The opening of I. UP TO BOGOTÁ
When we had “made a stake” as Canal Zone policemen, Leo Hays and I sailed from Panama to South America. On board the Royal Mail steamer the waist of the ship, to which our tickets confined us, was a screaming pandemonium of West Indian negroes, homeward bound from canal digging, and a veritable chaos of their baggage and household goods—and gods—ranging from tin trunks to pet monkeys, from battered phonographs to plush-bound Bibles. We preëmpted deck space for our suitcases and sat down upon them. It chanced to be the same day on which, eight years before, I had set out on a “vagabond journey” around the world.
Twenty-four hours after our last Zone handshake we marched down the gangplank among the little brown policemen of Cartagena, Colombia, and fought our way through a mob of dock loafers to the toy railroad train that eventually creaked away into the city. Our revolvers and cartridge belts we wore out of sight; uniforms and nightsticks no longer figured in our equipment.