“What’s the sense o’ me tryin’ to chew the fat in French?” asked Renson, with tears in his voice.  “I ain’t in no condition to work at this census business any longer anyway.  I ain’t got to bed before three in the morning this week”—­in his air was open suggestion that it was some one else’s fault—­“Some day I’ll be gettin’ in bad, too.  This mornin’ a fool nigger woman asked me if I didn’t want her black pickaninny I was enumeratin’, thinkin’ it was a good joke.  You know how these bush kids is runnin’ around all over the country before a white man’s brat could walk on its hind legs.  ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘if I was goin’ alligator huntin’ an’ needed bait!’ I come near catchin’ the brat up by the feet an’ beatin’ its can off.  I’m out o’ luck any way, an’—­”

The fact is Renson was aching to be “fired.”  More than thirty days had he been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he returned to the nursery discipline of camp.  Moreover he was out of cigarettes.  I slipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes grew—­for Renson was as tractable as a child, rightly treated—­and set him to taking Jamaican tenements in the center of town, while I struck off into the jungled Martinique hills myself.

There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a close.  My first pay-day had already come and gone and I had strolled up the gravel walk one noon-day to the Disembursing Office with my yellow pay certificate duly initialed by the examiner of accounts, and was handed my first four twenty-dollar gold pieces—­for hotel and commissary books sadly reduce a good paycheck.  Already one evening I had entered the census office to find “the boss” just peeling off his sweat-dripping undershirt and dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a day mule-back on the thither side of the canal; an utterly fruitless day, for not only had he failed during eight hours of plunging through the wilderness to find a single hut not already decorated with the “enumerated” tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands on when the noon-hour overhauled him far from the ministrations of “Ben” and the breeze-swept veranda of Empire hotel.

It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson’s linguistic troubles that “the boss” came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy mule.  In his eagerness to “clean up” the territory we fell to corraling negroes everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying their supplies at the commissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside trees, anywhere and everywhere, until at last in his excitement “the boss” let his medium soft pencil slip by the column for color and dashed down the abbreviation for “mixed” after the question, “Married or Single?” Which may have been near enough the truth of the case, but suggested it was time to quit.  So we marked Paraiso “finished except for recalls” and returned to Empire.