At that moment Big Al saw the whole picture. He was just about to make headlines, perhaps. Maybe the headlines would keep running for several days until someone spotted the crashed plane and the charred bodies. He felt coldly calm, and decided to go ahead. Bay was just as likely telling them to keep away from Reno as to turn back and land there. Half a minute later, he knew that he had made the wrong decision.

He’d have done better to try for some emergency field or even take her clear back to Elko on the reserve gas. A side-swipe took the plane, and then she went into a down-draught. He fought to regain control and get back altitude. (He hated to think what was happening among the passengers.) By the time he had control he was off the beam over in the N-sector somewhere. For the moment it was more important to get back some altitude than to hunt the beam. Just then he went into a thunderstorm, and even the N-signal disappeared. All he could do was to fight for control. If he kept moving west, he would gain altitude as the slope of the mountains fell away. Already he felt the drag of the ice; the de-icers couldn’t handle it; the weight was not so much as the distortion which the ice made in the flying-surfaces; the plane was getting hard to handle.

And then, almost at his level, a mile away perhaps but looking close enough to touch, some black fangs of crags seemed to drift by—too steep for snow to rest on. There was nothing like them along the air-lanes. The Siena Buttes, maybe, he thought. If so, he was already miles off his course, to the north. He fought for control, and to keep to the west.

•

Blue Boy, the big boar, decided that he would get back to his dry shed. With the rain still sluicing down in torrents he trotted stolidly along the semblance of a trail which the feet of animals and men had worn on the steep hillside. When he came to the gully, he paused a moment, hesitating. Usually the gully was dry; even during most of the storm it had flowed an insignificant amount of water; but now, such was the cloudburst, the stream rushed six feet wide across the ledge. Above and below, it was a series of waterfalls.

Blue Boy plunged ahead. He was almost across, when his long, low-hung body began to act like a dam. The water piled up in a wave against his upstream side; its buoyancy suddenly neutralized his weight; at the same moment his left hind-foot slipped.