ore thick and sultry day by day, the heat
was sticky, the weather dripping, with the sun only an irregular
whitish blotch in the sky. Through the open windows the heavy, damp
night came miasmically floating in, the very cigarettes mildewed in my
pockets. Earth and air seemed heavy and toil-bowed by comparison with
other days. The jungle still hummed busily, yet, it seemed, a bit
mournfully as if preparing for production and unhilarious with the task
before it, like a woman first learning of her pregnancy. Life seemed to
hang more heavily even on humanity; "Zoners" looked less gay and
carefree than in the sunny dry season, though still far more so than in
the north. One could not shake off a premonition of impending disaster
in I know not what form--like that of Teufelsdroeck before he entered
the "Center of Indifference."

Dr. O---- of the Sanitary Department had gone up into the interior
along the Trinidad river to hunt mosquitoes. Why he went so far away
for them in this season was hard to understand. There he was, however,
and the order had come to bring him back to civilization. The execution
thereof fell, of course, to my friend B----, who to the world at large
is merely Policeman No. ----, to the force "Admiral of the Inland
Fleet," and in the general scheme of things is a luckier man than
Vanderchild to have for his task in life the patrolling of Gatun Lake.
B---- invited me to go along. There was nothing particular doing in the
criminal line around Gatun just then; moreover the doctor was known to
be well armed and there was no telling just how much resistance he
might offer a single policeman. I accepted.

I was at the appointed rendezvous promptly at seven, a pocket filled
with commissary cigars. Strict truthfulness demands the admission that
it was really eight, however, when B---- came wandering down the muddy
steps behind the railroad station, followed by a black prisoner with a
ten-gallon can of gasoline on his head. When that had been poured into
the tank, we were off across the ever-rising waters of Gatun Lake. For
Gatun police launch is one of those peculiar motor-boats that starts
the same day you had planned to.

It was such a day as could not have been bettered had it been made to
order, with a week to think out the details,--a dry-season day even to
the Atlantic breeze that goes with it, a sort of Indian summer of the
rainy season; though the heavy battalions of gray clouds that hung all
around t