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I heard particularly those of two of the Marines, "Mac" and Renson, merry, good-natured, earnest-by-spurts, even modest fellows quite different from what I had hitherto pictured as an enlisted man. "Mac" was a half and half of Scotch and Italian.
I, too, had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescript cabins on the upper rim of Paraiso that seem on the very verge of pitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the jar of the next explosion, when one sunny mid-afternoon I caught sight of Renson dejectedly trudging down across what might be called the "Maiden" of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge-hall.
"What's the sense o' me tryin' to chew the fat in French?" asked Renson, with tears in his voice. "I ain't in no condition to work at this census business any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed before three in the morning this week" in his air was open suggestion that it was some one else's fault "Some day I'll be gettin' in bad, too.
I'm out o' luck any way, an' " The fact is Renson was aching to be "fired." More than thirty days had he been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he returned to the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out of cigarettes.
So midnight was no great space off when we turned out again into the howling night and, having helped Renson to reach a sleeping-place, scattered to the bachelor quarters that had been found for us and lay down for the few hours that remained before the 5:51 should carry us back to Empire. At last I had crossed all the Isthmus and heard the wash of the Caribbean at my feet.
Yet such a cheery, likable chap was Renson, so large-hearted and unassuming that was just why you felt an itching to seize him by the collar of his olive-drab shirt and shake him till his teeth rattled for tossing himself so wantonly to the infernal bow-wows. Renson's "bush" troubles were legion.
Not only were there the seducing brown "Spigoty" women out in the wilderness to help him on his descending trail, but when and wherever fire-water of whatever nationality or degree of voltage showed its neck and it is to be found even in "the bush" there was Renson sure to give battle and fall. "It's no use bein' a man unless you're a hell of a man," was Renson's "influenced" philosophy.
Moreover Paraiso will some day come again into her own, when the "relocation" opens and brings her back on the main line, while proud Culebra and haughty Empire, stranded on a railless shore of the canal, will wither and waste away and even their broad macadamed roads will sink beneath a second-growth jungle. Renson had come to lend assistance.
Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds of sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-mell around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumble food yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days when each man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour to cook himself an unsanitary lunch.
In one of the airy barracks I found Renson, cards in hand, clear-skinned and "fit" now, thanks to the regular life of this adult nursery, though his lost youth was gone for good. And "Mac"? Yes, I saw "Mac" too or at least the back of his head and shoulders through the screen of the guard-house where Renson pointed him out to me as he was being locked up again after a day of shoveling sand.
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