Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers

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Harry Alverson Franck. Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers

Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers

Table of Contents

TO A HOST OF GOOD FELLOWS THE ZONE POLICE. Quito, December 31, 1912

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

Special Order No. ... Having been found Guilty of charges of. Neglect of Duty. preferred against him by his commanding officer. First-class Policeman No. 88. is hereby fined $2. Chief of Division

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

Отрывок из книги

Harry Alverson Franck

Published by Good Press, 2021

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In time I reached the Commissary—the government department store—and enrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel, from steward to scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography; the police station on its knoll fell like the rest. I went to jail—and set down a large score of black men and a pair of European whites, back from a day's sweaty labor of road building, who lived now in unaccustomed cleanliness in the heart of the lower story of a fresh wooden building with light iron bars, easy to break out of were it not that policemen, white and black, sleep on all sides of them. Crowded old Empire not only faces her streets but even her back yards are filled with shacks and inhabited boxes to be hunted out. On the hem of her tattered outskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandoned junk,—locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters "U. S." painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day investigator material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste); all now soon to be removed by a Chicago wrecking company.

Then all the town must be done again—"back calls." By this time so wide and varied was my acquaintance in Empire that wenches withdrew a dripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with a sympathetic giggle, and piccaninnies ran out to meet me as I returned in quest of one missing inmate in a house of fifty. For the few laborers still uncaught I took to coming after dark. But West Indians rarely own lamps, not even the brass tax-numbers above the doors were visible, and as for a negro in the dark—

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