The men piled out of the rotary, and fought their way to the station-house. They were shaky in the legs from the unceasing vibration; they walked uncertainly. Their clothes were soaked with perspiration from the heat and steam, and they shivered in the cold, snow-driving wind. They grabbed themselves sandwiches and coffee; and standing with coats opened they tried to dry their clothing around the roaring, red-bellied coal stove.

Then orders came through. They plugged back to the rotary through the snow, and started out again. In this kind of storm the snow-equipment had to be kept moving. A fast train with mail was due through in a little while, and stopping a train like that was more serious than holding up a freight.

In the foothills rain was falling instead of snow. In ground well softened by the long downpour Blue Boy, the big boar, rooted in contentment. From his precipitous pasture above the railroad he looked down incuriously with his little eyes at a train passing below him. It had come down from the higher altitudes so fast that in spite of the heavy rain a little snow still clung to the tops of the cars. For a moment there was the roar of the locomotive and from the circular orifice of the smoke-stack thick blackness belched upward at the boar. Then came the click-click of passing mail-coaches and Pullmans. The noise faded off around a curve, and only the sound of a whistle came back faintly. The boar rooted on, undisturbed.

5

In the early hours of morning the tropical air had arrived at the coast; by noon it covered all central California. While passing over the surface of the ocean it had produced only moderate rains along its advancing front where it overrode the cooler air ahead of it. But at the coast line the mountains forced it upward. Rising and cooling, the air released its stores of moisture. There were no displays of violence—no thunderstorms or wind-blasts. In fine drops the rain fell almost quietly, but the downfall was unceasing, and intense.

Mile by mile, swiftly, the tropical air moved inland. It crossed the Coast Ranges, and the air upon the long ridge-tops grew strangely mild. It moved over the Great Valley, but the air in that long trough was cool and heavy so that the tropical air moved across its top and nowhere touched the surface; but the rain which fell was not cold. Reaching the long westward slope of the Sierra the tropical air again rode upward, and the downfall was most intense of all. The snow-line lay about the three-thousand-foot level, but as the warmer air moved in, thick rain began to fall clear up to five thousand feet.