But it is one thing for a Canal Zone employee to resolve to move, and quite another to carry out that resolution.  Nero was a meek, unassertive, submissive, tractable little chap, keenly sensible to the sufferings of his fellows, compared with a Zone quartermaster.  So the first time I ventured to push open the screen door next to the post office I was grateful to escape unmaimed.  But at last, when I had done a whole month’s penance in 47, I resorted to strategy.  On March first I entered the dreaded precinct shielded behind “the boss” with his contagious smile, and the musical quartermaster of Empire was overthrown and defeated, and I marched forth clutching in one hand a new “assignment to quarters.”

That night I moved.  The new, or more properly the older, room was in House 35, a one-story building of the old French type, many of which the Americans revamped upon taking possession of the Isthmian junk-heap, across and a bit down the graveled street.  It was a single room, with no roommate to question, which I might decorate and otherwise embellish according to my own personal idiosyncrasies.  At the back, with a door between, dwelt the superintendent of the Zone telephone system, with a convenient instrument on his table.  In short, fortune seemed at last to be grinning broadly upon me.

But—­the sequel.  I hate to mention it.  I won’t.  It’s absurdly commonplace.  Commonplace?  Not a bit of it.  He was a champion, an artist in his specialty.  How can I have used that word in connection with his incomparable performance?  Or attempt to give a hint of life on the Canal Zone without mentioning the most conspicuous factor in it?

He lived in the next room south, a half-inch wooden partition reaching half-way to the ceiling between his pillow and mine.  By day he lay on his back in the right hand seat of a locomotive cab with his hand on the throttle and the soles of his shoes on the boiler plate—­he was just long enough to fit into that position without wrinkling.  During the early evening he lay on his back in a stout Mission rocking-chair on the front porch of House 35, Empire, C.Z.  And about 8 P. M. daily he retired within to lie on his back on a regulation I.C.C. metal cot—­they are stoutly built —­one pine half-inch from my own.  Obviously twenty-four hours a day of such onerous occupation had left some slight effects on his figure.  His shape was strikingly similar to that of a push-ball.  Had he fallen down at the top of Ancon or Balboa hill it would have been an even bet whether he would have rolled down sidewise or endwise—­if his general type of build and specifications will permit any such distinction.

When I first came upon him, reposing serenely in the porch rocking-chair on the cushion that upholstered his spinal column, I was pleased.  Clearly he was no “rough-neck”—­he couldn’t have been and kept his figure.  There was no question but that he was perfectly harmless; his stories ought to prove cheerful and laugh-provoking and kindly.  His very presence seemed to promise to raise several degrees the merriment in that corner of House 85.