I caught a dirt-train to Balboa. There the very town at which I
had landed on the Zone five months before was being razed to give
place to the permanent, reenforced-concrete city that is to be the
canal headquarters. Balboa police station was only a pile of
lumber, with a band of negroes drilling away the very rock on
which it had stood. I took a last view of the Pacific and her
islands to far Taboga, where Uncle Sam sends his recuperating
children to enjoy the sea baths, hill climbs, and unrivaled pine-
apples. It was never my good fortune to get to Taboga. With thirty
days' sick leave a year and countless ailments of which I might
have been cured free of charge and with the best of care, I could
not catch a thing. I had not even the luck of my friend--who, by
dint of cross-country runs in the jungle at noonday and similar
industrious efforts, worked up at last a temperature of 99 degrees
and got his week at Taboga. I stuck immovable at 98.6 degrees.
Soon after five I had bidden Ancon farewell and set off on the
last ride across the Isthmus. There was a memory tucked away in
every corner. Corozal hotel was still rattling with dishes,
Paraiso peeped out from its lap of hills, Culebra with its
penitentiary where burglarizing negroes go, sunk away into the
past. Railroad Avenue in Empire was still lined with my
"enumerated" tags; through an open door I caught a glimpse of a
familiar short figure, one foot resting lightly and familiarly on
a misapplied gas-pipe, the elbow crooked as if something were held
between the fingers.
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