
offering us a salary to view all the Great Work in detail, for
virtually all the excavation of any importance on the Zone lay within
the confines of our district.

So one day "Scotty" and I descended at the girderless railroad bridge
and, taking each one side of the canal, set out to canvass its every
nook and cranny. The canal as it then stood was about the width of two
city blocks, an immense chasm piled and tumbled with broken rock and
earth, in the center a ditch already filled with grimy water, on either
side several levels of rough rock ledges with sheer rugged stone faces;
for