The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men
by Francis Rolt-Wheeler · English · Gutenberg #22156 · 408,225 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men
Author: Francis Rolt-Wheeler
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U. S. Service Series.
THE BOY WITH THE U. S. WEATHER MEN
by
FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER
With Seventy-two Illustrations from Photographs
[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
Boston
Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
[Illustration: THE FUNNEL OF DEATH.
Photograph of a tornado in Kansas, taken less than a minute before it
struck the point where the camera had stood.
(This is one of the best tornado photographs in the world and has not
been retouched.)
_Courtesy of Geo. S. Bliss, U.S. Weather Bureau, Philadelphia, Pa._]
Published, September, 1917
Copyright, 1917
By Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
All rights reserved
THE BOY WITH THE U. S. WEATHER MEN
Norwood Press
Berwick & Smith Co
Norwood, Mass.
U. S. A.
PREFACE
The savage fury of the tempest and the burning splendor of the sun in
all ages have stirred the human race to fear and wonder. All the great
stories and legends of the world began as weather stories. The
lightnings were the thunderbolts of Jove, the thunder was the rolling of
celestial chariot-wheels, and the rains of spring were a goddess weeping
for her daughter, Nature, held a captive in the icy prison of Winter.
We know a great deal more about the forces of the Weather than the
ancients did, yet we know but little still. The hurricane does not come
unheralded to our shores, the freezing grip of a cold wave is forecast
in time to enable us to fight it, the lightning is tamed by the metal
finger we thrust upward to the sky. But the tornado sweeps its funnel of
death over our cities in spite of all we do, the cloudburst falls where
it will, and rivers rush to flood with the melting of the snows upon the
distant mountains.
There is no battle greater than the battle with the Weather, which is
both our enemy and our ally. Death and disaster are the price we pay
for ignorance. Great victories have been won by knowledge. Galveston's
sea-wall dared and defeated the hurricane, the levees of the Mississippi
have held captive many a flood, and our myriad spears of defence have
snatched at the power of the lightning flash and hurled it harmlessly to
the ground.
We are not slaves to the demons of the Weather, now--not as we once
were. The United States Weather Bureau, day by day, draws closer and
closer the chains which bind the untrammeled violence of sun and storm.
High, high in the atmosphere, is a world all unexplored, where no man
can dwell; where, as yet, no human-made instrument has reached. This
unknown world calls for explorers, it calls for adventure, it calls for
daring and patient work. It is for Man to tame the forces of the sky,
and tame them he must and will. To show how much the Weather Bureau is
accomplishing, to depict the marvels of its work, to portray the
ruthless ferocity of the forces as yet uncontrolled and to reveal the
gripping fascination of this work, in which every American boy may join,
is the aim and purpose of
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
ADRIFT ON THE FLOODED RIVER 1
CHAPTER II
THE HOME OF THE RAIN 34
CHAPTER III
PUTTING THE SUN TO WORK 72
CHAPTER IV
THE MASSACRE OF AN ARMY 105
CHAPTER V
THE RUNAWAY KITE 143
CHAPTER VI
DEFEATING THE FROST 180
CHAPTER VII
CLEARING AN INNOCENT MAN 210
CHAPTER VIII
IN THE WHIRL OF A TORNADO 255
CHAPTER IX
THE TRAIL OF THE HURRICANE 280
CHAPTER X
STRUCK BY LIGHTNING 312
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Funnel of Death _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Futen, God of the Winds 14
There, Before the Flood, Stood Anton's House 30
The Edge of a Tornado's Whirl 38
In the Path of the Lightning 46
In the Path of the Tornado 46
Facing a Climb on Snow-Shoes 56
Twenty-Five-Foot Drift a Mile Long 56
Forest Ranger in Idaho 56
Observer Among the Quaking Aspens 56
No Peak Too Lofty for a Weather Station 68
Wall and Upright Sun-Dials 86
The First Line of Defence Against the Tempest 98
Solar Halo Seen in the United States 110
Solar Halo Seen in Russia 110
The Dust that Makes Red Sunsets 122
An Army Destroyed by Weather 138
Types of Upper Clouds 152
Types of Lower Clouds 152
Types of Rain Clouds 152
Kite-Flying--The New Way 162
Kite-Flying--The Old Way 162
The Explorer of the Upper Air 172
Snow-Flakes from the Upper Regions of the Air 186
Snow-Flakes from the Middle Regions of the Air 186
Snow-Flakes from the Lower Regions of the Air 186
Ringing the Frost Alarm 192
Fighting Frost in an Orchard--Night 206
Fighting Frost in an Orchard--Dawn 206
Bucking a Snow-Drift 212
Clear the Way! 212
Measuring the Blizzard's Rage 224
Signals on Delaware Breakwater 236
Signal Tower for Storm Warnings 236
Thermometers and Rain-Gauge 246
Pencil Drawings of Tornado in Dakota 256
True Tornado Forming in Advance of a Dust Whirl 268
Tornado Dropping Towards Ground 268
Tornado Wrecking a Farm 276
Tornado Whirling Sidewise 276
Galveston Causeway Before and After the Hurricane 286
Shot from the Gun of a Hurricane 296
Scale of Winds, Illustrated by Clipper Ships 304
Branch Lightning and Multiple Flash 314
Eiffel Tower Struck by Lightning 320
Lightning Flash Striking Building 320
Mules Carried in the Air Three Miles from Their Stable 328
Grand Piano Picked Up by a Tornado and Dropped in a 328
Cow-Pasture
THE BOY WITH THE U. S. WEATHER MEN
CHAPTER I
ADRIFT ON THE FLOODED RIVER
"What is it, Rex, old boy? What are you after? Somebody else in trouble,
eh?"
Ross looked down through the pouring rain at his Airedale, who was
pulling at his trouser leg with sharp, determined jerks. The dog looked
far more like a seal than a terrier, his hair dripping water at every
point, while a cascade streamed from his tail. The boy was every whit as
wet. Here and there, through the slanting lines of rain, could be seen
the smoky gleams of camp-fires, around which, shivering, gathered the
hundreds of people who had been rendered homeless by the flooded
Mississippi.
The lad turned to his father, who was bandaging a child's wrist, which
had been broken during the work of rescue.
"It looks as if I ought to go, Father," he suggested, "that's if you
don't mind. By the way Rex is going on, there's something up, for sure."
"Go ahead, then, son," his father agreed, "the dog's got sense enough
for a dozen. Watch out for yourself, though, and don't get foolhardy,"
he added warningly, as the lad disappeared in the darkness; "you've got
to be right careful when the Mississippi's in flood."
"I'll watch out," Ross answered reassuringly, as he started off with the
dog, and, a moment later, the glow of the camp-fire was blotted out in
the falling rain.
"This is your hike, Rex," announced the lad; "you lead and I'll follow."
The Airedale cocked up one ear on hearing his young master's voice,
then, putting his head knowingly on one side, as if he understood every
word that had been said, he trotted to the front and splashed through
the pools of mud and water, his stump of a tail wagging with evident
satisfaction.
Ross was used to all kinds of weather, but a downpour such as this he
had never seen before. The rain fell steadily and relentlessly, with
never a pause between. The night was too dark to see clearly, as the
sheets of water were swept before the wind, but their force was
terrific. Several times the boy had to turn his back to the driving
storm and gasp, in order to get his breath.
"Where are you going, old boy?" again queried Ross.
The terrier paused, shook himself so that the drops flew in all
directions, looked up in his master's face, gave a short sharp bark and
trotted on.
Ross leaned down, patted the dog, and followed. By some instinct of his
own, the terrier was keeping to a submerged road, though how he managed
to remain on it was beyond the lad's comprehension, for the night was as
dark as a wolf's throat and the path was under water half the time.
Suddenly the dog stopped and looked back as though for guidance. Before
them was a swirl of water. In the darkness it was impossible to say how
deep the wash-out might be, or how wide. Ross hesitated. His father had
warned him against foolhardiness, and here he was facing the crossing of
a swift current of unknown depth on a pitch-black night. Should he
venture?
Rex barked, a short excited "yap" of urgency.
"I'll go as far as I can wade, anyhow," said Ross in response; "maybe it
isn't so deep after all. I'm not particularly anxious to have to swim."
The terrier watched his master, and as soon as the boy started to cross
the wash-out in the road-bed, the dog plunged in. The current swept him
down rapidly, but Rex was a powerful swimmer and the lad had little fear
for him. It took all his own strength to keep him from being swept off
his feet, but the break in the road was not more than six yards across,
and the boy was soon safe on the other side. He whistled shrilly and a
moment or two later, Rex came bounding up and jumped on his master with
clumsy delight. Then, with another cock of his head, as though to make
sure of himself, he took up his position in front of the lad and trotted
ahead.
How it rained! The water had gone down Ross's neck and inside his shoes,
so that they sloshed and gurgled with each step. Little rills of water
trickled coldly down his back and legs. The wind was dropping, so that
the rain drove less in slanting sheets, but it seemed to pelt down all
the more heavily for that. Even in the darkness, Ross could see the
plops, where the drops fell, standing up from the surface of the flooded
water like so many spiny warts. It was lonely, even with Rex for
company, so dark and so wet was the night, and Ross was glad when the
glow of a fire in the distance told him that he was approaching an
encampment, probably, he thought, that of another group of settlers who
had been driven from their flooded houses and were shivering, homeless,
in the night.
When he arrived near enough to take in a full view of the scene,
however, he found it very different from what he expected. True, there
was a large camp-fire burning, such as the one he had left, and around
it were gathered a number of women and children, cold, hungry and wet. A
rough, lean-to tent, made of a sheet of tarpaulin, had been stretched in
order to try to keep off the worst of the downpour, but no shelter
availed.
A few steps farther, on the river bank, was a scene of excitement and
commotion. A large gasoline torch flared into the night, defying the
efforts of the storm to extinguish it, and by the light of this torch,
scores of men were working busily, almost crazily, repairing a cave-in
that threatened every moment to make a new break in the levee.
"Who's that? Another man?" rang out a clear, strong voice, as Ross came
near. "Good! We need men badly, right now."
"It's me, Mr. Levin," answered the boy promptly, as he recognized the
voice, and hurried into the circle of light, "it's me, Ross Planford."
"Howdy, Ross," came the greeting in reply, "all your folks safe?"
"Yes, sir," the boy answered. "It was a narrow shave, though. Rex got us
out just in time."
"Good dog, that," was the terse comment. "I always did like Airedales.
Well, Ross, it's time you got busy. Bring me a pile of empty bags from
Dave's sugar-mill, there."
"Yes, sir," answered the lad, and darted off towards the factory.
Rex followed at his heels, and when, staggering back with his load, Ross
dropped one of the empty bags, the terrier picked it up and came
trotting after, carrying it in his teeth.
"I dropped one, Mr. Levin," said the boy, "I'll go right back for it."
"You don't need to," replied the Weather Forecaster, "your pup retrieved
it for you. See?" and he held up the missing bag.
The engineer in charge of this section of the Mississippi, whose duty it
was to guard the artificial banks or "levees" of the river, was working
on the main break in the levee, with a huge gang of men. In this crisis,
one of the planters, who formerly had been the local Weather Bureau
official, had offered to take charge of the new threatened source of
danger.
At his request, Ross busied himself for some time in bringing empty
bags, which were then filled up with sand and dumped into the cave-in.
Being in bags, the washing action of the water could not carry away the
sand, and the gradually crumbling bank again was made firm. After a
while, however, Ross again felt the dog tugging at his trouser leg and
he realized that the mission on which he had started had been forgotten
in the excitement of mending the crack in the levee.
"That's right, I was forgetting," said Ross aloud, and he appealed to
his friend the Forecaster.
"Mr. Levin," he said, "can you spare me for a bit? I left Father's camp
because we thought there was something wrong. Rex kept on tugging at my
leg, as though he wanted to lead me somewhere. He's worrying again, now.
Do you mind if I go ahead and see?"
"Not a bit," was the hearty answer, "a dog doesn't generally go on like
that without some reason of his own. I'll send one of the roustabouts
with you, if you like?"
"No, thanks, sir," the lad answered, "if I really need help I'll come
back and ask for it. Right now, I just want to find out what it is
that's bothering Rex."
"Off with you, then," said the other, kindly, "but go easy. Oh, and
Ross!" he added, "if you're going down stream, just keep your eye on the
levee, won't you? If you see any signs of trouble, get back on the
double-quick. Don't try any of that story-book business about sitting
down with your back to a hole in the bank. That sort of thing may be all
very well in Holland but it wouldn't work with the Mississippi."
Ross grinned, remembering the story.
"All right, Mr. Levin," he answered, "if I see anything that looks like
trouble, I'll come right back and report."
For a short distance down the river, Rex led the boy along the levee,
then he branched away from the river bank towards a large stretch of
low-lying land. This was familiar territory to Ross, for one of his best
chums, a little crippled lad, lived in a house in the hollow.
"I hope Anton got out all right!" suddenly exclaimed Ross, half aloud,
as the thought swept over him of the plight in which his chum might
have been.
This fear became more poignant when, as Rex reached the path that led up
to Anton's house, he turned up it, half trotting and half splashing his
way through. Ross followed him closely, breaking into a run himself, as
the dog galloped ahead.
There was a slight rise of the ground, near the wood below which lay the
house, and from this shallow ridge the rain ran off in muddy gullies
that were miniature torrents. This ridge reached, Ross looked down over
the hollow toward the house. The entire plantation was a sheet of water,
and, in the middle, still stood the house, the water half-way up its
first story.
Rex set his forelegs firmly on the ground and barked fiercely, with
loud, explosive barks that rang through the storm like the successive
discharges from a small cannon.
Then, out of the rain, faintly through the distance, a shout was heard.
It sounded like a boy's voice.
"It's Anton!" cried Ross. "He's been left behind! And that house is apt
to go to pieces any minute!"
The first thought that sped across his mind, as he peered through the
darkness to the dim outlines of the white house, was to hurry back to
the Forecaster for help. Even as this thought came to him, however, Ross
realized that such action might be of little use. Already the waters of
the flood, swirling around the house, undermined it every moment, and it
would take a long time to portage a boat all the way from the levee to
the hollow, now in the wild sweep of the torrent.
Then Ross remembered that, a couple of years before, when a wet summer
had caused a considerable quantity of water to gather in the hollow,
forming a small lake, Anton and he, together with the rest of the boys,
had built a rough boat. They had played the whole story of "Treasure
Island" in this craft, Anton, with his crutch, taking the part of Long
John Silver. The boat was a rough affair, as he remembered it, something
like an ancient coracle, but it had been water-tight, at least. Perhaps
it would be sea-worthy, still. At least, it was worth a trial.
Turning his back on the building that was islanded by the flood, Ross
raced as fast as he could to the little block-house on the ridge that
the boys had built two years before, near which he hoped to find the
boat. Twice he stumbled over a root in the darkness and fell headlong
into the mud and water. Still, as he could not be any wetter than he was
already and as he did not hurt himself, a few falls were no great
matter.
On the ridge, fast to the block-house, to which level the water had not
yet reached, Ross found the boat. Moreover, to his great delight, he saw
that Anton had been patching it up, so that it was now more serviceable
than ever.
It was a different matter, punting this home-made boat around the waters
of a pond on a calm summer's day, and striking out with it in a blinding
storm across the flooding lowlands of the Mississippi River. Again his
father's warning not to be foolhardy, came to Ross's remembrance, and,
together with it, the Weather Bureau man's caution. None the less, the
boy knew well that his father would never bid him hold back from a piece
of work that was dangerous or difficult when life was at stake.
The boat was half full of water from the pouring rain. Ross bailed it
out with a cocoanut-shell to which a handle had been affixed, evidently
a home-made bailer of Anton's manufacture, and, as soon as it was clear
of water, dragged it to the border of the current and launched it. The
craft floated crankily, it was true, but it floated, and, so far as the
boy could tell, it seemed fairly water-tight.
