“That’ll do!  Because of your gestures I believe you are trying to bunco this court.  You are lying—­tell him that,” this to the negro interpreter; and he therewith sentenced the witness to jail.

As if any Panamanian could talk earnestly of anything without waving his arms about him.

The telephone-bell rang one afternoon.  It was always doing that, twenty-four hours a day; but this time it sounded especially sharp and insistent.  In the adjoining room, over the “blotter,” snapped the brusk stereotyped nasal reply: 

“Ancon!  Bingham talking!”

The instrument buzzed a moment and the deskman looked up to say: 

“‘Andy’ and a nigger just fell over into Pedro Miguel locks.  They’re sending in his body.  The nigger lit on his head and hurt his leg.”

His body!  How uncanny it sounded!  “Andy,” that bunch of muscles who had made such short work of the circus wrestler in Gatun and whom I had seen not twenty-four hours before bubbling with life was now a “body.”  Things happen quickly on the Zone, and he whom the fates have picked to go generally shows no hesitation in his exit.  But at least a man who dies for the I. C. C. has the affairs he left behind him attended to in a thorough manner.  In ten minutes to a half-hour one of the Z. P. is on the ground taking note of every detail of the accident.  A special train or engine rushes the body to the morgue in Ancon hospital grounds.  A coroner’s jury is soon meeting under the chairmanship of a policeman, long reports of everything concerning the victim or the accident are soon flowing Administration-ward.  The police accident report is detailed and in triplicate.  There is sure to be in the “personal files” at Culebra a history of the deceased and the names of his nearest relative or friend both on the Isthmus and in the States; for every employee must make out his biography at the time of his engagement.  There are men whose regular duty it is to list and take care of his possessions down to the last lead pencil, and to forward them to the legal heirs.  A year’s pay goes to his family—­were as much required of every employer and his the burden of proving the accident the fault of the employee, how the safety appliances in factories would multiply.  There is a man attached to Ancon hospital whose unenviable duty it is to write a letter of condolence to the relatives in the States.

And so the “Kangaroos” or the “Red Men” or whatever his lodge was filed behind the I. C. C. casket to the church in Ancon, and “Andy” was laid away under another of the simple white iron crosses that thickly populate many a Zone hillside, and he was charged up to the big debit column of the costs of the canal.  On the cross is his new number; for officially a “Zoner” is always a number; that of the brass-check he wears as a watch-charm alive, that at the head of his grave when his canal-digging is over.