Yet other storms would come; again the brown water would rise against the levees. In the end the levees would go down—a hundred years, a thousand years; but in the end they would go, and the men who built them.

Perhaps it was only that he had lost a night’s sleep; he felt old. He sensed a great weariness, of storms that came and went, of water that fell as rain and rushed through the rivers, only to return again as rain. He knew there was a quotation, not Bret Harte this time, something more ancient. What was it all about—this ceaseless, ineffective activity of storms, and of men? Then he found the quotation somewhere back in his mind: “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they also return again.” The cold northwest wind eddied about the General’s neck, and he shivered.

5

The Old Master was dead. A drenching, a chill—and he had never rallied.

“Gosh!” said Whitey. “It won’t be like the same place without him dropping in to see what the map looked like. As long as I remember, he was so old he never seemed to get older.”

The Chief and the J. M. bent together over the map. It looked much the same as it had during the weeks before the coming of Maria. The Pacific High, rearing like some sea-monster, thrust itself against the California coast and joined with a continental high over the Great Basin. Far to the north lay the storm-track. Over New York City was Little Maria; the new storm which had brought the chinook to the northern plains was moving across Manitoba; Victoria, magnificent in maturity, held the Gulf of Alaska.

But neither the Chief nor the J. M. was really thinking of the map.

“He was a good weather-man—for his day,” said the Chief. “You know, I can’t help liking the way he went—with his boots on. The barometer rose a little, and he forecast clearing; he left his umbrella in the rack, and went out on his own convictions.”

“Crazy,” said the J. M.

“Bad judgment at least,” said the Chief. “He was an old man. Probably he was a little gone. I don’t mean to say he’d have done a thing like that when he was at his best. In those days he had a real feeling for weather. Without the instruments and reporting-service we have today, I’ve known him to make some amazing forecasts. I don’t yet know how he did it.”

“Luck, maybe,” said the J. M.; he talked more boldly to the Chief now.

“Well, in this world who doesn’t need luck? Hn-n? And forecasting will be a mighty dull business when it’s no guessing and all slide-rules.”

In the pause the J. M. knew that he should say something; he felt the glancing reference to himself and all the new meteorology; but he did not think of any words, and the Chief went on. Somewhere in the Chief, the J. M. realized now, there was a vein of poetry.