Jen’s sister awoke, and went to look at her babies. As she heard the beating rain, she shivered and caught her breath in a sob. She felt her little sister out there somewhere lying in the rain, or wandering lost, calling to her. For the hundredth hopeless time she called the office of the Highway Patrol. No news. Shivering, she went to bed, and did not sleep again.

The Chief Service Officer did not quite awake. (He was worn out with a hard week, and all the responsibility of when to let his planes go, when to keep them grounded.) He tossed about as the drumming of the rain beat its warning in through layer after layer of sleep. But his subconscious mind rejected the call of duty which, waking, he would have assumed. It tricked him, and in dream he seemed only to be watching a parade. The rattle of the hail became the ta-ratta-ta-tat of snare drums, and the distant thunder was only the sounding of the great horns. He did not leap to the telephone with a word of warning and advice to his less experienced assistant at the airport. Instead, half-awaking, he imagined comfortably that it was merely a dream, and fell into another sound sleep.

The L. D. awoke. “Sounds like trouble,” he thought. He remembered his wires and his poles, his dams and his ditches. But he had confidence in his men, and went back to sleep.

The District Traffic Superintendent awoke. He took down the telephone from the head of his bed, and talked with the office. “Just a local cloudburst,” said his assistant. “No trouble yet on the long lines.” The DTS went back to sleep.

The Chief awoke. He looked at the clock “Hn-n?” he thought. “That was it!” Then, since there would be no use in getting to the Bureau before the reports came in, he rolled over for another cat-nap before getting up.

•

As it approached land, the old polar air had had a breadth of several hundred miles, bulging forward near the center. This center touched the coast first near San Francisco, and the violence of the action at that point was such that it pulled the air in from the north and south. The moving front of heavy rain and piled-up clouds thus shrank in breadth and became correspondingly more intense. It swept across San Francisco Bay, deluged the hill country and sluiced down its rain upon the delta.

Rushing northeast across the Great Valley it struck Sacramento.

The General awoke to full consciousness all at once. The rain crashed against the closed window like something solid. He called his office, where one assistant worked through the night.

“When did this get here?” he demanded.

“Just now, sir. But I knew it was coming. It hit the delta half an hour ago, and I’ve had a dozen long-distance calls already.”

“Any trouble?”

“Nothing—yet.”

“I’ll be right down.”