Jumping out again, Ross swung himself into the water and shoved the boat
along beside him. He saw the value of wading as far as possible, for he
knew that, as long as his feet were on the bottom, he could govern his
direction. To what extent he might be able to stem the current by the
use of oars in a boat of that character, he did not know.
Rex, however, was convinced that the boat had been secured expressly for
him, and, as soon as Ross came near enough to the shore, the dog bounded
through the shallow water in long leaps, swimming the last few feet, and
put his paws on the gunwale. Ross picked up the terrier and heaved him
into the boat. Rex gave a snort of satisfaction, shook himself so that
he sent a trundling spray of water clear in his master's face and then
took his post in the bow of the boat and set himself to barking with all
his might and main. It seemed almost as though he really knew that he
was at the head of a rescue expedition and wanted to convey the
information. When at last Rex ceased barking, which was not for some
minutes, Ross gave a shout.
Instantly, at one of the upper windows, something white appeared. In the
darkness the boy could not tell what it might be, but he guessed, and
rightly, that it was Anton's shirt, and he heard again, though faintly,
the answering call across the river.
"Keep up your nerve, Anton," he yelled, through the storm, "I'll be over
there in a minute."
Faintly, again, came the answering cry,
"Hello, Ross! Is that you? I wondered who it was that was coming."
The slow progress made by shoving the boat along, however, was not at
all to Rex's liking. He turned and looked at his master doubtfully, then
barked again. To his disgust, in turn, the boy found that the slope of
the hollow curved away from the house a great deal. He was tempted, time
after time, to jump into the boat and pull straight across, but he knew
that if the force of the current drifted him below the house, he could
never hope to go upstream against it. His only chance was to make sure
that he could reach the middle of the torrent above the house and drift
right down upon it. A few yards' extra leeway would enable him to steer
his cranky craft to the desired spot. So, though it seemed to him as if
he were going away from Anton, and though, indeed, he was now so far
away that the crippled boy's shouts no longer could be heard, Ross stuck
to his intentions, and, still wading, pushed the little craft up-stream.
Rex protested vigorously. He ran back from the bow and looked into
Ross's face with a reproachful and almost angry bark, as much as to say:
"You silly! Can't you tell what I brought you here for?"
The boy knew better than the dog.
"Lie down!" he ordered sharply.
Rex, understanding in a doggish way that he was in the wrong somewhere,
went back to his post in the bow, where he stood dejectedly, his tail no
longer at the jaunty angle than it had been before.
At last Ross felt that he had reached a point high enough up the flooded
bank to justify him in the attempt to get across. He jumped into the
home-made skiff, and, setting his strength to the clumsy oars, began to
pull with all his might.
He had not over-estimated the force of the current. As the light craft
got into the swirl, the black water caught it like a feather. Ross
pulled with all his might, but the banks slipped by as though he were in
tow of one of the river steamboats. Never had the boy tugged at a pair
of oars as he did now, and never had he so wished for a good boat and
for real oars. He was only two-thirds of the distance across to the
house when it came into sight, only a little distance below him.
He would not reach it!
With the energy of despair, Ross tugged on his oars, every muscle of his
body tense with the strain.
Rex, divining the struggle, stood silent, not looking forward over the
bow as he had been doing, but watching his master as he toiled with his
oars.
Then, out from the darkness, shot the long black menace of a floating
tree trunk. Straight for the boat it sped.
From the window, now close at hand, came a cry:
"Look out, Ross! Look out!"
Ross saw the danger. He knew, if he backed water, or halted long enough
to let the tree go by, he would infallibly be swept past the house and
all hope of rescuing Anton would be gone. He saw, too, that if the tree
struck the frail boat, it would sink it as a battleship's ram sinks a
fishing-boat in a fog at sea. He might win through, but if it struck--
The oars creaked with the sudden strain thrown on them.
On came the tree, but, just as it was about to strike the boat, it
checked and turned half over, as the projecting stump of a broken bough
caught on the ground below. For an instant, only, the tree halted and
began to swing.
The halt gave a moment's respite, one more chance for an extra pull with
the oars. The big log, thus poised, made a backwater eddy on the surface
of the river, checking the force of the current. Ross reached back for
another stroke, with every ounce of his muscle behind it.
The tree turned over sullenly and charged down the river anew. Yet that
brief pause, that second of delay, that back-water ripple as the log
hung in suspension, had given Ross just the advantage that was needed.
The branches of the upper part of the tree swept round, one of them
catching the stern of the boat and almost pulling it under. Peril had
been near, but victory was nearer. The bow of the boat touched the wall
of the house.
The current, swirling around the rocking walls, carried the boat to the
lee of the house, and, as it spun round, Ross leaped on to the porch,
chest-deep in water, and took a quick turn with the boat's painter
around the corner post of the porch.
The torrent took his feet from under him, and swept him down-stream,
floating, but Ross held a firm grip on the rope and dragged himself
back. There, clasping the post tightly, he got back his breath. After a
moment's groping he found the railing of the porch. By standing on this
and holding fast to the corner post, he was, for the moment, out of
danger.
He had reached the house, but how was Anton to be rescued?
The crippled boy was on the second story and the upper window could not
be reached from the boat, even if the boat could have been held in place
directly under it. Fortunately, Ross knew the arrangements of his chum's
house as well as he did those of his own. Stepping gingerly along the
porch railing, he came close to the window of the sitting room. The
glass was still in the window frame, but as the front door was swinging
wide open, though partly choked with débris, Ross knew that the sitting
room must be full of water. He kicked the glass out and then, with a
heavier kick, broke away the middle part of the window-sash. The water
did not come quite to the top of the window frame, sure evidence that
there was room for air between the water and the ceiling.
Taking a long breath, but with his heart knocking against his ribs, Ross
dived through the broken window. It is one thing to be able to swim and
dive, it is another to plunge through a splintered window-frame into a
dark house in the middle of the night, with a flood roaring on all
sides.
Was the door into the hall open? On that, success depended.
The boy turned sharply to the left as he came up to the surface and took
breath. His hand struck the top of the door jamb. The door was open, but
the casing was only three inches above the water. Ross dived again
through the door, and, under water, turned to the right. One swimming
stroke brought him to the staircase and he rushed up the few steps at
the top to the room above.
There, by the light of a single candle, he saw Anton, his eager eyes
shining out of his pale face. The crippled boy hobbled across the room
on his crutch and grasped his chum tightly by the shoulder. He was
trembling like an aspen-leaf in the wind.
"Scared, Anton?" said Ross. "I'm not surprised. You've a good right to
be."
"I wasn't so scared," the younger lad replied, with the characteristic
desire of a boy not to be thought cowardly, "I just got to wondering,
that was all."
"Wondering if any one was going to come for you?"
"Yes."
"How did you get left behind, anyhow?" queried Ross.
"Oh, it was my own fault, all right," the crippled lad replied. "It was
all because of the dog. You know, Ross, Lassie had pups, last Monday."
"No, I didn't know about it," responded the older boy. "Why didn't you
tell a fellow?"
"I haven't seen you since," Anton explained. "Well, when the levee broke
and the water commenced to come into the house, Dad and Uncle Jack went
and got the two boats we always keep on the river. Dad picked me up and
carried me down on to the porch. I heard him call to Uncle Jack:
"'You go ahead and get Clara; I've got Anton safe with me.'"
"Then you were with him, weren't you?" queried Ross.
"Sure I was. Just as I was getting into the boat, though, I thought of
Lassie and her puppies and I went back to get them. I called to Dad and
said:
"'I'm just going to fetch Lassie, Dad, and I'll go in Uncle Jack's
boat.'
"So, Dad, he called to Uncle, saying that I was to go with him. His boat
was pretty well crowded up, too. Back I went to get Lassie. As soon as
I'd picked up the pups, Lassie was willing enough to come along. The
water was running over the floor and made it slippery. My crutch
slithered on the wet wood and I tumbled down. It was pretty dark, and I
had a job finding the four puppies again. When I did gather 'em up and
started for the porch again, Uncle Jack was gone."
"Without you?"
"He thought I was with Dad, and I suppose Dad was sure I was with Uncle
Jack."
"They ought to have found out and come back after you as soon as they
got together."
"I thought of that," the crippled lad answered, "and that's what I
expected would happen. I suppose, though, they didn't land at the same
place, and so each bunch thinks I'm with the other and isn't doing any
worrying."
"It's a mighty awkward mix-up," declared Ross. "There's no saying what
might have happened to you if Rex hadn't been on the job."
"Was it Rex who brought you here?"
"It sure was," Ross replied, and he described how the terrier had pulled
him by the leg and insisted on his coming over to the house in the
hollow.
"Where's Rex now," queried Anton, "down in our old boat?"
"Yes, he's down there, keeping watch, good old scout," answered Ross.
"He ought to be satisfied now, he certainly made fuss enough to bring me
here. But, look here, Anton, how are we going to get you out? You don't
swim."
"No," answered his chum mournfully, "I can't swim."
"If there was room enough down that stair," said Ross, thoughtfully, "I
could take you on my back, but we'd never get through that door, and
the window would be even worse."
"I'd been thinking of that," Anton answered. "I wondered how Dad would
get me when he found out that I wasn't with Uncle Jack and came for me.
So I made a long rope out of strips of my sheets."
"What's the good of that?"
"Well," said the younger boy, "I was wondering if I couldn't get out of
the window. My arms are awful strong, you know, Ross."
"Yes," the other agreed, "you've plenty of muscle there."
"I thought if I could drop that line out of the window, Dad could grab
it and hold the boat there. Then I could chuck down Lassie and the pups
in a basket--I've got the basket--and slide down the rope of sheets into
the boat."
Ross thought for a minute.
"I don't see why we couldn't do that now," he said. "Suppose we tied a
piece of wood to the end of this rope of sheets, so that it would float,
the current would curl it around the corner of the house so that I could
get hold of it from the boat. If your end of the line was made fast up
here, I could hand over hand the boat right under your window, the way
you say. Why, I could get you out without any trouble at all! Let's see
how it goes."
Suiting the action to the word, Ross tied one end of the line of sheets
around the hinge of the door, passed it through the window, and, to the
other end, tied a spare crutch. Then he leaned out of the window and
watched it. The current snatched the crutch down and, as Ross expected,
swung it around the corner of the house.
"Fine," said the lad. "We can work that all right. I'll have you out of
here in two shakes, Anton. Where are the pups?"
Anton pointed to the bed, on which a basket was lying.
"Aren't they dandies?" he said.
Ross took the candle over and picked up one of the pups. Lassie growled
in a low voice.
"All right, Lassie," said Ross, "you ought to know me."
He bent down and patted her.
The dog smelt his hand and whacked her tail on the floor in token of
recognition, but growled again, nevertheless.
"I won't hurt your pup," declared Ross, putting the blind little
creature back in the basket.
"Nicely marked, Anton," he said, "they look great. But we've got to get
busy."
He went to the head of the staircase and stared down.
"It doesn't look a bit nice," he declared, "I sort of hate to go through
there again."
"Why do you?" queried Anton. "You could go down the line and reach the
boat that way."
"That's an idea," declared Ross thoughtfully, then he shook his head.
"No," he said, "my weight would swing the crutch out clear away from the
house. I'd better go down the way I came up. I can always get back,
anyway."
He ran down the staircase until the water reached to his chest and then
struck out. The water had risen slightly, but he got through the door
without any trouble. Passing through the window he was not so lucky, for
a projecting splinter of glass scraped him as he dived through, making a
long but shallow cut in the upper part of his arm.
Rex welcomed him back with short joyful barks.
"I'm not a bit sure," said Ross as he patted the dog, "whether it was
Anton or the pups that you wanted me to rescue, eh? Which was it?"
For answer Rex only wagged his tail and jumped up on his young master.
"Down, Rex, down," ordered Ross, "this boat's too cranky for that sort
of thing. Now, where's that crutch?"
In the darkness and the pouring rain it was hard to distinguish
anything, but the white gleam of the sheets showed where the crutch was
floating.
"Out of reach," muttered Ross in disgust. "Just my luck! How am I going
to get it?"
It was a problem. The crutch was floating on the current above twelve
feet beyond the reach of the boat's painter, let out to its utmost
length. By stretching out with one of the oars, Ross was about four feet
short. Just four feet, but so far as success was concerned, it might as
well have been four miles.
If he jumped from the boat and swam for it, there was always a chance
that the current would pluck him down before he could grasp the line,
and then he would not only be in danger himself, but he would have lost
all chance of saving his crippled friend. As long as he stayed either
with the boat or with the house, there was a chance. It would be
foolhardy to lose connection with both.
Then a brilliant idea struck him. Suppose he tied the painter of the
boat under his arms, loosed the boat from the post and jumped into the
water. He ought to reach the floating line before the current had taken
up the slack of the boat's painter. If he left loose a long enough end,
with a loop knot, he could fasten the rope from the boat to the line of
sheets, and the boat would be made fast. The loop knot would unfasten
itself and he could easily clamber into the boat, from the stern, since
it was fastened to the line coming out from Anton's window. Then he
could haul up the boat, hand over hand, as agreed upon, take Anton and
the puppies aboard and strike out straight for the shore.
No sooner was the idea conceived than Ross proceeded to put it into
action. Slipping the line around his arms, once, he tied a loop knot in
front of his chest, where it would be easy to reach, leaving about three
feet of rope hanging, untied the painter and shoved off the boat. The
instant that the boat felt the current it yawed around, but, at the same
moment, Ross jumped out and forward with all his might. The action sent
the boat down-stream all the quicker, but in a second's time, Ross had
grasped the floating crutch and had taken a turn with the loose end of
the rope around it.
He was not an instant too soon, for a sharp tug at his chest, followed
by a sudden release of the weight, told him that the loop knot had
untied itself, as he hoped it would. Holding on to the sheet line with
one hand, he rapidly passed the rope once under and through. Ross had
not learned his knots from the Mississippi sailors for nothing, and as
the boat came to the end of its tether and jerked on the line, the boy
had the satisfaction of seeing the knot tighten. With the strain off, it
was easy to take another half-hitch around the line, and the knot was
secure beyond peradventure. He climbed aboard, raised a cheery cry to
Anton, and commenced to pull the boat hand over hand along the line of
sheets. It was only a moment before the little craft was bobbing on the
flood, immediately beneath the window.
"Let's have the puppies first," cried Ross.
Anton's head disappeared from the window, and reappeared in a moment.
"Catch!" he cried and held out the basket.
Ross balanced himself as best he could and caught the falling basket. It
was not more than a five feet drop and the basket landed squarely in
his arms. He placed it in the boat. Loud barking overhead announced that
Lassie was displeased and worried over the sudden departure of her
offspring.
"How am I going to get Lassie out?" queried Anton. "I'd never thought of
that. She'll strangle if I let her down by the collar."
"That's easy," Ross called back. "Tie a bit of string to her collar,
chuck me the end of the string, and then throw her into the water. It
won't hurt her, and I can easily haul her aboard."
"All right, then," the other answered, "get the boat out of the way."
"Chuck me down the end of the string first," warned Ross, and, as he
spoke, a ball of stout twine fell in the boat. "Out with her now," he
continued, slackening away on the line, so that the boat was no longer
directly out of the window.
There was a moment's pause and then the big dog appeared in the opening,
struggling in Anton's strong, if clumsy, grasp. She clawed at the
window-sill, not understanding what was happening, but Anton gave her a
push, and half turning as she fell, Lassie struck the water all of a
heap. The instant she was afloat, however, her natural swimming
instincts asserted themselves and she started for the shore.
"Here, Lassie!" called Ross, with a whistle, and pulled gently on the
string that was fastened to her collar. The dog felt the pull and turned
around, swimming directly for the boat. Ross stooped down and lifted her
in. The mother immediately smelt the puppies and scrambled along the
bottom of the boat to the basket. She smelt her children, nosed them
over, one by one, then, satisfied that everything was all right, muzzled
against Rex, and lay down contentedly.
This feat accomplished, Ross pulled the boat under the window again.
"Now, Anton," he called, "it's your turn."
