From south of Kamchatka the Junior Meteorologist followed the long blue line of a cold front southwestward along the chain of the Kuril Islands and across the Sea of Japan. Somewhere along that line a new wave should be forming—a wave which might develop into a great storm like Maria. But now no ship happened to be at the proper location.

6

The Captain was spruce in his uniform of the Highway Patrol. He drove into the garage at Donner Summit, and talked with the Superintendent.

“How’s everything?” he asked, noticing that the Superintendent was heavy-eyed and tired-looking.

“Quiet enough today. We were blocked eight hours, the other night.”

“Tellin’ me? We had our own time with the traffic that you—that couldn’t get through.”

“Well, she beat us; that’s all. We lost the road.”

“Tough! Yes, that sure was tough!—But, say, that’s not what I stopped in about. Maybe you can help us. A fellow and a girl left Frisco the first night of the storm—driving for Reno. Haven’t been located since. D’you hear of it?”

“Haven’t had time for papers or for radio—except weather reports.”

“A service-station man we talked to last night in Auburn is pretty sure they were the ones he sold some gas to. So they’re probably along this road all right.”

“Yes, they would be.”

The Superintendent thought back through the days of the storm. He knew every foot of his road; he could remember for weeks a detail which another man would not have noticed in the first place.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s a spot we’ll take a look at, just down from the crest of the Pass here. I noticed a broken snow-stake there, back about the beginning of the storm; it didn’t look just like snow-plow work.”

At the place, they got out of the car. The day was cold on the Pass after the storm—a steel-sharp wind from the north, close to zero. They found the broken snow-stake, and floundered through the snow-wall toward the edge of the cliff. (There had been no snow-wall on the first night of the storm.) They peered over the hundred-foot drop; even through the snow, jagged rocks stuck out.

“Look!” said the Superintendent, pointing.

During the last night it had not snowed, and now on the shining white surface far below them the two men made out an intricate criss-cross of delicate markings.

“Coyote tracks—he must have smelled something!”

They went back to the Maintenance Station for a shoveling crew. The truck had to go down around the curve of the road, and then the men went in toward the base of the cliff on skis.

After fifteen minutes digging, they found the car. It was badly smashed.

The Captain looked upward toward the top of the cliff. “Blinded in a snow-flurry, probably,” he said.

They wrapped each body in a blanket, made sleds by fastening two skis side by side, and dragged them across the deep snow to the highway.

7