It was the noon-hour.  My two room-mates, therefore, were on hand for inspection, sprawlingly engrossed in a—­quite innocent and legal—­card game on a table littered with tobacco, pipes, matches, dog-eared wads of every species of literature from real estate pamphlets to locomotive journals, and a further mass of indiscriminate matter that none but a professional inventory man would attempt to classify.  About the room was the usual clutter of all manner of things in the usual unarranged, “unwomaned” Zone way, which the negro janitor feels it neither his duty nor privilege to bring to order; while on and about my cot and bureau were helter-skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent employee, who had left for his six-weeks’ vacation without hanging up his shirt—­after the fashion of “Zoners.”  So when I had wiped away the dust that had been gathering thereon since the days of de Lesseps and chucked my odds and ends into a bureau drawer, I was settled,—­a full-fledged Zone employee in the quarters to which every man on the “gold roll” is entitled free of charge.

Just here it may be well to explain that the I. C. C. has very dexterously dodged the necessity of lining the Zone with the offensive signs “Black” and “White.”  ’T would not be exactly the distinction desired anyway.  Hence the line has been drawn between “Gold” and “Silver” employees.  The first division, paid in gold coin, is made up, with a few exceptions, of white American citizens.  To the second belong any of the darker shade, and all common laborers of whatever color, these receiving their wages in Panamanian silver.  ’T is a deep and sharp-drawn line.  The story runs that Liza Lawsome, not long arrived from Jamaica, entering the office of a Zone dentist, paused suddenly before the announcement: 

    Crownwork.  Gold and Silver Fillings. 
    Extractions wholly without Pain.

There was deep disappointment in face and voice as she sat down with a flounce of her starched and snow-white skirt, gasping: 

“Oh, Doctah, does I have to have silver fillings?”

My room-mates, “Mitch” and “Tom,” sat respectively at the throttle of a locomotive that jerked dirt-trains out of the “cut” and straddled a steam-shovel that ate its way into Culebra range.  Whence, of course, they were covered with the grease and grime incident to those occupations.  Which did not make them any the less companionable—­though it did promise a distinct increase in my laundry bill.  When they had descended again to the labor-train and been snatched away to their appointed tasks, I sat a short hour in one of the black “Mission” rocking-chairs on the screened veranda puzzling over a serious problem.  The quarters of the “gold” employee is as completely furnished as any reasonable man could demand, his iron cot with springs and mattress unimpeachable—­but just there the maternal generosity of the government ceases.  He must furnish his own sheets and pillow—­must