In time I reached the Commissary—­the government department store —­and enrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel, from steward to scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography; the police station on its knoll fell like the rest.  I went to jail—­and set down a large score of black men and a pair of European whites, back from a day’s sweaty labor of road building, who lived now in unaccustomed cleanliness in the heart of the lower story of a fresh wooden building with light iron bars, easy to break out of were it not that policemen, white and black, sleep on all sides of them.  Crowded old Empire not only faces her streets but even her back yards are filled with shacks and inhabited boxes to be hunted out.  On the hem of her tattered outskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandoned junk,—­locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters “U.  S.” painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day investigator material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste); all now soon to be removed by a Chicago wrecking company.

Then all the town must be done again—­“back calls.”  By this time so wide and varied was my acquaintance in Empire that wenches withdrew a dripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with a sympathetic giggle, and piccaninnies ran out to meet me as I returned in quest of one missing inmate in a house of fifty.  For the few laborers still uncaught I took to coming after dark.  But West Indians rarely own lamps, not even the brass tax-numbers above the doors were visible, and as for a negro in the dark—­

Absurd rumors had begun early to circulate among the darker brethren.  In all negrodom the conviction became general that this individual detailed catechising and house-branding was really a government scheme to get lists of persons due for deportation, either for lack of work as the canal neared completion or for looseness of marital relations.  Hardly a tenement did I enter but laughing voices bandied back and forth and there echoed and reechoed through the building such remarks as: 

“Well, dey gon’ sen’ us home, Penelope,” or “Yo an’ Percival better hurry up an’ git married, Ambrosia.”

Several dusky females regularly ran away whenever I approached; one at least I came a-seeking in vain nine times, and found her the tenth behind a garbage barrel.  Many fancied the secret marks on the “enumerated” tag—­date, and initials of the enumerator—­ were intimately concerned with their fate.  So strong is the fear of the law imbued by the Zone Police that they dared not tear down the dreaded placard, but would sometimes sit staring at it for hours striving to penetrate its secret or exorcise away its power of evil, and now and then some bolder spirit ventured out—­at midnight—­with a pencil and put tails and extra flourishes on the penciled letters in the hope of disguising them against the fatal day.