“You’d better!” said the CSO shortly. He checked the latest weather reports from the air-lanes. There was no important change.

He passed into the dispatching-room, and checked the reports of progress which had been radioed in from the various planes. There was nothing of note.

He went back to his office. There he snarled malignantly at a stenographer who came in with letters. He knew that he was merely relieving his own nerves, but he did not apologize. Being rude to the stenographer was only a way of keeping himself from settling down into complacency.

“Act of God!” he thought cynically to himself, returning to that early religious training, now long perverted. “Fire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy wind fulfilling his word!” He checked over his old enemies wondering which was getting ready to strike next. “The Prince of the power of the air!” Yes, he too was working somewhere at his subtle sabotage—making pilots overconfident and careless, crossing the wrong wires in men’s minds, causing meteorologists to be unobservant, lulling dispatchers into negligence.

In a few minutes now his assistant would be coming on and taking charge for the night. He felt that he should pass on some warning, but there was really nothing which he could transmit except perhaps his own nervousness, and that in itself would be misleading.

9

The first outfit that got to the snow-slide was the V-plow with eight men of the night shift hanging on to it. First of all they took in a chain, and hooked it around the front axle of the Superintendent’s car. With the other end attached to the plow they yanked the car out of three feet of snow by main force. Then the V-plow drove right on into the slide. It went ahead easily as far as the snow had just run up the road, but when it hit the main part of the slide, where the snow was many feet deep, the plow shoved ahead and made a hole in the snow, and the V-plow could do nothing more.

Next a push-plow came up. It widened the narrow track of the V-plow, and then barged around, pushing the shallower snow back in various places. While it was working, some of the men got their webs on, and climbed up on the slide; they had to move gingerly for fear their weight might start the whole slide again and take them down into the canyon. When the lights of a rotary showed up around the turn, the push-plow went off to work on the road somewhere else; it would be no more use for a while at the slide.