Dense black night had fallen.  Here and there lanterns were hung, under one of which we dragged each captive.  The last passenger back to Empire roared away into the jungle night; still we scribbled on, “backed” a yellow card and dived again into the muscular whirlpool to emerge dragging forth by the collar a Greek, a Pole, or a West Indian.  It was like business competition, in which I had an unfair advantage, being able to understand any jargon in evidence.  When at last the pay-windows came down with a bang and an American curse, and the serpentining tail squirmed for a time in distress and died away, as a snake’s tail dies after sundown, I turned in more than a hundred cards.  To-morrow the tail would revive to form the nucleus of a new serpent, and we should return by the afternoon train to the lock city, and so on for several days to come.

It was after nine of a black pay-day night.  We were hungry.  “The Rowdy,” familiar with the lay of the land, volunteered to lead the foraging expedition.  We stumbled down the hill and away along the railroad.  A faint rumbling that grew to a confused roar fell on our ears.  We climbed a bank into a wild conglomeration of wood and tin architecture, nationalities, colors, and noises, and across a dark, bottomless gully from the high street we had reached lights flashed amid a very ocean of uproar.  “The Rowdy,” as if to make the campaign as real as possible, led us racing down into the black abyss, whence we charged up the further slope and came sweating and breathless into the rampant rough and tumble of pay-day night in New Gatun, the time and place that is the vortex of trouble on the Isthmus.  Merely a short street of one of the half-dozen Zone towns in which liquor licenses are granted, lined with a few saloons and pool-rooms; but such a singing, howling, swarming multitude as is rivaled almost nowhere else, except it be on Broadway at the passing of the old year.  But this mob, moreover, was fully seventy percent black, and rather largely French—­and when black and French and strong drink mix, trouble sprouts like jungle seeds.  Now and then Policeman G——­drifted by through the uproar, holding his “sap” loosely as for ready use and often half consciously hitching the heavy No. 38 “Colt” under his khaki jacket a bit nearer the grasp of his right hand.  I little knew how familiar every corner of this scene would one day be to me.

A Chinese grocer sold us bread and cheese.  Down on the further corner of the hubbub we entered a Spanish saloon and spread ourselves over the “white” bar, adding beer to our humble collation.  Beyond the lattice-work that is the “color line” in Zone dispensaries, West Indians were dancing wild, crowded “hoe-downs” and “shuffles” amid much howling and more liquidation; on our side a few Spanish laborers quietly sipped their liquor.  The Marines of course were “busted.”  The rest of us scraped up a few odd “Spigoty” dimes.  The Spanish bar-tender—­who is