"All right," the younger lad replied, "I'm coming."
Ross heard him drag a chair to the window, to make it easier for him to
clamber out.
Just at that instant, there came a cracking from the front of the house,
the corner-post of the porch, to which the boat had been fastened less
than five minutes before, fell with a crash and the front of the house
crumbled. There was a moment's pause, and then the whole structure
keeled over, away from the boat, and with a rending and cracking of
timbers, broke from its foundation. Over and over it heeled, and it
looked as though it would go to pieces. From the window overhead came a
scream of terror.
Realizing that Anton could never save himself, if the house were
collapsing, Ross leaped for the rope of linen that was hanging out of
the window and went up it like a monkey.
The chair on which Anton had climbed, to get out of the window, had slid
to the far end of the room and fallen on the sloping floor, the lower
edge of which was now in the water, and the crippled lad was pinned down
and unable to get out. The candle had been thrown down on the table and
fire was beginning to lick some paper that had not slipped to the floor.
Ross dashed in, grabbed Anton by the arm, picked him up with the
"firemen's carry" and staggered up the sloping floor to the window.
Had the boat suffered in the careening of the house?
The line, made of linen sheets, still was taut, and Ross, peering out of
the window, saw to his great delight that the boat was still there with
all its passengers safe, Rex, Lassie, and the puppies.
A lurch almost threw Ross upon his face and the whole house swayed as
though with a violent earthquake. The next instant, a sense of motion
beneath them told the boys that the house was afloat.
"The house has gone, the house has gone! What are we going to do?" cried
the crippled boy.
"That's all right, Anton," the older lad said consolingly, "things
aren't so bad. See, it's beginning to get daylight."
"But," said the younger boy, "the house is floating down to Pirate's
Cave, that gully where the big rocks are. If we run up against those,
the house'll be smashed to bits, sure."
Ross thought for a moment and saw that his chum was right.
"Guess we'll have to take to the boat after all, Anton," he said, "it's
a good thing the house got on a level keel again, when she came afloat."
Action was needed and that immediately. Ross climbed half-way through
the window.
"I've got to get that boat up here in a hurry," he said, "the current's
swift enough, when you're in that small boat, but this house doesn't
float down so fast. It's a mile, anyway, to the gully."
So saying, he swung himself out of the window, went down the linen rope
and dropped into the water. Hand over hand, again, up the rope came the
boat until once more it was under the window. Meanwhile, by heroic
exertions, Anton had swung himself up on the window-sill. As the boat
came beneath him, the crippled lad swung out on the rope and proceeded
to climb down into the boat.
He was not a moment too soon. While Ross had been bringing the boat to
place, the speed of the current had increased and the house, like a
clumsy Noah's Ark, began to sweep swiftly towards the gully of which
Anton had spoken.
"Quick, Anton," said Ross, as the smaller lad hesitated, "we've got to
be quick."
He cut the boat loose.
In spite of his blunt words, it was with the greatest gentleness that
Ross handed the lad to a seat in the rough craft where they had played
pirates during the preceding summer, and settled down to his oars.
Lassie, finding her master safe in the boat, came and laid her head on
his knee, while the shore went slipping by. Here and there a barn still
stood, the tops of the trees showed above the flood, but all the ground
was hidden and the torrent was running like a mill-race. Little by
little, Ross edged the boat towards the shore, not trying to stem the
current but rowing diagonally across it. Only a few hundred yards
separated the house from the gorge which the boys knew as Pirates Cave.
By this time the boat had reached the higher portion of the hollow,
where the current slackened. A few strong strokes of the oars and the
boat grounded, safely.
At that instant the slight lightening of the rain-filled skies showed
that, behind the clouds, the sun had risen. The boys turned to look at
the house which had been Anton's refuge, and which so nearly had been
his tomb. As they looked, the structure struck against the uppermost of
the rocks with a crash and collapsed as though made of matchwood, while,
a second after, into the medley of boards and timbers some uprooted
trees came crashing.
"You wouldn't have stood much chance there, Anton," said Ross.
The crippled lad put his hand on the older boy's shoulder, with as close
an approach to a gesture of affection as boy nature would permit.
"I guess I'd have been a goner," he answered, "but for you."
CHAPTER II
THE HOME OF THE RAIN
The gray morning broke over the desolate scene, and Anton, hollow-eyed
and exhausted, looked at the muddy waters rushing savagely over the
place where his home had stood. By the tops of the trees, only, was he
able to trace the outline of the fields he had known all his boyhood.
"Do you suppose it'll ever dry up, Ross?" he asked.
"Of course it will, Anton," the older lad said, reassuringly, "you'll
see. In a week or two all this water'll run off and you'll forget that
the old place ever looked like this."
The crippled lad shook his head, as though in doubt.
"My books have gone," he said mournfully.
The tones were quiet, but a tragedy lay beneath the words, and no one
knew better than Ross how largely his chum's life lay in the world
revealed in his tiny library. The flood would pass away and the
fertility of summer would hide every trace of the disaster, but for
Anton's loss there was no such swift remedy. His books were his closest
friends, and now, at one stroke, he was bereft of all of them.
"Come," said Ross, to change the current of his chum's thoughts, "we'll
have to make a start. Where do you suppose your folks are?"
The younger lad turned to his friend with the quick responsiveness and
willing resignation often found among those who have suffered a great
deal or who are handicapped in Life's race.
"I haven't the least idea," he said, "they might have gone over to the
other shore."
"Yes," agreed Ross, thoughtfully, "that's likely. They'd certainly have
more chance of finding help and grub over there. And, talking of grub,
Anton, aren't you hungry?"
"Starving," admitted the younger lad.
"Then I tell you what, we'd better go and hunt up Levin."
"The chap who used to be with the Weather Bureau, you mean?" Anton
asked.
"Yes."
"Don't you think that I ought to try to find Father first?" queried the
younger lad, hesitatingly. "He might be worrying."
"It's because of your folks that I think we ought to go first to the
camp," explained Ross. "We couldn't possibly row right across the flood
to the other shore. We've had trouble enough getting as far as this.
Besides, Anton, even if we did get over, we wouldn't know where to look
for your people. There's a chance that Levin may have heard from them,
and if he hasn't, he might send some one with a message. We couldn't do
much searching, anyway."
In truth, the boys were utterly exhausted. The only member of the party
who seemed in high spirits was Rex. He frisked about and jumped on the
two boys, his tail sticking straight up in the air, as though he were
convinced that it was solely through his exertions that Lassie and the
puppies had been rescued.
Ross slung the basket, with its living freight, across his shoulders and
started off. Lassie watched this elevation of her children with manifest
uneasiness, but as her master seemed satisfied, there was nothing for
her to do but to follow behind, which she did with her nose as close to
the basket as possible.
Nerve-frazzled and tired out, Anton pegged away behind. The heavy
downpour of rain, which had not ceased for a day and a night, and which
had followed upon the heavy rains of the week before, had made the
ground as soft as a bog. The crippled lad's crutch sank in so deeply at
every step that it was only with great pain that he could keep up at
all. Still, he struggled along bravely.
Ross, turning to see how his chum was faring, caught the boy's tense and
haggard look, and understood.
"Look here, Anton," he said, at once, "we'll never get anywhere this
way. You get into the boat and I'll tow you."
"But you can't, you're just about all in," protested the younger boy.
"You can't tow the boat with me in it, all the way."
"Got to!" declared Ross abruptly. "It's a sure thing that you're not
able to walk there with the ground in this sodden condition. Anyway, I
won't have to carry the puppies."
Thankful but still protesting, Anton got into the boat and the journey
began anew.
It was a weary way. Ross staggered forward, half-blind with sleep,
wading knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep, in the water. The rain had
stopped, but the sky was heavy and the clouds hung low. Twice Anton had
to jerk on the tow-rope to jolt Ross awake, for, unnoticing, he was
heading for deep water. Even near the shore the torrent was full of
floating debris. The bodies of horses and cattle drifting down the
stream told of many impoverished farms and the flotsam was eloquent of
wrecked and demolished houses and indicative of suffering.
When, after an hour's toil, rescuer and rescued reached the drier land
that sloped up to the levee, it was hard to tell which was the more
exhausted. To the last, however, Ross refused to let his chum bear the
burden of the puppies, and he lurched up the road to the place where he
had left the gang at work on the cave-in, not so many hours before. It
seemed weeks ago.
The Weather Man was still at work. He had been up all night, also, but
he greeted the lad cheerily as he came in sight.
"Hello, Boss!" he called, then, as the boy's exhausted state became more
evident, "what have you been doing? Has anything happened?"
"Anton was marooned," answered Ross in the dull, listless voice of
extreme fatigue.
"Marooned? You mean he was caught by the flood?"
As though in answer, Anton, toiling heavily and wearily on his crutch,
came in sight.
"Yes," said Ross, in the same tone, "he was left behind."
"How was that?" the Weather Man asked sharply.
"It wasn't anybody's fault, Mr. Levin," replied Anton, who had heard the
last two sentences as he came up, "Father thought I'd gone with Uncle
Jack, and Uncle Jack thought I'd gone with Father."
"You're not hurt?"
"No, sir," the crippled lad answered, "not a bit. Ross is, though. He
cut his arm diving through the window."
The Forecaster turned swiftly to the older boy and began examining the
injury.
"Is the house still standing?" he asked.
"No, sir," the boy answered, "it's all in bits down by Jackson's Gully."
The weather expert nodded. He knew the lay of the land and had expected
the water from the flooded hollow to pour down towards the entrance to
the gully.
"How did you get out, then?" he asked.
Anton burst into a glowing account of his rescue in the little boat
which the boys had made for their pirate adventures of two years before.
Even the excitement of the story, however, was not strong enough to keep
his overtaxed frame from showing signs of a breakdown and the Weather
Man cut the story short.
"I'm going to breakfast later," he said curtly, "but not for a couple of
hours. You two had better take a rest now. Here, Sam," he called to one
of the negroes, "bring me a bucket of coffee from your camp-kettle, and
fetch some corn-pone. Quick now, these boys are famished."
"Yas, suh! Yas, suh!" came the reply, and, a moment later, a bucket of
coffee and some corn-bread and molasses were brought.
Despite their hunger, neither Ross nor Anton could eat more than a few
mouthfuls, and the hot drink was the last straw to their sleepiness.
Ross fell asleep with an unfinished piece of corn-pone in his hand, and
Anton's head was nodding.
"Ain' no more weight than a babby, Mister Levin," said the laborer, as
he picked up the little crippled lad and carried him to a tiny open shed
near by, which was the only dry spot to be found in the neighborhood.
Very tenderly he laid the boy down on a pile of clothes that had been
salvaged while the Forecaster put his overcoat over Ross and laid him
beside his chum.
"There," said the Weather Man, "let them sleep a while. They'll be ready
for a real breakfast in a couple of hours."
Though hungry himself, the Forecaster waited for three hours before
awakening the lads. Anton, by nature a light sleeper, awoke easily and
was refreshed, but the awakening of Ross was a real task. He had been on
a severe strain for twenty-seven hours and Nature demanded sleep. At
last, however, he was roused and after he had plunged his head in a pail
of cold water, he felt as full of ginger as ever and ready to start on
rescue work all over again.
"I'm just going to breakfast," the Forecaster announced. "Do you want to
go along?"
"Do I? I should say I did! But I'm afraid, sir, that Anton and I will
eat up everything in sight."
"You don't need to worry about that," the Forecaster replied, "my men
have been hauling supplies all night. Why, Ross, there are over two
thousand people homeless this morning, right around this district.
They've all got to eat breakfast, too, so you see even your best
efforts won't seriously decrease the supply."
"I'm not so sure about that, sir," Ross said laughing, "right now I feel
as though I could eat all you've gathered for the entire two thousand."
"Come and try, then," the Weather Man said, smiling. Then, turning to
Anton, he continued, "Likely enough, some of your people will be at the
big tent that's been put up. If they're not there, I'll send out a
couple of the boys on horseback to cover both sides of the flooded area
and pass the word that you're safe." He turned to the older boy. "I've
already sent word to your father, Ross."
The boys thanked him and started down the levee. Owing to the continuous
work of the night, the cave-in had gradually been filled up, averting a
break at this point. The river, turbid and swollen, was swirling by, not
more than three feet below the top of the levee.
"Is the water going down yet, Mr. Levin?" asked Ross. "It looks as
though the rain were over."
"Yes," answered the Forecaster, "the rain is over, but the water's not
going down yet. It's rising. I'm fairly sure that there won't be any
more rain for a few days, fortunately, but I heard from Greenville this
morning that the river was still rising. We can stand another nine or
ten inches, but a foot would be serious. Of course, the break that
flooded out Jackson's Hollow, where your place was, Anton, is relieving
the pressure a little. We've been lucky here. I haven't heard of any
loss of life so far. It's a nasty flood, but when the rainfall last week
was reported as being so heavy, I knew we couldn't escape trouble."
"Is it just the rain that makes floods?" Anton asked.
"Just rain," was the laconic answer.
"Why is it," asked the younger boy, "that there's more rain one year
than another?"
"If I could tell you that," the old Weather Forecaster replied, "I'd be
the cleverest meteorologist in the world."
"But doesn't anybody know why it rains?"
"Certainly, we know why it rains."
"Why, Mr. Levin?"
The Forecaster pushed back his hat from his forehead and looked
quizzically at the white-faced lad.
"You really want to know why rain comes? Very well, Anton, I'll try to
tell you. Stop me, though, if you don't quite understand.
"The Earth goes whirling about in space, revolving around the Sun, as
you know, and it has, like a sort of skin around it, an envelope of air.
This air is kept from flying off by the force of gravity. You know what
that is?"
"Yes, sir," the cripple answered, "it's what makes a stone fall to the
ground."
"Exactly. Now the air is made up of little particles or molecules, like
the stone, only, of course, not so heavy. They're heavy enough, though.
How much weight of air do you suppose you're carrying, Anton?"
The boy looked puzzled.
"I don't quite see what you mean, sir," he answered.
"Suppose you had a pea on your head, it wouldn't be heavy to carry,
would it?"
"Why, no," answered the lad, laughing.
"Supposing you had a basket of peas, the basket being only about as big
round as your head, but six feet high, that would make quite a load,
wouldn't it?"
"I don't believe I could carry it," was the answer.
"And if the basket were sixty feet high, as high as a barn?"
"I'd be squashed under it."
"And if it were six miles high!"
"Why," answered Anton, "a basket six miles high, even if you filled it
up with cotton fluff, would weigh tons and tons!"
"Well, my boy," said the Weather Forecaster, "you're carrying on the top
of your head a column of air, not only six, but sixty miles high, yes,
and more than that! You don't notice it, of course, because you're used
to it, and your body is made to accommodate itself to that weight by
your tissues being full of air at the same pressure. Just the same, not
counting the weight which presses on your whole body, amounting to about
seventeen tons, you're carrying on your head, at this minute, a weight
of over six hundred pounds."
"Six hundred pounds! As much as if I were carrying three heavy men
sitting on my head!"
"Every bit of it, and more, under certain conditions of the atmosphere.
This depends mainly on the circulation of the winds, especially those
great movements a thousand miles in diameter known as 'lows' and 'highs'
or cyclones and anti-cyclones. In the United States, an anti-cyclone
generally means fair weather, and in an anti-cyclone the barometric
column rises. That's why a barometer helps to foretell weather some time
in advance; it responds to the vast movements of the atmosphere rather
than to local conditions.
"Of course, Anton, at sixty miles up, the air is so thin that it has
hardly any weight. Indeed, we wouldn't know there was any air at that
height but for the trail that shooting stars leave. A meteor glows
because of friction, and in a vacuum there is no friction. Therefore
there must be air at the vast heights where shooting stars are first
seen."
"Could an aeroplane get up there?"
The Forecaster shook his head.
