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.

Some few days before, the Arctic had swept down across Texas; now as if in compensating reflux California became an outpost of the tropics. That air which swept the peaks and ridges had lain for weeks over the warm ocean. It had sucked its rain from the creamy foaming of lazy blue waves, from the spouting of whales, from the splashing of porpoises, sporting in the sea-trough. Its air had smoothed the plumage of gull and gony; it had laved the sides of leaping swordfish, and the backs of sleeping turtles awash in the long swells.

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