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Updated: May 17, 2025
So loose are ties down on the Zone that a man's room-mate might go off into the jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for him for a week. Especially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage of "Zoners," with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating wherever the job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of our past in our own heads only.
The three Omnis are combined in an inconspicuous, white-haired American popularly known on the Zone as "the Colonel" so popularly in fact that an attempt to replace him would probably "start something" among all classes and races of "Zoners." That he is omnipotent on the Zone not many will deny; a few have questioned and landed in the States a week later much less joyous but far wiser.
Frequent as are these melancholy errors, scores of "Zoners" cling faithfully to their arithmetical superstitions. Many a man spends his recreation hours working out the winning numbers by some secret recipe of his own.
It is doubtful, to be sure, whether one-fourth of the "Zoners" of any class ever lived as well before or since. The shovelman's wife who gives five-o'clock teas and keeps two servants will find life different when the canal is opened and she moves back to the smoky little factory cottage and learns again to do her own washing.
The few laborers aboard would take an occasional wheel, pick oakum, and yarn their unadventurous yarns. As we drew near, a boat was lowered to set me aboard the steamer, to the rail-crowding surprise of her passengers, who fancied they had hours since seen the last of Zone and "Zoners."
Few are the "Zoners" now who do not consider the Spaniard the best workman ever imported in all the sixty-five years from the railroad surveying to the completion of the canal. The stocky, muscle-bound little fellows come no longer to America as conquistadores, but to shovel dirt. And yet more cheery, willing workers, more law-abiding subjects are scarcely to be found.
Thus casually was I robbed of the opportunity to display my manly form in uniform to tourists of trains and the Tivoli tourists, I say, because the "Zoners" would never have noticed it. But we must all accept the decrees of fate. That was the full extent of the Inspector's remarks; no mention whatever of the sundry little points the recruit is anxious to be enlightened upon.
The criminal was about three feet long, jet black, his worldly possessions comprising two more or less garments, one reaching as far down as his knees and the other as far up as the base of his neck. He had long been a familiar sight to "Zoners" among the swarm of bootblacks that infest the corner near the P. R. R. station. He claimed to be eleven, and looked it.
About the room was the usual clutter of all manner of things in the usual unarranged, "unwomaned" Zone way, which the negro janitor feels it neither his duty nor privilege to bring to order; while on and about my cot and bureau were helter-skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent employee, who had left for his six-weeks' vacation without hanging up his shirt after the fashion of "Zoners."
Across the tree-tops of the flat jungle, also seeming close at hand though the railroad takes seven miles and thirty-five cents if you are no employee to reach it, was Colon, the tops of whose low buildings were plainly visible above the vegetation. Not many "Zoners," I reflected, catch their first view of Colon from the veranda of the Administration Building at Gatun.
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