Around the
entire room, close under the sheet-iron roof, ran a wooden
platform or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked high with the
tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper suitcases
containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more workmen
around the rough table below.
Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may enter a Zone labor-
camp during working hours. Practically the West Indian janitors to
whom is left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not
fallible. In the course of the second day I unearthed a second
Turk who, having chanced the morning before to climb to the
baggage shelf for his razor and soap preparatory to welcoming a
fellow countryman to the Isthmus, had been mildly startled to step
on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given length and proportions
lying prone behind the stacked-up impedimenta. The latter
explained both his presence in a white labor-camp and his
unconventional posture by asserting that he was the "mosquito
man," and shortly thereafter went away from there without leaving
either card or address.
By all my library training in detective work the next move
obviously was to find what color of cigarette ashes the Turk
smoked. Instead I blundered upon the absurdly simple notion of
trying to locate the negro of given length and proportions.
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