The Pirate of Panama Part 38

"I'm grateful for their certificate of valor," I answered lightly.

Before I knew what she was at my sweetheart had stooped to kiss the bruises above my knuckles. I s.n.a.t.c.hed my hand away.

"Don't do that," I said gruffly. "It isn't exactly--you know--right."

"Why not?" She looked at me with head flung back in characteristic fashion. "Why not? They suffered for us, the poor, bruised fingers. Why shouldn't I honor them with my poor best?"

"Oh, well!" I shrugged, embarra.s.sed by her shining ardor, even though in my heart it pleased me.

She came close to me.

"I love you better every day, Jack. You're splendid. Life is going to be a great, big thing for me with you."

"Even though we don't find the treasure?" I asked, thrilling with the joy of her confession.

"We've found the treasure," she whispered. "I don't give that"--she snapped her fingers with a gesture of scorn--"for all the gold that was ever buried compared to you, laddie. I just spend my time thanking G.o.d for you with all my heart."

"But you mustn't idealize me. I'm full of faults."

"Don't I know it? Don't I love your faults, too, you goose? Who wants a perfect man?"

"I know, I know."

The wheel was getting very little attention, for my darling was in my arms and I was kissing softly her tumbled hair and the shadows under her glorious eyes.

"Love is like that. It doesn't want perfection. I care more for you because you're always wanting your own way. The tiny, powdered freckles on the side of your nose are beauty marks to me."

"You _are_ a goose," she laughed. "But it's true. I've seen lots of handsomer men than you--Boris, for example; but I've never seen one so good looking."

"And that's just nonsense," I told her blithely.

"Of course it's nonsense. But there is no sense so true as nonsense."

I dare say we babbled foolishly the inarticulate rhapsody all lovers find so expressive.

CHAPTER XX

THE BIG DITCH

Darkness had fallen before we dropped anchor in the harbor of Panama. It was such a night as only the tropics can produce, the stars burning close and brilliant, the full moon rising out of a silent sea. In front of us the lights of the city came twinkling out. Behind them lay the mystery of conquest.

No spot in all the western hemisphere held so much of romance as this.

Drake and Pizarro had tarried here in their bl.u.s.tering careers, Morgan had captured and burned the city.

Many times in the past centuries the Isthmus had been won and lost, but never had such a victory been gained as that our countrymen had secured in the past half dozen years.

They had overcome yellow fever and proved that the tropics might be made a safe place for the Anglo-Saxon to live. They had driven a sword through the backbone of the continent and had built a ca.n.a.l through which great liners could climb up and down stairs from one ocean to another.

The dream of the centuries had become a reality through the skill and resolution with which the sons of Uncle Sam had tackled the big ditch.

It may be guessed how anxious all of us were to get ash.o.r.e. There was little sleep aboard the _Argos_ that night. It was long past midnight before any of us left the deck.

The truth is that the yacht had become a prison to us just as it had to Bothwell. The thought of a few days on land, where we need not watch every moment to keep our throats from being slit, was an enormous relief.

But Blythe was taking no chances with the vessel. It had been decided among us that either he, Yeager, or I should remain in charge of the _Argos_ every minute of our stay.

I had volunteered for the first day and Yeager was to relieve me on the second.

All three of us were firmly resolved, though we had not yet broached the subject to Evelyn, that the ladies should remain in the ca.n.a.l zone while we continued down the coast to lift the treasure.

Before Bothwell was taken ash.o.r.e he had the effrontery to ask for a talk with his cousin. Blythe did not even submit his request to her. Fleming and he were removed from the vessel while the ladies were eating breakfast with Yeager, so that they did not even know until afterward that the men had been turned over to the authorities.

None of the reconstructed mutineers asked for sh.o.r.e leave. Each of them knew that if he left the ship he would be liable to arrest for a capital offense and preferred to take his chance of any punishment the captain might inflict.

The day was an endless one, but it wore away at last. The cattleman was to relieve me at breakfast time. I was up with the summer sun and had bathed, shaved, and eaten long before the city showed any sign of activity around the harbor.

"You'll like Panama," Yeager a.s.sured me after he had clambered aboard.

"It's a city of madmen, plumb daffy about the big ditch. The men can't talk anything but cuts, dams, cubic feet, steam plows, and earth slides.

But, by Moses, when I see what they've done it makes me glad I'm an American. Everything is the biggest in the world--the dam, the locks, the cuts, the lake, the machinery, the whole blessed works. They've set a new mark for the rest of the earth."

"What is Sam doing about getting a crew in place of our precious mutineers?" I asked.

"He's picked up several fellows already. A Yankee named Stubbs is chief engineer. Sam is shipping Jamaica n.i.g.g.e.rs for firemen."

No schoolboy out for a holiday could have been half so keen to be free as I was. At the wharf I picked up a _coche_ and was driven to the Tivoli, the hotel in the American quarter where our party was staying.

The mud and the mosquitoes of former years were gone, though the natives were as indolent as ever. It is a town of color, due largely to the a.s.sorted population. I was told by a young engineer from Gatun that forty languages are spoken on the Isthmus at present, a condition due to the number of Caribbean islanders employed by our government.

I found that the program for the day included a trip to Colon on the Isthmus railroad. Miss Berry preferred to rest quietly at the hotel, so her niece, Sam, and I set out to see the great ca.n.a.l.

As I look back on it now Panama means to me a series of panoramic pictures. To give more than a cursory description of our impressions is impossible. The fact is that one obliterated another so swiftly as to leave a sense only of confusion.

Take Culebra Cut, for instance, where the monsters of man's invention are biting into the mountain sides, ripping down with giant jaws loose dirt, and hauling it away on a maze of tracks.

Great hoses, under tremendous pressure, are tearing at hills and washing them down. All the time there is a deafening noise, the crash of the continent's spine being rent by dynamite, the roar of trains, the shrieks of dirt shovels blowing off steam, the stab and hammer of drills.

Man is making war on nature with amazing energy on a t.i.tanic scale. The disorder seemed hopeless, but one realized that these little figures moving about it in the man-made canon were achieving the seemingly impossible none the less.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Evelyn asked for the tenth time, as we looked down on a machine which had just seized a section of track and hoisted it up, rails and ties complete, to swing it over to another place.

I quoted to her Damon Runyon's verses:

We are ants upon a mountain, but we're leavin' of our dent, An' our teeth-marks bitin' scenery they will show the way we went; We're a liftin' half-creation, and we're changin' it around, Just to suit our playful purpose when we're diggin' in the ground.

"You Americans take the cake," Blythe admitted. "You never tire of doing big things."