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.
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