"Never," he answered. "Even six miles up, the air would be too thin to
sustain the weight of an aeroplane unless the machine were flying at
terrific velocity, and besides, at that height, there wouldn't be enough
air for an aviator to breathe. At that, Anton, you can see for yourself
that if the air is saturated with water vapor--and the cloud-bearing
atmosphere is eight or ten miles thick--there is room for a lot of
water."
"It's evaporation that puts water into the air, isn't it, sir?" asked
Ross.
"Exactly. The sun is shining on some part of the earth all the time.
There's never a second, day or night, that water is not being evaporated
from the seas, from lakes, from rivers and from the earth itself. All
the water that is taken up must fall somewhere, and all the rain that
falls means that the atmosphere must fill itself with water vapor again.
It's a continuous performance, and the water which is being evaporated
into the air falls to the earth, sooner or later, as rain, hail, or
snow."
"If it's all so regular," said Anton thoughtfully, "I don't see why we
don't get the same amount of rain every day, or at least every season."
"It isn't regular at all," the Weather Forecaster explained. "If
climatic conditions were regular, we could forecast the weather several
years in advance, instead of only a few days. There are a thousand
complicating factors. Land and sea are irregularly divided, and as there
is more evaporation from the sea than the land, every little curve in a
coast line means a disturbance of regularity. Then, Anton, remember,
while the earth is almost a globe it is not perfectly round, so that
every variation from the regular curve disturbs the air currents.
Moreover, the motions of the earth are very complicated. Sometimes it is
nearer the sun than at other times. It wobbles slightly on its axis. It
is inclined to the plane of the ecliptic, causing the seasons, and that
brings a new set of factors into the problem. A mountain range or a
desert will modify the atmosphere, even the difference between a forest
and a prairie is noticeable."
"Suppose you could figure all those things out, couldn't you foretell
the weather, then?"
The Forecaster shook his head.
"Suppose you had a thousand marbles of different colors," he said, "and
you dropped them from the top of a house to the hard ground below, a
rough and rocky piece of ground, could you ever figure out what kind of
a pattern they would make? You might measure the size of the marbles and
compute how many times they would strike against each other in falling,
meantime figuring the angles of direction that each collision would
produce. You might measure the resistance of the ground and the
elasticity of the marbles and estimate the manner in which they would
bounce after striking the ground and the distance to which they would
roll. After you had done all that, you might have the right to expect
that you would know the pattern that the marbles would make as they lay
scattered on the ground. But you would be wrong, for if you dropped
those marbles a thousand, yes, a million times, the pattern would be
different each time. After tens of billions of experiments you might be
able to find the proportion of patterns, but the result would never be
of practical use.
"It's the same way with the weather. We know well enough how to do the
things that would enable us to prophesy a long time in advance what the
weather is going to be, but the problem approaches impossibility because
there are too many factors that enter into the calculation. We're
learning all the time, but it's a big piece of work and needs big men to
do it. That's why, Anton, I can't tell you why this particular district
had more rain this year than it has had for several seasons past."
Anton, pegging away on his crutch beside the Forecaster, looked up at
him with an added eagerness in his eyes.
"And yet all those things are going on, right where I can see them!" he
exclaimed.
"Yes," the Weather Man answered. "Some men can explore distant
countries, and we envy them; some men can explore the greatest and the
smallest things in the world with marvellous scientific instruments and
we envy them, too; but every day and all day, and every night and all
night, we are surrounded by the World of the Weather, less explored,
less known than even the most remote corner of the earth. Why, Anton, if
you could simply follow all the various causes that brought about this
flood that made you homeless, you would have a story of adventure that
would make the most daring explorer green with envy."
"But you do predict floods and rains, Mr. Levin," Ross put in. "Father
told me, a week ago, that warnings for this flood had been sent out by
the Weather Bureau."
"Yes, indeed," the Weather Man answered. "I should say that weather
warnings issued by the Bureau save half a billion dollars to the country
every year and prevent the loss of hundreds of lives. All those are
short-range predictions. Very few of them cover much more than a week in
advance, except, perhaps, a West Indian Hurricane which has been
reported from the Antilles, or a flood on the Mississippi which is
caused by heavy rains in the upper reaches of the streams flowing into
it."
"Well, that's prophesying, isn't it?"
"Yes, and no," was the reply. "It's predicting, and it's due to
observation. If a storm is moving eastward, with a heavy rainfall, and
we've had telegraphic dispatches from all the towns in the west through
which it has passed, it's not hard to figure the speed at which the
storm is traveling, and it's a sure prediction to tell a city to the
eastward of that storm that rain can be expected at about a certain
date. Or, if there's a high flood wave at St. Louis, and we know the
speed of the Mississippi current, we can notify Greenville, Vicksburg,
and New Orleans at what time the trouble is likely to come to them. If
no more rain is falling at Greenville and the river is going down there,
we can notify Vicksburg that the flood danger is passing away. That's
the observational end of the work, and in that line, the Weather Bureau
of the United States is the best in the world."
The weather expert was proceeding to explain in detail the manner of
collecting these observations, when suddenly Anton clutched him by the
arm.
"What's that, Mr. Levin?" he cried.
The Forecaster looked ahead, then glanced down at the boy with a smile.
"What does it look like?" he asked.
"Why," said Anton, "it looks like a circus tent; you know, the one that
was here the week before last."
"It is the circus tent," the Forecaster replied. "When I found that
there were a couple of thousand people to be fed and looked after, the
only shelter I could think of, that was big enough, was the circus tent.
So, late last night, I sent a wagon up there, asking for the loan of the
tent for a day or two. And what do you suppose the circus folk did?"
"Sent it?"
"They sent it, with two of their wagons, a lot of food, their cooking
kit, and the two cooks who travel with the circus. What's more, Anton,
you remember those two clowns in the show who were so funny?"
"You bet I do!" exclaimed the lad, his eyes shining.
"They volunteered to come down and help as waiters. They're doing it,
too, and it's a right good thing, for every one around in the place is
roaring with laughter half the time. Folks work a lot better when
they're cheerful."
A perfect gale of merriment, which greeted the boys as they neared the
tent, showed the truth of the Forecaster's statement. He had greatly
understated the work of the circus. Nearly all the performers were
there, busily helping the distressed.
"They're a right kindly folk, the circus people, as a rule," remarked
the Forecaster.
"Are they all here?" queried Anton. "Goliath, the strong man, the Flying
Squirrel Brothers, Androcles, the lion tamer, Princess Tiny and the
rest?"
"Yes, most of them," the Forecaster answered. "Goliath is in charge of
one of the gangs I've got at work on the river front, and the darkies
are so proud of being under him that they're working like fury. The
Flying Squirrel Brothers--cracker-jack mechanics, both of them--have
been fixing up some tackle and machinery that we needed, but I think
Androcles stayed back with his lions. I suppose he thought the lions
wouldn't do us any good. But if you're not too hungry to wait just for a
second--"
He paused.
"What?" queried Anton excitedly.
"Yes, there they are!" the Forecaster answered, gazing along the levee.
Both boys followed his glance.
Vast, bulky shadows stood outlined against the distant Arkansas shore
and the clearing sky. Unreal they seemed, until it was evident that they
were moving.
There, shuffling along with that heavy rolling gait which is unlike that
of any other animal in the world, came two colossal elephants.
Anton shrieked with delight.
"Elephants! Real elephants!" he cried. "Oh, Mr. Levin, I haven't ever
seen an elephant quite close."
He started off up the levee, but the Forecaster called him back.
"Have your breakfast first, Anton," he said; "you've got all day to look
at the elephants. They're the best workers I've got. I'd like to have a
gang of them at work on the levee all the time."
This sentiment was not shared by Rex. At the first sight of the huge
creatures, Lassie had given a low growl. Rex stood silent, with a
stillness that Ross knew to be ominous, and just as the Forecaster
finished speaking, with an angry growl, he started off to do battle
against the elephants. It was a sight to see him, with his hair
bristling, rushing forward to dispute the passage of these huge brutes
who dared to approach the vicinity of Lassie and the puppies. Only the
sharp commands of Ross availed to bring him back, and throughout
breakfast he lay well in advance of the tent, watching, and growling
loudly every time the elephants passed, dragging the flat sleds loaded
with sand bags to the cave-in a few hundred yards beyond.
"I've been wondering," began Anton, using the expression most often on
his lips, "why there are so many floods on the Mississippi. Why is it?
Lots of rivers I know don't have these awful floods every year."
"I've wondered, too," said Ross.
The Weather Man looked at the two boys, then took a cigar out of his
pocket.
"I can't stay away from the levee very long," he said, "but I need a
cigar after breakfast, anyway, and I'll tell you why the Mississippi is
one of the worst flood rivers in the world and why the safeguarding of
the Mississippi is the biggest piece of work to be done in the United
States. It's a bigger piece of work than the Panama Canal, and a more
difficult piece of work. It means millions of dollars every year to the
people of the United States."
"Why is it such a hard job?"
"The Mississippi River," the Forecaster began, "is two and a half
thousand miles in length; the longest river in the world."
"Longer than the Amazon?" asked Anton.
"Yes, a great deal. Besides, it is navigable for nearly two thousand
miles, clear from St. Paul, Minnesota, to the Gulf. It drains two-fifths
of the area of the United States. To put it another way, all the rain
and snow that falls between New York State and Montana sooner or later
makes its way into the Mississippi River, except for the rain that is
used up by plants and animals or that is evaporated before it reaches
the river or that drains by underground seepage to the ocean. So you see
what a vast amount of water it must carry. Now, boys," he continued,
"what kind of banks has the river around here, rock or earth?"
"Mud!" answered Ross, tersely.
"Right," the Forecaster agreed, "and it is mud nearly all the way along.
But do you know what mud is?"
This was rather a poser, but finally Anton said slowly,
"It's a mixture of earth and water, isn't it?"
The Forecaster looked shrewdly at the boy.
"You've hit it just right," he said, "mud is earth or soil that has been
washed down by the river. That's what makes the bottom of the river so
irregular and why it's always shifting. You can see for yourselves,
boys, that if the bottom of the Mississippi is just made of light mud,
light enough to be carried down as muddy water for hundreds of miles,
any little change in the current of the river will stir up that mud
again and scoop out a hole. If it happens to be near a bank, the bank
will be eaten away and, naturally, will cave right in."
"About how much mud does the Mississippi carry down, Mr. Levin?" Anton
asked.
"In flood time, as much as a thousand tons a minute will be carried past
here."
Ross whistled.
"A thousand tons a minute!" he exclaimed. "Why, I should think that
would fill up the river in no time."
"It would," the Weather Man answered, "if the river stood still. In
flood time, however, the water is flowing rapidly and takes the mud
clear down to the delta. That's why there is always so much new land
being made at the mouth of the river. You could buy a piece of land
under water now, Ross, if you wanted, and be quite sure that in twenty
years' time there would be land there for a farm."
"But a thousand tons a minute!" the boy repeated, "that seems huge!"
"It is pretty big," the Forecaster agreed, "but I'll show you where it
comes from. You know, boys, generally the land slopes down in the
direction of the river, doesn't it?"
"Yes," assented the two boys, "it's supposed to. But it doesn't here.
The lie of the land is away from the river."
"That's just exactly the point," the Forecaster declared. "The banks of
the Mississippi range in height from about twenty to forty feet above
extreme low water. As the river, in times of flood, rises as high as
forty to fifty feet above low water, unless there were levees, the river
would overflow its banks every spring or flood time."
"It does, quite often, even yet," commented Ross, looking on the flooded
scene around him.
"Well," said the Weather Man, "the present levee system only dates
back to the end of the Civil War, although there were levees built
during the first settlement of New Orleans, two centuries ago. Remember,
though, that the Mississippi has been flowing down its present bed for
several hundred thousand years, with a flood every spring, so that the
overflow has had its effect. Of course, before the land was broken up by
farming, there wasn't as much earth carried down into the river to make
mud as there is now.
"When the Mississippi River, with its heavy sediment, overflows the
banks into the swamps, it's easy to see that the current will be slower
in the flooded area than in the main bed of the river."
"Of course," agreed Ross, "but what has that got to do with it?"
"A great deal," the Forecaster replied succinctly. "The faster a river
flows, the more sediment it can carry without allowing it to drop to the
bottom; the slower it flows, the more readily is the sediment dropped.
If you put some mud in a glass of water and keep stirring it with a
spoon, the mud will never sink to the bottom. Even if you let it stand
perfectly still, it will take several days before the finest particles
sink to the bottom of the glass and the water becomes clear."
"Yes," agreed Anton, "I've often wondered why."
"Well," the Weather Man continued, "if you look closely at the mud in
the bottom of the glass, you'll see that the bigger particles are at the
bottom and then those a little smaller and so on up, until your top
layer is made of a mud composed of particles so fine that you'd have to
get a microscope to see them."
"I don't quite see why," said Ross. "I know bigger things are heavier,
but why should a big bit of earth sink more quickly than a small bit,
when they're both made of just exactly the same stuff?"
The Weather Man looked at him.
"Some of these days," he said, "remind me to talk to you about sunlight
and dust, and I'll tell you a heap of things you don't know. Right now,
get this idea in your head. The larger a piece of matter is, the smaller
is the surface in proportion to the bulk. A feather of swan's down will
float in a high wind, but if you roll that feather into a ball, it will
fall. Why? You haven't made it any heavier. You've only reduced the
amount of surface which was borne up by the air. It's the same way with
mud, the bigger pieces sink first because they have less surface in
proportion to their weight."
"Yes," answered Ross, "I can see that now."
"Very good, then," the Forecaster continued, "when the Mississippi
overflowed its banks and the water got out of the current of the main
stream, so that it flowed more gently, the sediment began to fall, the
larger pieces first and those that were finer until it was only at the
most distant point from the river that the finest mud settled. This has
gone on, year after year, for thousands of years.
"Therefore, you see, the lands nearest the river are higher than those
farther away. In two big basins, the St. Francis and the Yazoo basins,
the slope and the drainage is away from the river, instead of towards
it."
"In that case, then," said Anton thoughtfully, "the Mississippi runs in
a groove on the top of a hill."
"That's it exactly," the Forecaster said, "and some of the most fertile
fields lie in the lowlands made of the fine mud at the bottom of this
hill. It's just like that hollow where your house was, Anton. The flood
hasn't done much damage south of here because all the waters poured down
into that fine plantation land where your place was located."
"What I don't see," said Ross, "is why the Government doesn't build a
really high levee all the way along the river. I don't mean just a few
feet higher, but a regular wall 'way higher than the river ever goes. I
mean a regular stone wall, twice as high as any levee that we've got
now. I should think that would make the river behave."
"It would and it wouldn't," replied the Weather Man. "What are you going
to build that wall on? On the ground?"
"I suppose so," said Ross. "I hadn't thought much about that."
"Indeed you hadn't," his friend replied. "You've got to remember, Ross,
that the Mississippi doesn't run in a straight line; it bends and twists
like a snake. In the bends the current strikes on the outwardly curving
bank, and, as you know, the water is always deep there. This causes a
rapid caving and erosion of the bank. At the foot of each bend, the main
flow crosses to the other side, where it strikes the bank which has
become concave there, and eats into that bank just as, a few hundred
yards higher, it has been eating into the opposite one."
"I know you've always got to pilot a boat first on one side of the river
and then on the other," said Ross thoughtfully.
"You have. And, if you remember, you'll see that it is generally on the
side nearest to the concave shore that the boats pass."
"Yes," agreed Ross thoughtfully, "I guess it is."
"Now, you can easily see," the Forecaster continued, "that the river
might keep its own channel clean if it flowed straight down with a
current of equal strength. But, as the current crosses from side to
side, it slackens speed at each of these crossings. Therefore, as the
current becomes slower, it drops some of the heavier particles of sand
or mud, forming a bar at every bend, sometimes so high as to prevent
navigation."
"That's what the dredges are for, isn't it?" asked Ross.
"Yes. The Government has twelve large dredges at work all the time,
keeping the navigation channel open."
"I don't see, yet, why the stone wall idea wouldn't work," protested
Ross.
