When they had drawn on out of earshot life began to return
to the banks and nature again took possession of the scene.
Alligators abounded once on this lower Chagres, but they have
grown scarce now, or shy, and though we sat with H----'s automatic
rifle across our knees in turns we saw no more than a carcass or a
skeleton on the bank at the foot of the sheer wall of impenetrable
verdure.
Till at length the sea opened on our sight through the alley-way
of jungle, and a broad inviting cocoanut grove nodded and beckoned
on our left. Instead we paddled out across the sandbar to play
with the surf of the Atlantic, but found it safer to return and
glide across the little bay to the drowsy straw and tin village.
Here--for the mouth of the Chagres like its source lies in a
foreign land--a solitary Panamanian policeman in the familiar
Arctic uniform enticed us toward the little thatched office, and
house, and swinging hammock of the alcalde to register our names,
and our business had we had any. So deep-rooted was the serenity
of the place that even when "Dusty," in all Zone innocence,
addressed the white-haired little mulatto as "hombre" he lost
neither his dignity nor his temper.
The policeman and a brown boy of merry breed went with us up the
grassy rise to the old fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were
still the massive, rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of
prisoners of the old brutal days; blind owls stared upon us; once
the boy brought down with his honda, or slung-shot, one of the
bats that circled uncannily above our heads.
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