Before eight o'clock next morning they were waiting in a large, plainly furnished room of a barn-like office building perched on the hill-side of Culebra. The walls were covered with maps and blue prints. At a desk heaped with papers sat the soldierly, white-haired ruler of forty thousand men, the supreme director of a four-hundred-million-dollar undertaking. His cheek was ruddy, his smile boyish, and he appeared to be at peace with all the world. He had come to listen to complaints, no matter how trivial, to pass judgment, to give advice, like a modern Caliph of Bagdad. It was a cog in the machinery of his wonderful organization. Dissatisfaction had been checked as soon as the colonel set apart the one forenoon of the week in which his men were not at work in order that they might "talk it over with him." As Jack Devlin entered the office he was humming under his breath the refrain of a popular song composed by an Isthmian bard: "Don't hesitate to state your case, The boss will hear you through, It's true he's sometimes busy And has other things to do; But come on Sunday morning And line up with the rest, You'll maybe feel some better With that grievance off your chest." The colonel was listening gravely to a difference of opinion between a black Jamaican laborer and his buxom wife, touching the ownership of seventeen dollars which she had earned by washing and ironing. The wise judge ruled that the money belonged to her and ordered the husband to return it. He muttered: "I'se a British subjeck, sah, an' mah property rights is protected by de British laws, sah." "All right," and the colonel's blue eyes snapped. "If you like, I'll deport you. You can get all the English law you want in Jamaica." A perplexed young man informed the colonel that he was the secretary of the Halcyon Social and Literary Club of Gorgona, which desired to give a dance in the ballroom of the Tivoli Hotel. The request had been denied because of a clash of dates with another organization. Would the colonel help straighten it out? Certainly he would, and he sent the young man away satisfied, after investigating the difficulty with as scrupulous attention as if the fate of the Gatun dam had been involved. A brawny blacksmith's helper had been discharged by his foreman. He thought himself unfairly treated. The colonel pressed a button, and inside three minutes the man's record, neatly documented, was on the desk. "You deserved what you got," crisply declared the colonel. "You were drunk and insolent, and I am surprised that the foreman did not tap you over the head with a crow-bar." Jack Devlin restlessly awaited his turn, while Alfaro looked on with comical wonderment that so great a man should busy himself with matters so trifling. At length the colonel swung his chair around and affably observed: "Hello, Devlin. Have you dug Twenty-six out of the slide? And when will she make another high record?"