Crossword-Solution: PANAMANIAN 10 letters, 5 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

Early one afternoon our Panamanian helpmate burst upon one of his numerous aristocratic relatives in his royal thatched domains in the ancestral bush.

Every little way was a gang, averaging some thirty men, distinct in nationality,--Antiguans shoveling gravel, Martiniques snarling and quarreling as they wallowed thigh-deep in swamps and pools, a company of Greeks unloading train-loads of ties, Spaniards leisurely but steadily grading and surfacing, track bands of "Spigoties" chopping away the aggressive jungle with their machetes--the one task at which the native Panamanian (or Colombian, as many still call themselves) is worth his brass-check.

Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing gangs, dynamite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with shovel and pick and crowbar, gangs down on the floor of the canal, gangs far up the steep walls of cut rock, gangs stretching away in either direction till those far off look like upright bands of the leaf-cutting ants of Panamanian jungles; gangs nearly all, whatever their nationality, in the blue shirts and khaki trousers of the Zone commissary, giving a peculiar color scheme to all the scene.

The $33 had been, for further safety's sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting a burglar with a wheelbarrow.

Here--for the mouth of the Chagres like its source lies in a foreign land--a solitary Panamanian policeman in the familiar Arctic uniform enticed us toward the little thatched office, and house, and swinging hammock of the alcalde to register our names, and our business had we had any.