Once I fancied the bulk of my troubles was over.  Tom disappeared, leaving not a trace behind—­except his working-clothes tumbled on and about his cot.  Then it turned out that he was not dead, but in Ancon hospital taking the Keeley cure; and one summer evening he blew in again, his “cure” effected—­with a bottle in his coat pocket and two inside his vest.  So the next day there was Tom celebrating his recovery all over House 47 and when next morning he did finally go back to his shovel there were scattered about the room six empty quart bottles each labeled “whiskey.”  Luckily Tom ran a shovel instead of a passenger train and could claw away at his hillside as savagely as he chose without any danger whatever, beyond that of killing himself or an odd “nigger” or two.

We had other treasures on exhibition in 47.  There was “Shorty,” for instance.  “Shorty” was a jolly, ugly open-handed, four-eyed little snipe of a roughneck machinist who had lost “in the line of duty” two fingers highly useful in his trade.  In consequence he was now, after the generous fashion of the I.C.C., on full pay for a year without work, providing he did not leave the Zone.  And while “Shorty,” like the great majority of us, was a very tolerable member of society under the ordinary circumstances of having to earn his “three squares a day,” paid leisure hung most ponderously upon him.

The amusements in Empire are few—­and not especially amusing.  There is really only one unfailing one.  That is slid in glass receptacles across a yellow varnished counter down on Railroad Avenue opposite Empire Machine Shops.  So it happened that “Shorty” was gradually winning the title of a thirty-third degree “booze-fighter,” and passengers on any afternoon train who took the trouble to glance in at a wide-open door just Atlanticward of the station might have beheld him with his back to the track and one foot slightly raised and resting lightly and with the nonchalance of long practice on a gas-pipe that had missed its legitimate mission.  In fact “Shorty” had come to that point where he would rather be caught in church than found dead without a bottle on him, and arriving home overflowing with joy about midnight slept away most of the day in 47 that he might spend as much of the night as the early closing laws of the Zone permitted at the amusement headquarters of Empire.

With these few hints of the life that raged beneath the roof of 47 it may perhaps be comprehensible, without going into detail, why I came to contemplate a change of quarters.  I detest a kicker.  I have small use for any but the man who will take his allotted share with the rest of the world without either whining or snarling.  Yet when an official government census enumerator falls asleep on the edge of a tenement washtub with a question dead on his lips, or solemnly sets down a crow-black Jamaican as “white,” it is Uncle Sam who is suffering and time for correction.