Fiercer than Pict or Caledonian, more furious than the Northmen, it swept upon Britain. On Grasmere and Windermere, the ice was like steel. On moor and down and heath hard-driven crystals flecked the gorse and bracken. Cold wind upon warmer land, it swept the mist from the gray cities by the northern firths; and cleared the smoke from the great towns of the Midlands; and drove before it the yellow pall of London, covering six counties. Even in sea-girt Cornwall, men whiffed the dry air of the North, sharp upon the cheek-bones, biting the nostrils.

Still onward drove that wind. It buffeted ships in the Channel. It swept the lands of Scheldt and Seine and Loire. Still on! For, when the sun rides deep in Capricorn, what power shall withstand the North?

4

The General had jumped from bed at four-thirty Friday morning when the cloudburst suddenly beat against his windows. During the night when Friday passed into Saturday, he did not consider the question of bed.

As he looked from his office windows in the still hours of the morning, he felt a curious sense of unreality. The full moon was brilliant; street lights shone upon dry asphalt; branches of trees and shrubbery swayed in a steady breeze. It was no night to imagine floods and disaster. Apparently the inhabitants of the valley felt a similar sense of safety. Few long-distance calls came in from panicky ranchers and business-men demanding the news and asking advice.

The storm was over. But for the General the crisis had not yet passed. Far and wide, he could feel those billions of cubic feet of water, penned in behind the levees, pouring toward the Bay. The water-level in the rivers stood far above the valley floor, high as the roof-eaves of the cottages in the river towns, high as the second-story windows in Sacramento. Along hundreds of miles of levee-top, in the bright moonlight, his patrols walked their beats, back and forth. The men needed no slickers tonight; each carried a shovel on his shoulder. On one side each man looked far down the slope of the levee, and saw the street-lights of some little town still burning or perhaps only the wide stretches of the valley where the scattered houses showed no lights. On his other side, the patrol looked out almost on his own level, and saw the brown backwater among the leafless willows of the stream-margin; beyond the willows flowed the swift water of the channel.

At one o’clock word was telephoned from Kennett, far north under the peak of Shasta, that the upper Sacramento had crested at twenty-four-point-six, and was falling. This crest was high enough to be dangerous, but it would not arrive in the lower river for several days and could be disregarded for the moment.

The critical stream was still the American. Although the rain in the foothills had ceased twelve hours previous, the crest had not yet had time to descend to the plain. Every fifteen minutes the General had a telephone call from his deputy at Sacramento gauge where the American poured into the main river. Hour by hour the water rose—twenty-seven-point-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-eight-point-one.