CHAPTER XIV
HOW WE LIVE ON THE ISTHMUS TO-DAY[1]
WHEN Bill Smith, steam-shovelman, went to Panama in 1904, he wrote to his wife in Kansas City that it looked to him like a pretty tough camp. The food was bad and the water was worse, and there wasn't enough of either. His quarters were in an old French house full of scorpions, and the only mirror he could find to shave himself in was a broken piece of window-glass tilted back against the wall. Some of the boys were living in tents, and others in native shacks with mud floors, thatched roofs full of snakes, and walls you could throw a cat through. There was no place for a man to go after he finished his day's work but a saloon full of bad liquor or a crooked gambling-house. Two of the men who came down with him had died of fever, and three more had gone back on the next boat north. But Bill Smith thought he would stick it out a little longer. It took more than a little courage to make that resolution in 1904.
In 1912, Bill is still on the Isthmus, and Mrs. Smith and the children are there too. They are living rent-free in a "Type 17 House," a neat little cottage that Uncle Sam has not only built for them, but also furnished, from the concrete piles it stands on, to the ventilator in the galvanized-iron roof. Grass rugs, mission
- ↑ Written in 1912.
