Over Alberta and Saskatchewan and Montana now rested a vast calm. In a steel-blue sky the low sun of the short winter day shone without seeming warmth, not compensating for the heat lost during the long clear night. Havre reported forty-nine below zero. The northern plain was temporarily a cold pole from which new outbursts of frigid air might be relayed on.

Southeastward the cold front speeded along. It burst upon Cincinnati and Louisville, plastering hard-driven snow against poles and buildings; it swept on toward Huntington and Nashville. But in this country of woodland and tangled hills the front lost its knife-like edge; the flying snow no longer cut with blizzard-force. Even west of the Mississippi the Ozarks broke the sweep of the wind, before it reached Little Rock and Shreveport. Only as the front bore southward across the vast plains of Texas could the storm maintain something of its full fury.

That morning in Abilene and Fort Worth and Dallas men looked up and saw the high blue wall of cloud sweeping down upon them. In its long journey the polar air had grown warmer, so that the Texans called the storm a norther more often than a blizzard. Even so, the temperatures dropped from well above freezing to close to zero, and with the whistling wind and the driving snow mid-Texas became suddenly a province of the Arctic. People battling their way along gale-swept streets quoted the grim proverb: Between Texas and the North Pole there’s only a barbed-wire fence for a windbreak. In San Antonio and Houston men made ready; at the wharves of Galveston and Corpus Christi seamen looked to their mooring-ropes; in the orange-groves of Brownsville there was setting-out of smudge-pots and laying of fires. And radio cast the warning on to shipmasters far out upon the Gulf.

8

All day, from Cape Mendocino to Point Conception, the south wind blew steadily and grew stronger. The slow Pacific groundswell rolled in heavily, wave by wave, breaking white over ledge and reef, tossing spray high on the rocky points, crashing solidly on the long beaches. Hour by hour the cloud-deck grew lower and thicker and darker; swift-blown scud sped beneath the low stratus, seeming to skim the wave-crests. In the early afternoon the wind grew stronger. The mild air was dank with moisture.

There was neither thunder nor lightning, nor any gale. Such petulant displays might be left to smaller storms, just as a small man wins attention by showing off, but a great man keeps his dignity. This, indeed, was no local thunderstorm, no tornado spitefully leveling a town here and yet so petty and evanescent that it dissipates before reaching the next county.