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Every here and there we caught labor's odds and ends, diminutive "water-boys," likewise of varying nationality, a negro switch-boy dozing under the bit of shelter he had rigged up of jungle ferns, frightening many a black laborer speechless as we pounced upon him emerging from his "soldiering" in the jungle; occasionally even a native bushman on his way to market from his palm-thatched home generations old back in the bush, who has scarcely noticed yet that the canal is being dug, fell into our hands and was inexorably set down in spite of all protest unless he could prove beyond question that he had already been "taken" or lived beyond the Zone line.
One evening, just after I had closed the commissary, one of the water-boys came to tell me that I was wanted in the contractors' office, a little shack at the far side of the end-of-track cantonments. Hadley, the senior member of the firm, was alone when I showed myself at the door. "Come in, Bertrand," he invited, gruffly genial; "come in and wait a minute until I go over this estimate again.
For example, certain men developed into capable wood-choppers, while others were useless in that capacity. Each successive draft, therefore, had its choppers, its strippers, its haulers, its "handy men," and its water-boys.
They had saved almost fifty dollars, which had been earned running errands and working as water-boys whenever an "extra" gang had been sent from the division point to assist their father's crew in putting in a new culvert, building a new switch or doing other heavy work requiring more man-power then the reservation crew could supply.
As the stage, getting down the high bank, lurched carefully along the scraper ways of the yellow bed, shovellers, drivers, and water-boys looked curiously at the unusual sight, and patient mules nosed meekly the alert, nervous horses that dragged the stage along the uneven way. At the lower end of the cut a more formidable barrier interposed.
The gulls and kittiwakes rose and fell, uttering their peevish wails; a large shoal of fish fretting the radiant surface of the sea was passed and about a dozen porpoises went right across the cutter's bow, rising and diving down one after the other like so many black water-boys, playing at "Follow my leader;" but the eyes of all on board the Kestrel were fixed upon the dingy looking chasse maree, which apparently still kept on trying hard to escape by its speed.
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