Captain Boss pulled up his coat collar and grasped the helm desperately as the gale lashed him with spray that stung the skin of his face and hands.

A whistle shrilled through the speaking tube from the engine room. Boss picked it up, said, “Wheelhouse.”

Ragan’s voice came with a hollow tone through the tube. “I’m taking water down here, Captain.”

“Can the pumps handle it?”

“So far. But the hull is creaking something awful. I fear the bulkheads might give way.”

“Get ready to clear out if it gets bad. Make your way to the roof over the galley and unlash the raft.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Ragan. “What about you, Captain?”

“Call me when you leave the engine room. I’ll follow if I can.”

“What about the people on the train? We can’t just abandon them.”

Boss was a man with moral depth, a God-fearing man of great inner strength from the old school whose word was his bond. He was well respected by all who lived around the lake. He gazed through the broken wheelhouse window at the far shore and the mad water thrashing over the bow and felt certain the Kalispell was not going to make it.

“They’re my responsibility,” he said slowly. “You save yourself.”

“God bless you, Captain.”

Then the tube went silent.

49

THE TORNADO WINDS OF THE CHINOOK WERE THE most destructive in memory. Barns were flattened, roofs carried away, trees ripped by their roots, and telegraph and telephone lines downed. The full force of the warm winds roared over Flathead Lake and flogged the water into a swirling turbulence that battered the weary old Kalispell unmercifully as she wallowed in the valleys between the waves. Already, the lifeboat that Captain Boss had hoped would save lives had been torn from its lashed mounting and shattered, its wreckage swept into the restless water.

Boss struggled with the helm in a desperate attempt to keep the Kalispell on a straight course toward the west shoreline, now only two miles away. He nurtured a slim hope that they might reach the safety of the little harbor of Rollins, but, deep inside, he knew the odds were stacked against him and his boat. There was a constant danger the ferry might swing. The engine, tender, and freight car were the straws that would break the camel’s back.

Without their weight, the Kalispell might have ridden higher in the water and not have suffered as badly from the huge waves that swept across her lowered track deck. Boss looked down at the bow and saw that it was badly damaged. Timbers on the exposed part of the bow were being smashed and torn from their beams.

His clothes and lumberman’s coat soaked through to his skin, Boss grimly took one hand off the wheel, held the speaking tube to his mouth, and whistled. There was a lag of nearly thirty seconds before Ragan answered.

“Yes, Captain?”

“How does it look down there?”