Adventure Magazine Cover — page 149: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Big Medicine up and caught it precariously with one hand behind his back, but he was never trapped in a bare-faced lie. He was a master at enlarging an incident until men held their sides and roared with him, or stood with gaping mouths as he related just when, where and how he had been mixed up in some dramatic occurrence. He laughed heartily at his funny sallies and was the big hero in most of the others. ae a general foreman down on the rock storage dump back of New Gatun— a settlement of saloons, negro tenements, “silver roll”? men with families who did not care to live in the Government labor bar- racks, and camp followers who did not work for the I. C. C. He had several native straw bosses with gangs of Spaniards and West Indian blacks working for him and three American locomotive crane-runners. The rock trains dumped the stone at the top and the large chunks either rolled down at once or were pried loose and started down by the gangs. At the bottom they were picked up and reloaded into skips, placed on cars and taken to the locks and dumped in with the concrete. Orange- peel buckets or chains were used by the craneman. Each day’s work and the trip down and back through New Gatun supplied Flood with material for hours of yarn spinning on the piazza in the cool of the evening—or at least when the evening should have been cool but usually wasn’t. He had heard a negro wench talking to a sanitary inspector in patois English; seen two naked kids fighting; one of the crane-runners had re- fused a bottle of beer from the water cooler in Flood’s office, and he had phoned for the ambulance; a Bajan had delivered a sermon to a group of others behind the tool house; he had sent three Castilians for a box of dynamite and had had to go after them; a Gallego had made a funny remark in un- grammatical Spanish—anything. It was all grist for his story-telling proclivity. He had little education, reading and writing with difficulty, but he had a flow of picturesque language that was at once gripping and startling. He brought to the Zone expressions that remained for months after he had gone, such as: “Shoot where he’s standing without giving him time to jump up;” “claw him from his forehead to BIG MEDICINE was some sort of 1395 his umbilicus;” “tear him up as if the hogs had chawed him;” ‘‘pull his eyeball out a foot and flop it back into place and scare him;” “re-Jake and back at you again with my stack of yallers,” “just barely,” and the like. And these, dead as they look in cold print, were replete with meaning in the mouth of this big, red faced, white eye- browed man. He could mimic a Swede, any type of lime-juicer from a remittance man to a Liverpool Gorblimme-Bill, a Western judge, any type of Spaniard, and almost any other kind of man he had laid eyes on. North ‘“Caroleenians” he dubbed ““down-homers,”’ explaining that they all went to Virginia and spent the rest of their lives talking about “down home.” East Texans were “boll-weevils” and “rawzum- bellies” and they raised “lean do-gie” cattle, whatever kind of cattle that is. Life was one big joke shot through with — dramatic incidents, down on the porch of House 68. Noman went inside and went to bed until Flood did—it wasn’t any use. That’s how windy he was. Men sometimes passed the wink when he was spinning his fighting yarns, and a good one hundred per cent. said to each other behind his back that they did not think he would harm a fly; that he just liked to talk, and no one had ever seen him sore for so much as a second. It was out of reason that a man as good- natured as he was should ever have had trouble with any man. And then a man moved into House 68 who did not seem to take kindly to him. He also had drifted in over the trail from somewhwere or other, he didn’t say just where, and had been running a stiff-leg derrick down at Mindi and had been trans- ferred to one of the cranes on Flood’s rock storage dump. He and Flood had showed up walking together the first evening he appeared at House 68 and that night he had’ been one of the cirtle gathered around Big Medicine. After that they did not show up together, and when the group gathered, this newcomer sat far at the other end by him- self. We took it for granted that Flood had given him a call on the job and that he was peeved about it. He was as big a man as Flood, but of a different type. He was tall and rangy, swarthy of complexion, with a small, waxy, black mustache, quiet as a grave, dangerous _as a machine-gun, boasting of his prowess as Eomicboo <Si-GO m