Maria was dead—completely vanished. Perhaps off the Olympic Peninsula or Vancouver Island there might be areas of drizzle and shower, but no ships were there to report. The air which had composed Maria twenty-four hours before had now turned to new courses and revolved around other centers of activity. But she had been a good storm—Maria!

He turned back over his charts. He told himself that it would be a good idea to study, scientifically, the history of that storm. Actually, he realized that he was sentimental about Maria. Twelve days back he found that first little closed isobar shaped like a football which he had drawn half way between Titijima and Hatidyosima. Day by day, in twenty-four hour jumps, he followed Maria across the Pacific. She grew larger; her fronts became more sharply defined, her winds more violent. He saw her on the day when she smashed the Byzantion. The great outburst of polar air drove her to the south, and then blocked her passage inland. From her sixth to her eleventh day she had brought rain and snow to California. She had given birth to Little Maria. Then, with a rapidity remarkable even for a storm, she had died.

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.