“Dirty Ed” was sixteen and a holy terror. He took his .22 rifle, and with a friend called Lefty went down along the marshes of the Bay shore. The two were bad shots, and managed only to splash water in the vicinity of several mud-hens. They thought their ammunition was all used up, and started home; then Ed found one more cartridge at the bottom of his pocket. They looked for a bird, cat, or dog, and then Lefty dared Ed to shoot at a switch-box which loomed up plainly on a pole some fifty yards away. The pole was on the highway along which was passing a continuous stream of traffic. At this particular point, however, the highway dipped into an underpass beneath the railroad tracks. Shooting right across the highway was thus not really very dangerous, and it was a swell thing to say you had done.

Ed sighted, and fired. For once his aim was good, but the sound of the shot obscured the pang with which the bullet pierced the thin steel. The boys scrouged down in a gully, in sudden fear that a passing motorcycle-policeman might have seen them. After a minute they went on, not enough interested to investigate the unlikely possibility of whether or not Ed had hit the switch-box.

•

On this day, Tony Airolo went out to see how Blue-Boy was getting on. Blue-Boy was not blue, but he was named after the boar in the old Will Rogers movie. Tony was letting him take care of himself for a while just now; it was good weather, and there were plenty of acorns. About half of Tony’s ranch was rolling foothill country, and the rest was this steep hillside pitching down into the canyon and bounded at the base by the railroad right of way. It was too steep and rocky to be really a pasture; sheep could manage it well enough, but quite possibly the boar could not. As Tony worked along the hillside a freight train went by, up-grade—a three bagger. Tony felt he was looking down right into the top of each of the belching smoke-stacks, just as if he were standing on an over-pass.

Several natural gullies ran down the hillside, and as Tony came to one of these he saw the boar. Blue-Boy looked in good condition. Just now he was busy grubbing for acorns under an oak tree which hung on precariously to the slope. Watching for a minute, Tony decided that a boar was more sure-footed than you would think. Blue-Boy was getting along all right.

3

The storm centered now between the Hawaiian Islands and Alaska, somewhat nearer the latter. The dry east winds upon the northern fringe of its circuit swept Kodiak and Dutch Harbor, but the rest of its vast expanse lay over the ocean, and all its rain returned to mingle again with the salt water from which it had been drawn.