"I'm just showing you," was the reply. "If you built your heavy wall on
the bank, the water would strike the concave bank at one of these
crossings, eat away the earth under the wall and your wall would topple
in. Then the current would cross the stream, undermine the bank on the
other side and your masonry would crumble there, too. So much for the
wall."
"Suppose you sunk that wall, away down deep, below the level of the
bottom of the river?" suggested Ross.
"That might work," the expert replied, "but it would cost more money
than the United States could afford to spend. Besides, Ross, where would
you build this wall? Right on the bank?"
"Of course."
"But the Mississippi is half a mile wide at some places and three miles
wide at others. If the river were absolutely walled in, you'd have swift
currents at one place and slow in another. Then your channel would fill
up in the wide places and you'd be as badly off as before."
"Make it all the same width, then," said Ross.
"Build two-thirds of the whole two thousand miles by some underwater
system, constructing the wall under water? If you had ever read of the
difficulty of building one lighthouse foundation, my boy, you wouldn't
talk so glibly about building huge retaining masses of masonry under
water."
"Suppose it were done, that way, Mr. Levin," put in Anton, "would that
settle it all?"
"You mean--suppose there was a high masonry wall, making a canal equal
in width and height from St. Louis to the Gulf, would that turn the
Mississippi into a permanent ship channel? Is that what you mean?"
"Yes."
"No, it wouldn't," the expert replied. "What are you going to do with
all the little streams that flow into the Mississippi? Think for a
minute, boys. You can see that wherever you narrow the banks, the river
channel has got to be made deeper to accommodate the water, hasn't it?"
"Yes," both boys agreed, "it has."
"In other words, suppose that before you put up this huge masonry wall,
the flood crest was fifty feet at Memphis, then, after the wall was
built, the flood crest would be seventy-five or a hundred."
"Suppose it were," said Ross, "the wall would hold it in."
"So you think. There are the tributaries to consider. Take the Yazoo,
for example. It flows into the main river until the Mississippi reaches
the fifty-foot flood level. If you raise the flood level of the
Mississippi to seventy-five feet, the water in the main river will be
twenty-five feet higher than the water which used to run into it at the
fifty-foot level, won't it?"
Ross whistled.
"I see where you're coming to," he said; "I'd never have thought of
that. Go ahead, Mr. Levin."
"With the water in the main stream twenty-five feet higher than in the
tributary, due to your retaining wall, boy, instead of the water in the
Yazoo River flowing into the Mississippi, all the water above the
fifty-foot level in the Mississippi would flow into the Yazoo. The Yazoo
couldn't hold the water, and as the stream backed up, it would overflow
its banks. All the low valleys would be flooded in exactly the same way
that they were before, only, instead of the floods coming directly
through a break in the levee or over the banks of the Mississippi, they
would come over the banks of the Yazoo. That would be true of every
small river that flows into the Mississippi, and there are scores of
them."
"What can be done, Mr. Levin?"
"There's only one thing to do," the Weather Man answered, "and that's to
build up the levee system, year after year, steadily and without pause,
making allowances for the tributaries flowing into the Mississippi and
paying especial heed to the rainfall that may be expected in the basin.
Wherever possible, forestry must be undertaken to keep the slopes from
erosion. Reservoirs might be built with great profit, from which water
could be let down during the low water periods.
"When the river channels are accurately adjusted to the amount of
rainfall in the river basin, destructive floods will be averted. We can
never expect that the Mississippi will be absolutely put in harness. The
basin is too huge, the amount of water that has to be carried down is
too great. Permanent dredging and permanent levee construction and
repair will always be necessary, and a close co-ordination between the
Weather Bureau and the government and state engineers is a first need in
the problem."
"Just how does the Weather Bureau come in," asked Ross, "the rainfall?"
"It isn't only the rainfall of the few days in advance," the Forecaster
answered, "it's the rain that has fallen before and the rain that's
going to fall. If there should be twelve inches of rainfall after a
long drought throughout the Mississippi basin, it would make
comparatively little difference, for all the rain that fell on the dry
ground would be sucked up by it and only a very little would flow into
the rivers and streams that feed the Mississippi.
"On the other hand, if there had been slight but frequent rains for
weeks and weeks, those twelve inches of water would make an entirely
different story. No one, except the Weather Bureau, would have kept
track of the amount of rain that had fallen.
"If the ground has been steadily soaked, even by light occasional
showers, twelve inches more of rain cannot soak in. Therefore, the
entire amount of rain will flow directly into the stream channels and
thus into the Mississippi. Flood warnings will be sent out, the height
of the flood crest can be estimated, the length of the period of the
danger will be known in advance and the proper preparations can be made.
If further rain is threatened, that information can be sent out, also,
and the entire Mississippi valley is completely prepared. That's the
true preparedness, my boy, being ready for the foe that you know will
come. Stupidity or cowardice are the only causes for not being willing
and ready to help in time of danger."
"What can a chap do?" asked Ross, aflame with eagerness.
The Forecaster looked at him thoughtfully, but before he answered, Anton
piped in, with a plaintive note in his voice:
"Is there anything that I could do?"
In spite of himself, the Forecaster's glance fell on the crutch. Anton's
intent gaze followed the look and he flushed. A sudden silence fell, the
silence of an abiding tragedy from which all eyes are always turned, the
tragedy of the disabled.
"Yes," he said with grave quietness, "there's a great deal that you can
do."
The crippled lad regarded him steadily.
The steady rushing of the Mississippi in flood could be heard near by
with its thousand miles of menace.
"We need work," the weather expert said, at last, "work with the heart
behind it. Even now, the United States Weather Bureau has over four
thousand co-operative observers, who work without pay, who work with
their hearts behind their duties. Still, this is all too few."
Anton's gaze never wavered, but a question crept into his eyes.
"Yes," answered the Forecaster, "you can be one. I know your father
well, and I'm sure that he will be guaranty for the instruments. The
work of making and recording observations will be yours. Never late,
never forgetting, never swerving from your duty, your post at the
rain-gauge and the barometer will be as honorable and responsible a post
as the soldier's at sentry-post or behind the gun."
The lad's eyes glowed more deeply.
"Storms, frosts, and droughts will be your enemies," the Forecaster
continued, "and they never sleep and never give quarter. The
lighthouse-keeper who lets his light go out and permits a ship to go
unwarned to wreck upon the rocks is not more guilty than the Weather
Observer who allows disaster to sweep, unwarned, upon his district. It
is a trust, Anton. Can you and will you take it?"
The sun broke through the clouds, lighting up the yellow wood of the
crutch and turning it into gold. It caught the boy's eye, but with a new
significance. No longer would it stand between him and his future. There
was something he could do for his country, as well as though he were
the strongest and best-built lad in all the neighborhood. Life, with its
promises of work, opened before him.
"I'll take the trust," he answered simply.
CHAPTER III
PUTTING THE SUN TO WORK
"Fo' the land's sake, Mistah Anton, what fo' yo' puttin' up that pole on
the grass?"
"So that I can find the sun, Dan'l," the crippled lad answered cheerily,
as he held upright the pole, while Ross began to fill in the deep hole
that the two boys had spent the morning in making.
"Yo' don't need no pole to find the sun," the old darky answered; "why,
yonder's the sun, right up over yo' head."
"Is it right over my head, Dan'l?" the boy asked.
The negro, an old family servant, put his hand above his eyes and
squinted at the sky.
"Not right over," he corrected himself, "but mighty near it."
"How near?"
Dan'l looked at the boy with a puzzled air.
"Ah don't jest know how near," he answered.
"That's the idea, exactly," Anton rejoined, "I want to know how near."
"Is this hyar another of your contraptions to tell what the weather's
goin' to be like the year after next?" the plantation hand queried,
taking advantage of his position as an old family appanage. The
instruments had been a point of discussion all summer, for Dan'l prided
himself on being a weather prophet, though he based most of his
predictions on the behavior of the animals and birds around the farm.
"This is to tell time, not weather, Dan'l," Anton answered, "but we'll
use it for weather, too."
The darky shook his head.
"Ah don't hold with none o' them glass things with silver runnin' up an'
down in their insides, what you calls 'fermometers," he declared,
"they're not nateral. Ah believe in signs. When, in the evenin', a
rooster crows like he's done goin' to bust, ah knows sho' it's goin' to
rain befo' mornin'."
He ambled up to Ross, who was busily shovelling in the earth.
"Hyar, Mist' Ross," he said, "let me do that for yo'. Yo' ought to ask
old Dan'l when yo' got a job like that."
"That's all right," the older boy answered, readily yielding up the
spade, however, and wiping the perspiration from his brow, "it is
pretty hot, though."
"Yo' got no call to be workin' right near noon," the negro protested,
"that's not fo' white folks. Fust thing yo' know, yo'll be havin' a
sunstroke."
He shoveled vigorously as he talked, tamping the earth down hard.
"It's sho' goin' to be a hot summer," he said, "yo' only find the
field-mouse nests where the shadder's thickest. Thar," he continued,
patting down the earth level with his spade, "that's done now. Yas, suh,
it's hot."
He wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand.
"You bet the sun's hot," the boy agreed, "but Mr. Levin told me the
other day that we only get a two-billionth part of the heat put out by
the sun. Did you know that, Ross? The sun has heat enough to warm two
billion Earths as big as this one. Even at that, Dan'l, the amount of
heat we get from the sun would make thirty-seven billion tons of
freezing water boil in one minute."
The negro's jaw dropped.
"Yo' not fooling?" he said.
"Not a bit."
"Ah's hot," he said. "Ah's goin' to boil, soon."
"Cheer up, Dan'l. You'll cool off tonight," suggested the older lad.
"Nearly everything that takes in heat has to give it out again. The
earth, the sea and the dust in the air, all gradually let out some of
the heat during the night. If it wasn't for that, everything would stay
at the same temperature all night long. That's why it's always colder an
hour before dawn than an hour after sunset.
"See, Dan'l, the earth and the air which take in heat easily and give
off heat easily, by the end of the night, have got rid of a lot of their
heat. At sea, though, where the water lets go its heat less easily, it
is never as cold as on land. The thermometer shows when it's hot and
when it's cold."
"Ah don't hold with none o' them fermometers," the old darky repeated.
"That's because you don't understand them," the crippled lad replied.
"It's dead easy, though. You see, Dan'l, when a thing is hot it gets
bigger and when it's cold it gets smaller, that is, most things do."
"Ah don't see that, nohow," the negro answered. "A red hot stove is
just 'zackly the same size as when the fire's out."
"No, it isn't, as a matter of fact," the lad replied, "but you can't
always see the difference. Iron does get bigger as it gets hot. You've
seen the steel rails on railroad tracks, haven't you, Dan'l."
"Sho'."
"Did you ever notice that there's a little crack between each rail? In
winter, the crack is quite wide."
The negro thought for a moment.
"Is that the crack that makes a train bump?"
"Yes, that's it. Now, Dan'l, on a hot day in summer, you can't see any
crack there at all, the rail has expanded or got bigger, and filled it
up. On a frosty day in winter, there's a big crack, so big that you
could drop a lead pencil between the ends of the rails. That's the
difference of expansion on a steel rail between winter and summer."
"That's powehful little!"
"It's quite a good deal. I'll show you. Suppose, Dan'l, you had a small
rubber ball filled with ink and there was a pipe out of the ball
sticking straight up in the air, and suppose you put that little rubber
ball in the crack between the rails."
"Yes?"
"Then, on a cold day, the rubber ball would have room enough. It
wouldn't be squeezed and all the ink would stay in it. On a hot day, as
the end of rails came together, they would squeeze the ball and the ink
would squirt up. As there wouldn't be anywhere for it to go except
through the tube, it would shoot up the tube, wouldn't it?"
"Sho'."
"So that you could tell, by the height of the ink in the tube, how much
the rails had come closer together, or expanded. As the only thing that
would make them expand would be the heat, you could measure the heat
that way, couldn't you?"
"Ah reckon yo' could."
"That's what a thermometer does, Dan'l. The little bulb at the bottom
contains something that's easily swelled by the heat. In a hot climate,
quicksilver is used, because it doesn't boil except at a heat much
greater than the air ever gets, though it freezes easily; in a cold
climate, they use alcohol because it doesn't freeze except at a degree
of cold much colder than the atmosphere ever gets, though it boils
easily."
"Yo' fermometer's got blood in it!"
"No, the alcohol is colored, so that you can see it easily, Dan'l,
that's all. The quicksilver, or the alcohol, is put into a little bulb
and up from this bulb there runs a tube. That tube is awfully thin,
sometimes a hundred times thinner than a hair. When a tube is as thin as
that, even a tiny amount of expansion or contraction will make the
quicksilver run up the tube or down. If you watch that thermometer I've
got in that white shelter over there, Dan'l, you can easily tell when
it's hotter and colder. It's nearly always hotter around noon."
"It's sho' mighty near noon now," Dan'l declared.
"How do you know?"
"Ah can tell that fo' sho', yas, suh!"
"How, Dan'l?"
"By mah own fermometer, Mist' Ross, an' that's mah inside. Right about
five minutes befo' noon, thar's a little knock that says 'Tap, tap,'
Dan'l, yo're hungry.' An' that knockin's always right, Mistah Ross. Ah
sho' is hungry right at that hyar time."
"It hasn't knocked yet, Dan'l, has it?"
The darky looked thoughtful.
"Ah hasn't felt it," he answered, "but Ah's got a feelin' that Ah can
expect it now 'most any minute."
"Well," the younger lad answered, watching the black shadow of the pole
as it stretched along the ground almost to his feet, "we'll find out how
near right your inside is."
He took a piece of steel tape from his pocket and handed it to his chum.
"How long is it, Ross?" he asked. He bent down eagerly and watched the
measuring of the shadow.
"Four feet, six inches," the older lad announced.
The negro looked at the shadow a moment and then burst into a hearty
laugh.
"What is it, Dan'l?"
"Why, Mistah Ross, it ain't no use for yo' to measure that! Yo' done
forgot that a shadder don't stay still."
"Why not?"
"A shadder keeps movin' round. Yo' ought to have thought o' that," he
added seriously.
"We thought of it, all right, Dan'l," Anton answered. "See, the line of
the shadow's already on one side of the tape. Try it again, Ross!"
"Four feet, five inches and three quarters," came the reply.
"What fo' makes that shorter?" queried the negro.
"Dan'l," said the younger boy, reprovingly, "why don't you use that
thick head of yours a little? When you get up in the morning, isn't your
shadow longer than it is in the middle of the day?"
"Sho', it stretches away off yonder!"
"And in the evening?"
"Jest as far."
"And around noon-time?"
"It's right short."
"Then," said the crippled lad, "don't you see that if we measure where
the morning shadow stops growing shorter and the afternoon shadow begins
growing longer, that'll be the middle of the day?"
The darky slapped the side of his leg with a resounding smack.
"Who'd have thought o' that, now?" he said. "It sho' does look like you
was right."
Ross bent down and measured the shadow.
"I think we'd better put in a peg to mark it," he said, looking up; "it
doesn't seem to be changing so much. I can only make it five and
five-eighths, now."
Anton stuck a sharpened peg in the ground and took out the little silver
watch that had been given him on his birthday.
"It's not nearly twelve o'clock by my watch yet," he said.
"That's standard time," Ross reminded him; "don't forget that we're not
right on the line of standard time here, Anton. That's New Orleans time
you've got, not sun time."
"Is thar more'n one kind of time?" the darky asked. "Ain't time, jest
time, all over?"
"I should say not!" declared both boys at once, "it's never the same
true time at any two places in the world."
"That is," corrected Ross, "unless they happen to be due north and
south."
"Yo' makin' a joke of me, Mistah Anton," declared Dan'l.
"Not a bit of it," replied Anton. "I'll show you just why. The sun rises
in the east, doesn't it?"
"Sho'."
"So, if you walked a long way east, you'd see the sun quicker, wouldn't
you?"
"Ah s'pose Ah would," the darky responded hesitatingly.
"And your watch would show that the sun rose earlier."
"Sho'!"
