The J. M. decided that on the whole Maria had changed but little since yesterday. She remained a fast mover, having again traveled more than a thousand miles in the twenty-four hours. She would still have to be called a vigorous and growing young storm. Already the horse-power developed by her winds was enough to equal that of a dozen tropical hurricanes combined, but this huge energy was spread over such a wide area that nowhere, except perhaps in a few squalls along the cold front, did her winds reach gale force.

Now that Maria was well advanced into girlhood she was no longer the youngest of the family. Two new storms had already developed along the Asiatic coast, and were moving out to sea. But the J. M. regarded them with no special interest; he did not even find names for them, but since they had appeared at the same time he called them the Twins and let it pass at that.

The rest of the map also had little to offer. Antonia, continuing her erratic and suicidal course, had moved close to Bering Strait and come into a region of polar high pressure; she was rapidly disappearing. Cornelia was still beating against the south Alaskan coast. She too was losing energy, but a bulge of isobars eastward showed that some of her Pacific air had crossed the mountains. This eastward elongation, the J. M. decided, would bear watching.

As his eyes wandered north toward the stations along the Arctic Ocean, he realized even more surely that something might be about to happen. The Chief, as he remembered to his chagrin, had commented upon Coppermine the day before. Quickly now he checked back over his previous maps. On Tuesday, Coppermine had reported 1020; on Wednesday, 1022; now on Thursday, 1023. During the same time the wind had been blowing from the east or northeast and growing stronger; the temperature had fallen slowly.

Tantalized, he looked at the broad blank spaces over Beaufort Sea, and beyond. How could anyone know what was happening when there were holes like that in the map? And here in California he did not have reports from the Atlantic or from Europe and western Siberia. That little rise of pressure over Coppermine seemed slight, and might be some local development. Or it might be the bulging snout of some great mass of cold air from over the polar ice-cap. Even if it were, without round-the-world reports you could not be sure how it would move.