With night things grew more compact. From twilight
till after midnight I prowled in and out through New Gatun, spilled
far and wide over its several hills, watching the antics of
negroes, pausing to listen to their guitars and their boisterous
merriment, with an eye and ear ever open for the unlawful. When I
drifted into a saloon to see who might be spending the evening
out, the bar-tender proved he had the advantage of me in
acquaintance by crying: "Hello, Franck! What ye having?" and
showing great solicitude that I get it. After which I took up the
starlit tramp again, to run perhaps into some such perilous scene
as on that third evening. A riot of contending voices rose from a
building back in the center of a block, with now and then the
sickening thump of a falling body. I approached noiselessly,
likewise weaponless, peeped in and found--four negro bakers
stripped to the waist industriously kneading to-morrow's bread and
discussing in profoundest earnest the object of the Lord in
creating mosquitoes. Beyond the native town, as an escape from all
this, there was the back country road that wound for a mile
through the fresh night and the droning jungle, yet instead of
leading off into the wilderness of the interior swung around to
American Gatun on its close-cropped hills.
I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined among those ordered
to report for target test.
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