"So noon would come sooner, too. And if you walked west, it would be
longer before the sun rose and noon would be later, that is, figured by
your watch."
"Ah declah Ah never thought o' that!"
"So, you see, every place has a different time."
"But," the darky protested, "it's the same time when Ah goes to
Vicksburg."
"Certainly," the lad answered, "and if you went away to Texas it would
seem the same, but it really wouldn't be. The clocks change four times
in the United States, don't they, Ross?"
"Yes, four times," the older lad agreed. "East of a line running through
Buffalo, Wheeling, Asheville and Atlanta, time is called 'Eastern Time.'
Everything west of that line is really an hour later, so the clock has
to be put back an hour. If a train comes from the east into the station
at Wheeling, at ten o'clock in the morning, and only stays in the depot
five minutes, the timetable shows that it left at five minutes past
nine."
"What-all happens to that yar hour?" asked Dan'l.
"It's just lost," Ross declared. "That standard of time, which is called
'Central Time,' reaches clear across to the middle of the Dakotas, and
the eastern boundaries of Colorado, and New Mexico. There you lose
another hour, 'Mountain Time' extending as far as the ridge of the
Rockies. From there to the Pacific coast, it's called 'Pacific Time' and
is another hour later.
"You see, Dan'l," he continued, "when it's noon in Washington and New
York, it's eleven o'clock in Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans; ten
o'clock in Butte, Cheyenne and Denver; and nine o'clock in Spokane, San
Francisco and Los Angeles."
"Who-all fixed it up that way?"
"The railways," Ross answered, "but the various states have O.K.ed it.
You've got to arrange the setting of time in some definite way for the
handling of railroads and telegraphs and things of that sort. It seems
funny, Dan'l, but if you send a telegram here to a friend in San
Francisco, he'll get it, according to his watch, nearly two hours before
you sent it."
Ross stooped down as he spoke, and again measured the shadow of the
pole, as it lay stretched out like a black line across the grass.
"It's just the same!" he cried. "It's noon now!"
Anton promptly set his watch right by the sun.
"There's Mr. Levin coming," he announced, "let's show him that his watch
is wrong. He's always so exact."
The boys came up to him, but before they could put their question, the
Weather Man spoke.
"Well, boys," he said, "what are you after? Putting up a flag-pole? It's
a little short, isn't it?"
"No, Mr. Levin," Anton answered, "that isn't a flag-pole, it's a new
clock, and one that's always right!"
"How have you been making it?" the Forecaster asked, immediately
interested.
Anton described the principles that the boys had used and especially the
means adopted to ensure that the pole should be upright.
"Why don't you fix it so that you won't have to measure the length of
the shadow every day?" queried the Forecaster. "It's quite easy when you
know how."
"Won't you show us?" responded Anton.
"Certainly," the old Weather Man answered, getting out of his buggy. "I
see," he continued, "you've got hold of the idea that when the sun casts
the shortest shadow it must be true noon, because the sun is half-way
between the longest shadow and the shortest. That means, of course, that
the sun is at the meridian."
"Yes, sir."
"It would be much the same thing, wouldn't it, if you measured half the
distance between the points on the horizon where the sun rose and the
sun set?"
Ross thought for a moment.
"Yes," he said, "I suppose it would. But is that always the same?"
"How can it be anything else?" the Forecaster asked. "In winter the day
is short and in summer it is long, but the meridian plane is always the
same--that is, excepting for certain very small astronomical variations
which would make no difference to you in the matter of measuring time.
Let's get the meridian plane, first. Dan'l, do you suppose there's a
pail of whitewash in the barn?"
"Yas, suh," the darky replied, "Ah knows there is."
"Go ahead and get it then," the observer asked, "and let me have a piece
of string."
He fastened the string to the bottom of the pole and awaited the return
of Dan'l with the whitewash. In a moment the old negro came back with
the pail.
"Now," said the Forecaster, "I'm going to hold this string right at the
end, and, holding it tightly, walk around the pole. What kind of a
figure will that make?"
"A circle," answered the two boys.
"Right. Dan'l, you take the brush and whitewash a narrow line right
behind my hand as I move the string round."
Dan'l stooped down and rapidly painted in the circle, as the Forecaster
moved the string.
"Next," said the Weather Man, "we'll make another circle, a little
closer in."
"At any special distance, sir?" asked Anton.
"No," was the reply. "It doesn't matter. Any distance at all will do."
A second, and again a third circle was thus made.
"Tie a piece of rope around the pole," was the next direction, "as high
as you can reach."
This only took a minute.
"Now, boys," the Forecaster said, "all that you have to do is to watch
when the shadow of the rope crosses those three circles. Put in a peg
this evening when it crosses the inside one, then the middle and then
the outside. To-morrow morning, mark with pegs the place where the
shadow crosses the same circles on the other side, only, of course, it
will cross the outer one first."
"Then what shall we do, sir?" asked Anton.
"Have you a long straight board?" he asked in reply.
"Plenty of them," the younger lad answered.
"Good. Well then, to-morrow morning lay that board so that its edge
touches the two points where the shadow of the rope on the pole crossed
the outer circle and let Dan'l whitewash a straight line joining the two
points. Do the same with the second and with the inside circles."
"Yes?" queried the lad eagerly, "and then?"
"You'll have three parallel lines," the Forecaster said, "the outer one
longer and the next two shorter. Bisect those lines. Do you know how to
do that?"
The younger lad shook his head.
"Only by measuring with a bit of string and doubling the string," he
said.
The Forecaster took a pencil and an envelope out of his pocket.
"It's quite simple," he explained. "Fasten a string to the peg at one
end of the line you want to divide in half. Stretch the string along the
line till you come to the end of this line. Then make a circle. Do the
same thing from the other end of the line. That will give you two
circles crossing one another. With the board, draw a straight line
joining the points where the circles cross.
"To be exact, bisect the line on the middle and on the inner circles in
the same way. You'll find they all come out the same. The bisecting
line, reaching from the pole, and crossing the bisected lines is called
the plane of the meridian. If I were you, I'd make that line a permanent
mark by pressing into the ground a row of stones, or those white clay
marbles. Then the rain can destroy the other whitewash lines, without
doing any harm, because you've got what you were after."
"But how is that going to show the time?" queried Ross.
"Because," said the Forecaster with a smile, "whenever the shadow of the
pole lies along the line of white marbles, which marks the meridian
plane, it is exactly twelve o'clock by sun time."
"Without any measuring as to length?"
"Without any measuring at all."
"That ain't no clock, Mistah Levin," the darky announced in a superior
way. "Ah don't hold with no clock like that."
"Why not, Dan'l?"
"Ah gets hungry other times besides noon," he said. "Ah'd only eat once
a day by that clock. No, suh, Ah wants a clock that tells every hour o'
the day, not jest noon-time.
"Ah got another clock that don't never need no mending, not in
summer-time," continued Dan'l. "My marigolds open at seven sharp every
mornin' an' wink their eyes at me an' say 'Dan'l, yo're hungry,' and Ah
sho' is. An' jest before six o'clock in the evenin', the white
moon-flowers say, 'Dan'l, time fo' supper and yo' little white bed.' An'
dey's right, too. Don't need no sun-clocks."
"I'm like Dan'l," put in Anton, "I'd like to be able to tell every hour,
not just twelve o'clock only!"
"Well," the Forecaster answered cheerfully, "you can make your
sun-clock that way if you like."
"Can we, sir?" asked Anton. "How?"
"By using your pole as the style or upright of a sun-dial. Before clocks
were invented, people told the time by sun-dials, and there was a whole
science of sun-dials, called gnomonics. It was quite a difficult
mathematical science. Even after clocks and watches came into use,
sun-dials continued to be used as time-pieces, because watches and
clocks were expensive and there were few mechanics who could mend them."
"I've been wondering--" began Anton.
"Let's make a sun-dial here, Mr. Levin?" asked Ross, finishing Anton's
sentence. "We can, can't we?"
"Certainly. You can make a sun-dial anywhere. If you had to do it
without a watch, you might find it a little difficult, of course, but it
can be done. For example, I can tell you off-hand that for this latitude
here, the angle between noon and eleven o'clock, is a little over nine
degrees, while it is nearly ten degrees at New York.
"Since you've got a watch, however, it's quite easy. Your meridian line
marks twelve o'clock, and a line drawn at right angles to it, from the
base of the pole, inclined to an angle corresponding to the latitude,
will mark six o'clock, morning and evening. If you'll put in a peg on
the circle that Dan'l whitewashed, exactly at the place where the shadow
touches when it is one o'clock, two o'clock and so forth on your watch,
the watch having been made to agree with the shadow at noon, your
sun-dial will be right all the year, round. You don't need to mark
anything earlier than four in the morning or later than eight in the
evening, as even on the longest day, here, the sun does not rise before
that time nor set after it. You don't have to get up before six o'clock
to mark the hours, as the lines are the extension of the four and five
lines of the afternoon."
"Let's do it!" cried Anton. "We'll make a clock with white stones, just
that way! Couldn't I divide it up into five minute distances, like a
regular clock, Mr. Levin?"
"Yes," the Forecaster answered, "if your circle is big enough. And if
you wanted to do the thing in the way that it used to be done, you could
have a little motto running all around the circle, just picked out in
white stones."
"What kind of a motto, sir?"
"All kinds were used," the other answered, "I remember one that read
'Pass On'; another 'Do not linger'; but the one I like best is the old
Latin one which ran 'I count only the bright hours.' I suppose you've
heard the story of the American sun-dial motto?"
"No, sir," said both boys together.
"You knew that the sun-dial is one of the official emblems of the United
States?"
"I never heard of it," Ross exclaimed.
"It is. It was used on some of the earliest American coins. Last
century, in London, one of the courts of justice, known as the Inner
Temple, gave an order to a sun-dial maker to put up a dial. He asked for
a motto, and was told to come the next day for it. Next day it was not
ready, nor the day after. Still the dial-maker persisted. At last, one
day, in making his request, he interrupted an important meeting, and the
chairman turned to him quite impatiently and said:
"'Sirrah! Begone about your business!'
"'A very good motto,' said the dial-maker, not realizing that the
command was meant personally for him, and he engraved the words on the
dial. When the lawyers of the Inner Temple saw the motto, they agreed
that nothing could be better, though it had never been intended.
"When our first coinage was discussed, Benjamin Franklin was on the
committee and he suggested that a sun-dial should be used. As, however,
the coinage would go to the people instead of the people going to the
sun-dial, he suggested the old motto with a change. This motto read:
"'Mind Your Business!'"
"That's good, too," exclaimed Anton.
"Very good. So that phrase was engraved on the American coinage, and on
some money that was issued by the State of New York, over a century ago.
You could use whichever motto you liked best."
"I'll use the American one!" declared Anton enthusiastically. "I've a
lot of those marbles. I'm going right off now to see if I haven't
enough."
He shifted his crutch to a more comfortable position under his arms and
pegged across the yard to the house as hard as he could go.
"I've noticed," said the Forecaster, as he looked after the limping boy,
"that Anton seems a lot happier since the flood. He used to be such a
mournful little fellow."
"It's this weather work you started him on," the boy answered. "It means
a lot to him."
"Ross," said the Weather expert, "I've been thinking a good deal about
Anton and about all the rest of you boys in this neighborhood. Issaquena
county is over ninety per cent colored and there aren't very many of you
white boys, but the dozen or so that are here seem to me to be mighty
good American stuff."
"They're a dandy lot," Ross agreed.
"Have any of you boys thought at all about what's going to happen to
Anton, when he grows up? His father hasn't money enough to send him to
college, or anything like that, especially since he lost so much by the
flood, and, being a cripple, Anton's not going to have much of a chance
on the plantation."
"I hadn't thought of it," Ross answered, "but it does seem as if he were
up against it, doesn't it?"
"Why don't you boys make it easy for him?"
"How, Mr. Levin? We would in a minute, any of us. Everybody likes
Anton."
"Look here," said the Weather Man, putting his hand on Ross's shoulder,
"I know from experience that when you suggest something worth doing to
a bunch of American boys, they're mighty apt to go ahead with it. Now,
as you said yourself, Anton seems to have a real interest in these
weather observations. His father tells me he's never two minutes late in
taking them. Making this sun-dial is another example of the same thing.
What I'm thinking is this--why couldn't Anton be taken in hand and
taught to fit himself for the Weather Bureau? I'll teach him mathematics
as my share, but you boys will have to do your bit."
"What could we do?"
"Suppose--of course, without letting Anton know why you're doing
it--suppose you boys got together and took up this weather plan as a
sort of outdoor club. You could meet here at Anton's place. If all his
chums were interested and having a natural earnestness, I'm sure he'd
work like fury at it. It would give him a real chance, and, what's more,
I believe you chaps would like doing it."
"Make a Weather Bureau of our own, Mr. Levin? I think it would be
great!"
"I think myself that you'd get a lot of fun out of it," said the
Forecaster, "but the real idea is that you'd be helping Anton, yes,
helping him more even than when you rescued him from the drifting house
during the flood, because you'd be giving him a start in life. It's a
piece of work that's worth the doing, Ross."
"It's a bully scheme, sir," agreed the boy, waving his hand to another
lad who was coming up the road. "I'm game to do all I can."
"You'll have a good deal to do," the Weather Man warned him. "I know
you're practically the leader of the neighborhood and the boys follow
you. I've spoken to a few of the fellows and asked them to meet me here
this afternoon, but I wanted to see you first. I've just come from your
house and they said you were over here. It's got to be a boys' deal,
through and through."
Ross thought for a moment.
"You said, sir, we oughtn't to let Anton know. I think, perhaps, we
ought to keep it dark. But I'd like to talk to Bob Portlett about it, if
you don't mind. He doesn't talk much, but the chaps put a lot of stock
in what he says. Bob and I are pretty thick, you know."
"Of course, talk things over with him. I spoke to him about it
yesterday. You two go into executive session, while I go up to the house
a minute."
He nodded to Bob and strode off across the yard.
"Levin been talking to you about Anton, Bob?" Ross asked, as soon as the
Forecaster was out of hearing.
"Yes," answered Bob, in his abrupt way. "He said you knew all about it."
"He only sprung it on me just a few minutes ago," Ross rejoined, "but I
think it's a dandy idea," and he proceeded to relate to his friend the
outline of the plan. When he had finished, Bob nodded his head.
"Count me in," he said, "I'll do anything for Anton."
"What'll you do?"
"Wireless," was the brief reply.
"What's that got to do with weather?"
"A lot. I got my new big sending apparatus yesterday and I've got a
transmitting license."
"Have you?" said Ross in surprise. "I thought they were so awfully hard
to get. Don't you have to pass an examination, or something?"
"Yes. I passed it. I've still got the small apparatus I used to have,
the one you know. I'll give that to Anton, teach him to work it. He can
send me his observations and I'll transmit. I've a lot of amateur
stations on my string. How's that?"
"Fine!" declared Ross enthusiastically, "it would keep the observations
up to scratch if the chaps knew they were going to be used. Who else do
you think would join in?"
One by one the two lads discussed the other boys in the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, many of them had arrived and were clustering around Mr. Levin
and Anton, asking innumerable questions about the new sun-dial. Dan'l
was giving out information freely, and one of the puppies had taken
exception to the whitewash line and was barking at it with high
puppy-toned barks. Presently Ross caught the Forecaster's eye, and came
over and joined the group.
"I've just been telling the fellows, Ross," said the Weather Man,
speaking as though the lad knew nothing about it, "that we've a good
chance in this county to give a hand to the Weather Bureau. I'm out of
the work, now, of course, but my heart's in it yet, and I'd like to see
Issaquena County put on the map. We haven't got an observer's station in
the entire county. Weather's the most important thing in the world and
we've only just begun to learn how wonderful it is.
"Every one of you boys has seen what it means when the Mississippi gets
in flood, and most of you could guess what would have happened last
spring if the Weather Bureau hadn't given any warnings. As it was,
nobody was drowned, all the way down the river. In the Johnstown Flood,
just because it was a case in which no warning could be given, over two
thousand people were killed.
