self, turned red; then everybody howled with
glee. Johnny dismounted, and a dozen eager hands adjusted the harness.
We shook hands all around, laughed some more, and resumed our very
sloppy journey.

This to me was one of the most terrible days I ever spent. We passed
dozens of dead mules, and vultures that sat in trees; and exhausted men
lying flat as though dead; and sick men shaken with fever; and one poor
wretch, whom we picked up and took with us, who had actually lain down
to die. He was half raving with fever, and as near as we could make out
had had companions. We twisted him aboard a mule, and took turns walking
alongside and holding him on. Beyond the fact that he was a very small
individual with light hair and an English accent, we could tell nothing
about him. He was suffering from cholera, although we did not know that
at the time. That night we spent at a wayside hut, where we left our
patient.

Early the next morning we began to ascend a little; and so came to a
rocky tableland with palms, and beyond it another ridge of hills. We
climbed that ridge and descended the other side. Another elevation lay
before us. This we surmounted, only to find a third. After we had put a
dozen such ranges behind us, we made the mistake of thinking the next
was sure to be the last. We got up our hopes a number of times in this
fashion, then fell dully into a despair of ever getting anywhere. The
day was fearfully hot. The Indian who had stolidly preceded us as guide
at last stopped, washed his feet carefully in a wayside mud hole and put
on his pantaloons.

"That looks to me like an encouraging symptom," I remarked.

Shortly after we entered the city of Panama.

CHAPTER VIII

PANAMA

We arrived early in the afternoon, and we were all eyes; for here was a
city taken directly from the pages of the Boy's Own Pirate. Without the
least effort of the imagination we could see Morgan or Kidd or some
other old swashbuckler, cutlass in teeth, pistols in hand, broad sashed,
fierce and ruthless rushing over the walls or through the streets, while
the cathedral bells clanged wildly and women screamed. Everything about
it was of the past; for somehow the modern signs of American invasion
seemed temporary and to be blown away. The two-story wooden houses with
corridor and veranda across the face of the second story, painted in
bright colours, leaned crazily out across the streets toward each other.
Narrow and mysterious a