Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workersFranck, Harry Alverson
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Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers
Franck, Harry Alverson
Panama Canal (Panama); Police -- Panama -- Canal Zone
I piled him into a cab and we rolled away to East Balboa, to climb upon
an empty dirt-train and drop off as it raced through Miraflores, the
sturdy legs of the Peruvian saving him where his practice would not
have. Up in the bush between Pedro Miguel and Paraiso we found a hut
where the Greek had stopped for water and gone on up a gully. We set
out to follow, mounting partly on hands and knees, partly dragging
ourselves by grass and bushes up what had been and would soon be again
a torrential mountain stream. For hours we tore through the jungle, up
hills steeper than the path of righteousness, following now a few faint
foot-prints or trampled bushes, now a hint from some native bush
dweller. The rain outside vied with the sweat within as to which would
first soak us through. To make things merrier I had not only to wear an
arsenal but a coat atop to conceal it from the general public.
To mention the holes I crawled into and the clues I followed during the
next few days would be more tiresome than a Puritan prayer. By day I
was dashing back and forth through all Ancon district, by night
prowling about the grimier sections of Panama city. Almost daily I got
near enough to sniff the prey. Now it was a Greek confectioner on
Avenida Central who admitted that the fugitive had called on him during
the night, now a Panamanian pesquisa whose stool-pigeon had seen him
out in the bush, then the information that he had stopped to shave and
otherwise alter his appearance in some shack half-way across the Zone
and afterward struck off for Panama by an unused route. The clues were
pendulum-like. They took me a half-dozen times at least out the winding
highway to Corozal, on to Miraflores and even further. The rainy season
and the reign of umbrellas had come. It had been formally opened on
that memorable Sunday afternoon. There was still sunshine at times, but
always a wet season heaviness to the atmosphere; and the rains were
already giving the rolling jungle hills a tinge of new green. There was
nothing to be gained by hurrying. The fugitive was as likely to crawl
forth from one place as another along the rambling road. Here I paused
to kill a lizard or to watch the clumsy march of one of the huge purple
and many-colored land-crabs, there to gaze away across a jungled valley
soft and fuzzy in the humid air like some Corot painting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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