"Think of it, boys, if we could get together and map out the weather in
every square mile of this county, we could make this district the best
kept and most famous meteorological centre in the world!
"I know, sometimes, it seems as if we were a good deal out of things,
here. There's not a town of any size in the county, one day's a good
deal like another, and we're apt to think of places like New York,
Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco as being the fighting centres of
the nation's life.
"Yet, right here, right over our heads, the never-ending battle of the
weather goes on, with its brigades of warring clouds, its wind-cavalry
and its artillery of storm. The sky holds more secrets than the city
does and there's a lot of adventurous work to be done. Which of you is
game to do it? Who'll volunteer?"
An excited babble of answers greeted him.
"I will, Mr. Levin!" cried one.
"Sure!" said another.
"Put me down for it," proclaimed a third, voicing the general sentiment.
Ross brought the matter to a point.
"The way I feel about it," he said, "I reckon we'd all like to tackle
something like that. And, I tell you, chaps, it would be bully for us to
have a club-house of our own."
"A club-house!" cried one.
"Yes," said Ross, "Anton's father is ready to give us the old barn. He
says we can fix it up any way we like."
"All for our own?"
"Yes, to do anything we like with. Mr. Levin has given me some bully
ideas about things we can do, and Bob's thought up a scheme that's just
great!" and he proceeded to explain the lad's offer of wireless.
The enthusiasm of the boys was rapidly growing. With the Forecaster
behind him, with Anton's rain-gauge, with the new sun-dial staring them
in the face, with Bob's plan for the wireless plant, with a club-house
of their own and the admitted leadership of Ross, the whole group was
swinging into line.
"Tell you what I'll do for my share, fellows," said another of the boys.
"You know that printing-press of mine?"
"You mean the one you printed the pirate flags on, Fred?" queried Ross,
referring to the Treasure Island period when the boat was made.
"Yes. Ever since Dad found that he had to use the shed I used to keep
the press in, I haven't had much chance to get at it. I'll ship the
press over here, if there'd be room for it in our club-house," the words
were said with great pride. "We could print a little weekly paper. I
wanted to do that last year, but Dad said that he didn't want me to
print nothing but gossip, and there didn't seem anything else to write.
If we really had some stuff worth reading, like weather news, I'm sure I
could make it go. Enough, anyhow, to pay for paper and mailing."
"You think we ought to issue a regular weather bulletin," said Ross.
"That's a good notion, Fred."
"I'll let you have some of my stories," said one.
"Or Fatty's jokes," suggested another, dodging a nudge of the elbow from
his neighbor.
"A weather bulletin would be a good thing," the Forecaster said,
approvingly.
"What could the rest of us do?" asked an alert youngster. "I haven't a
printing-press, or a wireless apparatus or anything else."
"Nor have I," said two or three voices.
The Forecaster looked quickly at Ross. This was a crucial point. It was
Anton who answered.
"You've got plenty of wind at your place, Lee, haven't you?" he asked.
The lad laughed.
"Pop says it's the windiest place in the county," he answered, "poked
right up there on the top of that knoll."
"You ought to be the official wind-measurer," the crippled lad declared.
"There is a way to measure wind, isn't there, Mr. Levin?"
"Certainly," the Forecaster answered, "it's a very necessary thing to
do, too."
"Pete's camera!" interjected the laconic Bob.
"What's the good of that?" broke in its owner. "You can't snap-shot the
wind, at least not that I've ever seen."
"Clouds!" said Bob.
"That's right," agreed Anton, "you could photograph the clouds, Pete.
Suppose you took a snap-shot of the sky every day, at the same time, for
a year, it would make a peach of a series."
"The Bureau at Washington would be glad of a series like that," put in
the Forecaster. "So far as that's concerned, Pete, I'd buy a daily print
for my own use. I couldn't pay much, of course, but enough to meet the
cost of materials."
Pete brightened up.
"I'll do that, quicker'n a wink," he said. "I've snapshotted about
everything else around here, but I never thought of the sky."
"You could tackle eclipses and halos and rainbows and lightning--all
sorts of things," suggested Anton.
"Right-o!" answered Pete, "you can put me down as official
photographer."
"I don't see," said one of the smaller lads, "where that rain-gauge is
so hard to make. I'll make one and put it up at my place."
"Dad's got an old barometer," suggested another, "that he used to have
when he was a steamboat skipper. I'm sure he'd let me have it. It's in
the attic now, where nobody looks at it."
"Some of us might measure the amount of sunshine," said Ross. "Isn't
there some way of doing that, Mr. Levin?"
"Indeed there is," the Forecaster replied. "Why, in some places, they
run machinery by sunshine. There is a big solar engine at Pasadena, in
California, where they pump water and irrigate an orchard just by an
arrangement of mirrors. Even a small one would run quite a good-sized
engine."
"Gimme that! Oh, gimme that!" burst in another of the boys, who had been
passive theretofore but who was absorbed in mechanics. "I'll be tickled
to have an engine run by sunshine."
The Weather Forecaster looked around with a smile at the enthusiastic
group.
"It seems to me," he said, "that with an official photographer, an
official wind-measurer, an official sunshine recorder, an official
wireless station, a club-house and an editor with an official
publication, 'The Mississippi League of the Weather' is mighty well
launched on its way.
"Now, I'm going to have the fun of making the first motion. I move you,
Mr. Chairman, that the League come into the house and hold its first
official feast!"
CHAPTER IV
THE MASSACRE OF AN ARMY
"Where's the boss?" queried a strange voice, one afternoon.
The entire mechanical staff of the _Issaquena County Weather Herald_,
consisting of Fred Lang, publisher and editor-in-chief, aged fifteen,
and a general assistant with the blackest face and the whitest teeth in
the county, aged seventy, named Dan'l, turned at the question.
"Why?" asked Fred.
The stranger stepped into the office of the _Herald_.
"I'd be wishful to see the foreman," he said, with a twinkle in his eye,
"that's if he's not too busy."
Fred grinned in response.
"I guess I'm the foreman," he said.
"I'm lookin' for a job," the new-comer explained.
"What kind of a job?"
"Any kind of a job in a printin' shop," the Irishman replied. "I'm an
old-timer. There's nothin' about printin' I don't know."
"Have you seen a copy of our paper?" asked Fred.
"I have so," was the reply, "I've got it with me, right here." He pulled
from his pocket the latest number of the little four-page sheet. "'Tis
an illigant publication," he went on, "but I'm thinkin' that you're in
sore need of a printer."
"Does it look so bad?" queried the "foreman." "The worst of it is, I
don't know how to make it any better."
"I'm not saying that it's bad, but there's a deal to be learnt about
printin'," the journeyman declared. "I'm thinkin' your compositor hasn't
had overmuch experience."
"He hasn't," the boy admitted. "I'm him. Dan'l helps me all he can, but
since he can't read, it makes it bad."
"Give me the job," said the Irishman, "an' I'll make the paper look
right."
"I can't," Fred replied. "The subscriptions hardly pay for the paper and
the ink. I give Dan'l thirty cents a week for wages to run the press and
it's hard to scrape up that much, because Mr. Levin says I mustn't pay
out a cent that the _Herald_ hasn't actually earned. What wages do you
want?"
"Three dollars a day when I'm workin'," the journeyman printer replied,
"an' the good green grass to sleep on and a hunk of corn-bread to eat
when I'm not."
The young editor looked at the journeyman printer with a sudden
eagerness.
"I've got four dollars and a half saved up," he said, "that's a day and
a half's wages. Will you teach me all about printing in a day and a
half? That isn't office money, that's my own, but, you see, it's for
me."
"I'll teach ye for nothin'," said the Irishman, pleased at the boy's
pluck, "if ye'll give me a bite to eat an' a place to sleep."
Fred shook his head.
"No," he said, "Mr. Levin won't let any of us boys take something for
nothing. I'd sooner pay. It would be great if you could get out this
week's number for us, and let me see how you do it. I'd learn a heap
that way, and it would be just the stuff I want to know. Then the number
you got out we could use for something to go by. But you'll have to do
it in a day and a half, because that's all the money I've got. Can
you?"
"I can that," the printer answered, "an' I'll pay for my board out of
it, so that you won't be spending all your money."
"Can't do that either," said the boy, "because that would make it
Anton's Dad's money, not mine. If you want to pay him, all right."
The Irishman stripped off his coat and rolled up his sleeves.
"I'll be lookin' to see what fonts o' type ye have in the shop," he
declared, and examined the forms which were lying on the rough table.
"Did anny one ever show you annything about printin'?" he asked
presently.
"No," said the boy, "I got this printing-press from a chap whose brother
used to run it. The fellow who owned it was going to show me how it
worked, but he went away and hasn't come back."
"Watch me a while," the journeyman responded and began to unlock the
forms that had stood since the issue of the week before. It was a
revelation to the boy to see how the trained fingers of the printer
sorted, classified, and arranged the type. Talking steadily, in his
Irish fashion, the journeyman explained how the type should be set up,
showed that they had been using twice as much ink as necessary, warned
them against pinching the type too closely, explaining that this "put
the letters off their feet," and, by altering the arrangement of the
sheet, improved its appearance a thousandfold. These routine matters
were quickly adjusted, and then the printer asked for the copy which was
to fill the first page.
"It's just got here," the young editor answered. "I haven't looked over
it yet, but I guess it's all right. I had a wireless yesterday that one
of our chaps was sending in a corking description of a sunset, or rather
a sort of description of all the sunsets in the last month. Here it is."
He handed the pages of boyish handwriting to the journeyman, who looked
over them hastily.
"'Tis fine stuff, entirely," he said in surprise. "I'd be wishful to
take some copies of the paper for myself. Listen to this now!" And,
turning the sheets, the enthusiastic Irishman read aloud:
"'Sunsets all look different, but when you write down what you see, one
right after the other, they seem to be quite alike, that is, when the
sky is clear. When the sun begins to set, and there are not many clouds,
the lowest part of the sky is more different from the rest of it than in
daytime. In the west--at the side of the setting sun--the sky looks
white, changing to yellow. In the north and south, it is a dull yellow,
which gets yellower. In the east, it is a dirty yellow, which changes
slowly into a dull purple. All these yellows are duller at the horizon
than a little way above. The purple in the east looks gray at the
sky-line but shades into blue, higher up.'
"'Tis an illigant style the boy has," declared the journeyman, and
continued:
"'Just as soon as the sun begins to drop below the horizon, an
ash-colored plate (the shadow of the earth) begins to creep up the
eastern sky, covering part of the purple bit and making it look like a
purple rainbow. Soon the shadow covers all the purple light in the east.
"'In the west, where the sun is setting, the colors are all different.
The whitish light spreads quite a long way up into the blue, but when
the sun comes close to the horizon, this turns to yellow, lighter higher
up and darker lower down. It is sometimes reddish at the horizon line,
and the clouds are turned to pink.
"'After the sun has really gone down, the yellow gets darker, changing
into orange, sometimes, while the white spot spreads sideways and its
upper edge marks off the brighter from the darker bits of the sky.
"'In the darker part of the sky, at about quarter way up, a purple glow
suddenly appears. It grows bigger quickly, making a circle, the lower
edge of which looks as though it slipped behind the yellow strip. This
purple spot in the west comes just as the purple rainbow in the east is
dying out, and as the western purple spot grows it gets brighter, so
that there is a time, after the sun sets, when it seems brighter than it
did before.'"
"That's queer," interrupted Fred.
The printer thought for a moment.
"It's right, bedad," he said, "I've noticed it meself."
He continued reading:
"'Sometimes there are dark blue and greenish stripes running down to the
sun and these stripes shoot a long way up into the sky.
"'If there are any clouds, they seem to be generally light yellow to
begin with, changing to pink and rose, then red and dark orange. I
couldn't find any system in the color of the clouds, perhaps because
they are at different heights.
"'A few times I've seen a sort of second faint purple arch or bow in the
east, but by that time it's dark. In the west, though, the second arch
is quite clear. As the first western purple arch sinks to the horizon,
following the sun, a green stretch, ever so green, shows up, and above
it is a second arch of bright light, with a purple arch above that. When
this last one sinks, it is quite dark.'"
Mr. Levin, as was his habit on Saturday afternoon, had come over to the
League's club-house, and he had entered during the reading, followed by
his usual bevy of boys; Rex, Lassie, and four roly-poly puppies, now
able to run around on unsteady legs, bringing up the rear.
"That's a mighty accurate description of sunset colors," the Forecaster
commented; "whoever did that, deserves a lot of credit. Hello! Have you
enlarged your staff, Fred?" he continued, as he noted the printer and
realized, at a glance, that the little shed had already assumed a more
business-like look.
The editor-in-chief explained the bargain he had made and the Weather
Man nodded his head approvingly.
"That's the best way I know to spend your savings," he said, "using
them to learn something. I'm glad you're going to have this issue
properly printed, too, because that sunset article is about the best
you've had, so far. If I don't miss my guess, a good many people will
keep that number as a sort of reference for the colors of sunset. Who
wrote it?"
"I did, sir," said one of the boys who had come in with him.
"Good work," the Forecaster commented. "Do you happen to know, though,
Bert, what makes the colors of sunset? Why doesn't it just gradually get
dark as the sun goes down?"
"I don't know," the boy replied. "I tried to explain it the other day
and I found I hadn't the least idea why, myself. I asked Father, but he
didn't know either."
"Yet it's quite simple," the Weather Man answered, "and if you boys are
going to be real meteorologists, you ought to know the reasons for
things. First of all, why is the sky blue?"
There was a gasp of astonishment, followed by silence.
"Sure, 'tis the air that's blue," hazarded the printer.
"That doesn't help much," the Forecaster said, "though perhaps it does,
a little. Why is the air blue?"
The Irishman shook his head.
"Why is annything blue?" he asked.
"That's just what I'm going to tell you," the Weather Man answered, "and
you want to listen carefully, boys, because the colors of the sunset
depend a great deal on the weather. You can foretell weather from the
sunset."
"Yo' sho' can," interrupted Dan'l. "Don't yo' remember Mammy's old
rhyme:
"Evenin' red an' mornin' gray
Certain signs of a beautiful day;
Evenin' gray an' mornin' red,
Sends a nigger wet to bed."
"All those old rhymes are fakes, though, Dan'l," declared Anton, with
the importance of his newly acquired weather knowledge.
"Easy there, easy there!" warned the Forecaster. "Not so fast. A good
many of those old rhymes are mighty good weather forecasts. That one is,
for example."
"You mean, sir, that a red sunset and a gray sunrise really tell that
the weather is going to be fine?"
"Yes, to a great extent, they do."
"Why, Mr. Levin?"
"Because they show the state of the atmosphere, boys. Rain can't fall
unless there is dust. Every little drop of rain has a grain of dust in
the middle. The colors of the sunset, too, are due partly to dust. Not
only that, but colors of the sunset vary as the particles of dust which
reflect the rays of light, are enveloped by water vapor.
"A piece of dust, without an envelope of water, is smaller than one with
a little wetness around it. When more water vapor gathers around the
piece of dust, the drop becomes bigger. When the sunset is red, it is a
sign that it is shining on very small bits of dust, or that the
condensation of water vapor into rain has not advanced very far. If,
however, the sunset sky is gray, that means that the upper air is
saturated, that it has all the water it can hold, and, of course, rain
is likely to come soon."
"I should think, then," said Anton, "that gray in the morning would be a
bad sign, too."
"It's not, though," the Forecaster replied; "the proverb is right there,
as well. A gray sky in the morning means that the air is filled with
water drops which are large enough to reflect light of every color.
While this is the same as the gray of evening, the processes that led
to the forming of these drops is quite different. In the day the dust is
heated and the forming of the droplets in the afternoon is due to
cooling. In the night, the condensation is caused by loss of heat
through radiation. Radiation shows that the air above must be dry.
