His first thought was that the Byzantion had it coming—sending in weather reports so irregularly, a slack ship. He read the details.

But more than of the ship, the J. M. thought of the storm. Only four mornings ago he had drawn on the map that tiny closed isobar in the shape of a football. Now, already, Maria was a killer. The papers called her a typhoon; actually (though less violent) she was far greater than any typhoon.

Other people stood at the sunny street-corner reading the same paper. The J.M felt distant from them. They must be thinking of the battered ship, of the drowned First Officer, of the man with the dislocated shoulder. If they considered the storm at all, they thought only of a sudden and unrelated cataclysm, arisen in a particular part of the ocean to the misfortune of a particular ship. They did not know of Maria’s birth and growth, of which way she was moving, or even of what she was. They did not know that now in her massed power, from Alaska to Hawaii, she swept the ocean and ruled the air.

10

There was a dance at Blue Canyon that Friday night. Usually you wouldn’t be having a dance at Blue Canyon in mid-winter; the road would be snowed over, and the only way you could get in or out would be by the railroad. But for this dance (maybe because it was so unusual) a lot of people turned out. From high up on the Pass they came, and from all the way down to Dutch Flat. There were railroad people and Power-Light people and telephone people, and highway people. There were young fellows and girls who worked at the resorts up in the snow-country. There were a few people from little mountain-ranches. And there were some men—pretty well broke—who were just hanging around out of work, knowing that as soon as the storms came the big companies would need extra men for emergencies.

It was a big party, and Rick the lineman went to it. He met a girl, and as soon as he met her he knew there was something about her. He saw that she was not as pretty as lots of girls, but she had good blue eyes that looked just a little strange along with her dark hair and skin.

She was with her sister and her sister’s husband, and Rick made her his girl for the evening. They danced, and got along well. And in some way when he talked to her Rick found that he wasn’t kidding along or trying to get fresh, the way he usually did. He found himself telling her about how it felt climbing poles and mending wire up on the Transcontinental Lead—serious things like that—and what kind of man was good on the job, and just what some of the tricks were to it.