C. C.
launch attached to dredge No.----.
My Canal Zone days were drawing rapidly to a close. I could have
remained longer without regret, but the world is wide and life is
short. Soon came the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back
across the Isthmus to clear up the last threads of my existence as
a "Zoner." Chiefly for old times' sake I dropped off at Empire.
But it was not the same Empire of the census. Almost all the old
crowd was gone; one by one they had "kissed the Zone good-by."
"The boss" of those days had never returned, "smiling Johnny" had
been transferred, even Ben had "done quit an' gone back to
Bahbaydos." The Zone is like a small section of life; as in other
places where generations are short one catches there a hint of
what old age will be. It was like wandering over the old campus
when those who were freshmen in our day had hawked their gowns and
mortarboards and gone their way; I felt like a man in his dotage
with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation about him.
I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far down below was the
same struggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the
"cut" with its jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still
stretching away endless in either direction. Here as in the world
at large generations of us may come and pass away, but the tearing
of the shovels at the rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains
for the Pacific goes unbrokenly on, as the world and its work will
continue without a pause when we are gone indeed.
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