The S.S. Panama had passed Watling’s Island and steamed into story-land.  On the white-scrubbed deck aft of the wheel-house Carl sat with his friends of the steerage — sturdy men all, used to open places; old Ed, the rock-driller, long, Irish, huge-handed, irate, kindly; Harry, the young mechanic from Cleveland.  Ed and an oiler were furiously debating about the food aboard: 

“Aw, it’s rotten, all of it.”

“Look here, Ed, how about the chicken they give the steerage on Sunday?”

“Chicken?  I didn’t see no chicken.  I see some sea-gull, though.  No wonder they ain’t no more sea-gulls following us.  They shot ’em and cooked ’em on us.”

“Say,” mused Harry, “makes me think of when I was ship-building in Philly — no, it was when I was broke in K. C. — and a guy — ”

Carl smiled in content, exulting in the talk of the men of the road, exulting in his new blue serge suit, his new silver-gray tie with no smell of the saloon about it, finger-nails that were growing pink again — and the sunset that made glorious his petty prides.  A vast plane of unrippling plum-colored sea was set with mirror-like pools where floated tree-branches so suffused with light that the glad heart blessed them.  His first flying-fish leaped silvery from silver sea, and Carl cried, almost aloud, “This is what I’ve been wanting all my life!”

Aloud, to Harry:  “Say, what’s it like in Kansas?  I’m going down through there some day.”  He spoke harshly.  But the real Carl was robed in light and the murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics down the sky-line.

Lying in his hot steerage bunk, stripped to his under-shirt, Carl peered through the “state-room” window to the swishing night sea, conscious of the rolling of the boat, of the engines shaking her, of bolts studding the white iron wall, of life-preservers over his head, of stokers singing in the gangway as they dumped the clinkers overboard.  The Panama was pounding on, on, on, and he rejoiced, “This is just what I’ve wanted, always.”

They are creeping in toward the wharf at Colon.  He is seeing Panama!  First a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the I. C. C. quarters at Cristobal, and negroes on the sun-blistered wharf.

At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland — a medley of Colon and Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island pineapples.  Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars.  Gold Spanish signs and Spiggoty money and hotels with American cuspidors and job-hunters; tin roofs and arcades; shops open to the street in front, but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese proprietors smoking tiny pipes.  Trains from towns along the Canal, and sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery.  Gambling-houses where it is considered humorous to play “Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night?” on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states.  Negro wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo; Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories of the Spanish Main and Morgan’s raid, of pieces of eight and cutlasses ho!  Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf; huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and suggests the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured.

Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston, seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra slide.

Colon!  A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white, warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched with sudden rain like escaping steam, or languid under the desert glare of the sky, where hangs a gyre of buzzards whose slow circles are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom.

“Lord!” sighs Carl Ericson from Joralemon, “this is what I’ve wanted ever since I was a kid.”

At Pedro Miguel, which the Canal employees always called “Peter McGill,” he found work, first as an unofficial time-keeper; presently, after examinations, as a stationery engineer on the roll of the I. C. C. Within a month he showed no signs of his Bowery experiences beyond a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks.  He lived in quarters like a college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and cube-cut tobacco and college banners; clean youngsters dropping in for an easy chat — and behind it all, the mystery of the Bush.  His room-mate, a conductor on the P. R. R., was a globe-trotter, and through him Carl met the Adventurers, whom he had been questing ever since he had run away from Oscar Ericson’s woodshed.  There was a young engineer from Boston Tech., who swore every morning at 7.07 (when it rained boiling water as enthusiastically as though it had never done such a thing before) that he was going to Chihuahua, mining.  There was Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman, and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil servant to know.

Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers, who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St. John’s College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon, relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal lore.  These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside information.  The others drawled about various strange things which make a man discontented and bring him no good.

Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in Aeronautics at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room.  It is true that at this time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a motor for Captain Baldwin’s military dirigible.  But Langley and Maxim had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines; lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six hundred feet in France.  Various crank inventors were “solving the problem of flight” every day.  Man was fluttering on the edge of his earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air.  Carl was able to make technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the restless children.

The adventurers kept moving.  The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, “What price T. T.?” The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in Chihuahua.  He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the Très Reyes mine — and he took Carl with him.

Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and hill.  He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing péons with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at night under an exhilarating splendor of stars.  It never seemed to him that the machinery desecrated the mountains’ stern grandeur.

Stolen hours he gave to the building of box-kites with cambered wings, after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908, that in August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France; that before this, on July 4, 1908, another Yankee mechanic, Glenn Curtiss, had covered nearly a mile, for the Scientific American trophy, after a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A. D. McCurdy, “Casey” Baldwin, and Augustus Post.

He might have gone on until death, dealing with excitable greasers and hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mine superintendent — one of those Englishmen, stolid, red-mustached, pipe-smoking, eye-brow-lifting, who at first seem beefily dull, but prove to have known every one from George Moore to Marconi.  He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, conquer it, build up a reputation cumulatively; that he needed a contrast to Platonians and Bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers.

“You can do everything but order a petit diner a deux, but you must learn to do that, too.  Go make ten thousand pounds and study Pall Mall and the boulevards, and then come back to us in Mexico.  I’ll be sorry to have you go — with your damned old silky hair like a woman’s and your wink when Guittrez comes up here to threaten us — but don’t let the hinterland enslave you too early.”

A month later, in January, 1909, aged twenty-three and a half, Carl was steaming out of El Paso for California, with one thousand dollars in savings, a beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a motor business in San Francisco.  As the desert sky swam with orange light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Musetta’s song from “La Bohême” he was homesick for the outlanders, whom he was deserting that he might stick for twenty years in one street and grub out a hundred thousand dollars.