Therefore a gray morning means a dry air above the water drops, and this
means a fine day, for the droplets will soon be evaporated by the rising
sun. The red morning sky declares that the dust particles have been
protected from radiation by a blanket of overlying moisture, the air,
therefore, is saturated to great heights and rain is probable. So you
see, Anton, Mammy's rhyme is right."
"What fo' yo' talk to me against signs," declared Dan'l, putting out his
chest and strutting; "Ah done told yo' them signs am pow'ful good."
"But the sunset colors, sir?" the author of the article asked. "You said
they were due to dust. Just how, sir?"
"Yes, to dust, plain ordinary dust, but dust of the lightest kind," was
the reply. "If you could go up in the air a hundred miles, the sky above
you in the middle of the day would be jet black and the sun would shine
down on you like a great bright-blue ball, without any white glare
around it at all."
"Then it's a blue sun that makes a blue sky!" cried Fred.
"Don't go so fast," the Forecaster warned him. "I want you to think of
the sky, first. It's a dead black, a hundred miles up. Now, at a hundred
miles up, the air is so thin that there's little or no dust, but as you
gradually come down and the air becomes denser, it begins to be able to
buoy up some dust. Boys," he said, breaking off suddenly, "why does a
stick float in water when it falls in air?"
"Because water is denser than air?" guessed Ross.
"Exactly. And why does a bar of iron sink through water and not through
earth?"
"Because the particles of earth won't move aside as easily as the
particles of water, I suppose."
"Not quite, but something that way. So, you see, as the air gets
gradually denser it becomes gradually more able to support particles of
dust, light ones at first, then heavier and heavier, until near the
earth big pieces of dust can be carried in the air. You know how big
some of them are when you happen to get a grain in your eye! Viscosity
has a lot to do with it, too.
"The light of the sun is a bluish-white, like some of the blue stars.
White, as you remember from the rainbow, is just a mixture of all sorts
of colors and the different colors are created by waves of light, some
being shorter and others longer. A long wave, like the red, will pass
around a tiny piece of dust, but a short wave, like the blue, will be
stopped by it, and scattered, sometimes polarized, as it is called, or
turned into one plane."
"I don't think I quite see that," said Anton.
"It's a little complicated," the Weather Man answered, "but maybe I can
give you an idea of it. Suppose you were on a big steamboat in a choppy
sea. As the steamer's length would extend over several of these waves,
none of them would be big enough to make the vessel heave. If you were
on that same choppy sea in a small canoe, you would be tossed in every
direction. Now, if you think of the long red wave of light as a steamer
and the blue as a canoe, you can see that in a ripple of small particles
of dust the blue is going to be more affected than the red. In other
words, the blue will be scattered. It will be diffused all over the sky
and the light that comes through will be less blue."
"Then I should think the sun would look red," said Anton.
"It does," the Forecaster explained, "when there's a fog, which simply
means, when there's more obstruction in the air. Sunlight is never
white, as you know, it's yellow-white and the golden effect is due to
dust. It's the same way at sunset. Then the rays of the sun which reach
you pass through a larger amount of air, because you're looking at them
from an angle, so they have to strike more grains of dust, and more of
the blue rays are scattered. Then, too, when the sun, at sunset is, to
you, shining obliquely on the atmosphere, it is passing through several
layers of air and these bend the rays differently."
"I still don't see," said the author of the sunset-color article, "why
there should be so much pink, or rose-color, and why the clouds should
generally be pink."
"There's not much pink in a clear sky," the Forecaster answered, "and as
for the pink clouds, you've never seen them in the west when the sun was
still above the horizon, have you?"
"No--no," said the other, "I don't think so. The pink generally comes
after the sun had disappeared."
"Scientifically, of course," the Weather Man said, "the sun has gone
below the horizon at least two minutes before you see it disappear.
You're looking at a sun that isn't there at all. That's due to
refraction. The reason of the pink glow is that when you see it, the
earth and the air for several thousand feet above you are in the shadow
of the edge of the earth. The sun, therefore, is not shining on the
thicker dust of the lower part of the air, but the finer dust of the
upper part, the particles of which are small and more uniform in shape.
"The glow is of a rose-color because the particles are of the size to
diffuse the rays of this wave-length. That's why rose colors appear in
the east, before the west, and why the color lasts in the sky, which may
be reflected on dust twelve miles high, after it has disappeared from
the upper clouds, which are not more than eight miles high."
"'Tis the illigant hand ye are at explainin'," put in the Irishman, "but
I c'n remember, when I was learnin' me trade, about thirty-four years
ago, the sunsets were much finer than annything I've seen since. We
don't have such sunsets now as when I was a boy."
"They were sho' brighter," agreed Dan'l. "Ah can remember when the skies
used to look like they was all burning up. Ah thought the end of the
world was a-comin', sho'!"
"Thirty-four years," said the Forecaster thoughtfully; "that would be in
1883, wouldn't it? Why, of course, Mike," he continued; "that was during
the period of the famous Krakatoa sunsets."
"An' what's a Kraker-something sunset?" the printer asked.
"Krakatoa," the Weather Man explained, "was a volcano, near Java. In
August, 1883, one of the most violent eruptions in the history of the
world occurred. Half the island was blown up in the air, and, where a
mountain had stood, the ocean rolled a thousand feet deep.
"The vibrations in the air were so terrific as to break windows and
overturn frame houses over a hundred miles away, and the pressure wave,
like some huge blast of wind, traveled round the world three times
before it died down. The huge sea-waves caused by the eruption and the
engulfing of the island, swept across the oceans, destroying the coasts
for hundreds of leagues around. Over thirty thousand people were
drowned.
"Pumice and ashes fell over the sea so thickly that within three miles
of the island you could walk on them, and even five hundred miles away,
the ashes formed a scum on the surface of the sea. The finer dust and
the icy particles from the condensed vapor reached extreme heights in
the air. These dust particles spread all round the world, completing the
circuit in fifteen days.
"The sunsets were extraordinarily red, because, in the very thin air of
great heights, there was an unusual amount of dust which had been forced
there by the great volcanic outburst. It took three years for this dust
gradually to settle into the lower air, and this made the sunsets that
Pat speaks of. The great eruption of Mont Pelé in 1902 created unusually
beautiful sunsets in America for a couple of months afterward, but, of
course, this was not to be compared to the Krakatoa eruption.
"It's curious, though, boys," he said, "that Bert, here, should have
been writing this article on sunsets, because it happens that I've got
something here quite important to show you."
Walking to the table, he took a large home-made portfolio from under
his arm and spread it out. He untied it, threw open the cover and
stepped back to let the boys look. They crowded round.
"Oh--oh!" said one. "Isn't that bully!"
The Forecaster turned over a second picture.
This was greeted with cries of delight, and one of the lads added:
"I saw a sunset exactly like that only a week ago!"
The Forecaster bent down and looked at a pencilled note underneath the
vivid chalk drawing.
"It is dated just a week ago," he said.
"I didn't know you drew with chalks!" said Ross.
For answer, the Forecaster smiled and turned to another one. The first
few had been a little crude, but it was evident that they improved as
the series went on. All of them, in a curious way, possessed the faculty
of giving a real impression of the sunset.
"So you like them," the Weather Man said, when the whole series had been
examined.
"They're dandies," declared Ross, and Fred added:
"I wish we could use them as colored plates in the _Review_."
"Who do you suppose drew them?" the Weather Man asked.
"Didn't you?" queried several of the boys together.
The Forecaster shook his head.
"One of the boys?" asked Ross.
Again the Forecaster made a negative gesture.
"A boy drew them," he said, "but not a member of the Mississippi League
of the Weather."
"Who was it, Mr. Levin?" pleaded Anton.
"Cæsar," he answered, "down on McDowell's place."
"Cæsar!" exclaimed Fred; "it couldn't be. Why, he's--" he checked
himself just in time, remembering that Dan'l was close by.
"Yes, he's colored," the Forecaster agreed. "But don't you think he can
draw?"
"He surely can."
It was on the point of Anton's tongue to suggest that the colored artist
should be admitted to the membership of the club, but, so far, its
membership had been confined to the white boys, largely in deference to
the feelings of the older people of the neighborhood, many of whom
remembered the difficulties that followed the reconstruction period
after the Civil War.
Anton looked a little troubled.
"Do you think we ought to get mixed up in a thing like this?" he asked.
The Forecaster glanced at him.
"You mean because Cæsar is a negro?"
"Yes, sir," the crippled lad replied.
"I don't want to persuade you one way or the other," the Weather Man
replied, "but I can tell you how I feel about it. I don't see that it
matters very much what point of view a fellow has on the color question,
we're all agreed that the darkies should be given every chance. You
certainly can't harm yourself by helping any one, no matter who it is
that you help."
"Sure," Ross agreed.
"And even if the person you help is never going to be able to do you any
good, why, that's all the more reason for helping, isn't it?"
"Yes," admitted Anton.
"All right, then. Supposing some of the older people here do feel that
it's necessary to draw the color line closely; well, I don't see that it
wouldn't be a good thing for us to strike out a little. The color line
is there, and it's going to stay there. But the most unreconstructed man
in the district--even Colonel Grattan, for example--will do everything
possible to better the condition of the negroes. I think it's the
absolute duty of every American boy to help every other American boy
when he gets the chance, whether his skin is white or black."
"Yes," said the laconic Bob.
Anton brightened up, for he was anxious to help Cæsar.
"What do you suppose we can do?" he asked.
"I'd rather put it up to you boys," said the Forecaster. "This is your
affair, after all."
Anton turned to Ross.
"Haven't you some scheme?" he asked.
Ross shook his head.
"I haven't thought one out. How about it, Bob?"
"Deacon Paul," was the abrupt reply.
"Yes," said Ross, "old Paul will do pretty nearly anything for me,
because Dad was so good to his father when he was a slave. But I don't
quite see what he can do?"
"I do be thinkin'," said the Irishman, "if I might be so bold as to make
a suggestion, that there's no reason why you boys shouldn't use a
colored lad's work. He's only a contributor, annyway. When a paper takes
a story or a picture from a man, it doesn't ask who his parents were.
Why don't ye make some color plates and give them as premiums for
subscriptions?"
The Weather Forecaster laughed aloud.
"That's a good business idea, Pat," he said. "Some of the colored
planters and farmers are fairly progressive here, and a premium of a
colored lad's work might be a good scheme."
"But I can't make colored plates!" protested Fred.
"No," said Pat, "you can't, an' that's a fact. I was forgettin' that
this wasn't a regular shop."
"How could we get them made?" asked Anton. "Do you suppose the Weather
Bureau in Washington would make them for us and let us have a few
copies?"
"No," said the Forecaster decidedly, "I know the Bureau wouldn't.
They've a hard enough job doing their work on their present
appropriations, as it is, and if they were going to spend money on
sunset pictures, Anton, such would be done by some big artist, in
consultation with trained meteorologists."
"I've been wondering," began Anton, and paused.
"Go ahead," urged Ross.
"Couldn't we interest some one else to do them, just to help the thing
along?"
"One of the big negro colleges has a lithographing plant," the
Forecaster said thoughtfully; "they might be interested in it, if the
matter were put before them the right way. I don't suppose they'd give
any money, but they might make plates for you at cost and you could sell
them here at enough to cover the expense. Bob has the right idea.
"Talk it over with Deacon Paul, the colored minister; he's closely in
touch with all the progressive work among the negroes. I think you'll
find it can be arranged, because there's a right fine spirit among the
negroes. They're trying hard to improve themselves.
"I believe you could interest them, too, by showing that the study of
the weather, even in sunsets, is a patriotic duty. The negroes are
mighty loyal."
"Mr. Levin!" exclaimed one of the boys, "what has a sunset got to do
with patriotism?"
"They do look pretty far apart, don't they?" replied the Weather expert,
with a smile. "Yet one of the great tragedies of military history, one
which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of men and changed the
map of the world, was due to a failure to study the colors of a sunset."
"What was that, Mr. Levin? Won't you tell us the story?" pleaded Anton.
"Very well," the Forecaster agreed; "maybe it'll show you how important
to the world everything is that is connected with the weather.
"I was telling you about Krakatoa and its eruption and how the outburst
had caused red sunsets that lasted for three years. Now, if you think
for a moment, you'll see that any one who observed a period of unusually
red sunsets and knew the cause of them would know that there had been a
big volcanic eruption somewhere."
"Of course."
"Now, boys," said the Forecaster, "suppose that the upper air were
unusually full of dust, what effect do you suppose that would have on
the temperature?"
For a moment no one spoke, then Anton piped up:
"I've been wondering," he said, "if the dust wouldn't shut out some of
the sunlight and make the earth colder."
The Weather Forecaster gave the boy a shrewd look.
"We're going to make a real weather man out of you, Anton," he said. "As
a matter of fact, it does, though, of course, not to such a very
noticeable extent. Indeed, it's only quite recently that we've been
working out the relations between volcanic eruptions and weather.
They're striking, though, and while it may be a little too early to say
that the one causes the other, volcanic action has a big influence.
"The Krakatoa eruption, as I said, produced a dust cloud in the upper
parts of the air, which not only created red sunsets, but which kept so
permanent a haze over the sky that the sun was surrounded by a reddish
brown circle, known as 'Bishop's ring,' during most of that time. This
circle showed the existence of a dust cloud, through which the sunlight
had to pass. As a result, the amount of sunlight was diminished. When
the sunlight is less, the crops are poorer, for it needs the entire
force of the sun to ripen them, and the three years following the
eruption of Krakatoa are known to history as 'The Poverty Years.' The
still more famous 'Year without a Summer,' which was the year 1816,
followed the eruption of Tombora, the autumn before."
"That seems to cinch it, Mr. Levin," said Ross.
"It isn't sure," was the reply, "but it seems that way. Famines have a
tremendous effect on the world's history. The great French Revolution,
one of the greatest events in modern history, was brought to a head by a
famine. This was the 'Three Year Freeze' of 1784-1786."
"Did that follow a volcanic eruption, sir?" asked Anton.
"It followed the greatest eruption in the history of the world, that of
Asama, in Japan, in the year 1783. In that eruption, fifty-six thousand
people were killed and the entire atmosphere of the earth was shaken.
Like Krakatoa, you see, boys, it took three years for the dust to settle
down."
"But what has that got to do with the army, sir?" Fred asked.
"I was just coming to that," the Forecaster replied. "If Napoleon had
known as much about the weather as we do now, boys, the world's history
might have been very different. There had been some marvellous sunsets
during the years of 1810 and 1811 and the spring of 1812, but none of
the scientists of that time thought of observing them or finding any
significance in them, nor did any of them imagine that such could have
any effect on the weather. Before Napoleon started on his march for
Russia, which was begun in June, he asked the French meteorologists at
what time the Russian winter usually began. They told him that if he
could begin his return by the middle of November, his army could get
safely out of Russia before the winter set in.
"But, boys, the three years before that campaign had been three years of
eruptions. St. George, in the West Indies, erupted in 1810; Etna, the
great volcano of Sicily, had an eruption in 1811; and La Soufrière,
which broke loose again in your lifetime, boys, erupted in 1812. As a
result, the upper air was full of dust, and the middle air was even more
filled, for while these eruptions were not as powerful as Asama and
Krakatoa, there had been a continual replenishment of the stores of
volcanic dust.
"So Napoleon and his army started off. The great march into Russia began
with an army of four hundred and fifty thousand men, in torrid summer
heat. The crops were still green, for the spring had been late and the
summer most unseasonable. As a result, there was not enough food for the
horses and terrible epidemics of disease broke out among them. Napoleon
was always especially strong in cavalry, over eighty thousand of his
troops being mounted. When, to this, is added the twenty thousand horses
needed for officers and for the artillery, it is easy to see that the
lack of forage seriously handicapped the army. It is by no means easy to
feed a hundred thousand horses. Before the army had advanced more than
ten days' march, one-fourth of the horses had died.
"The Russians, thoroughly realizing that their strongest ally was
Distance, retreated, without giving battle. Napoleon's army marched on.
The Cossacks, with their well fed horses, constantly circled round the
French army and cut to pieces the small detachments in the van and in
the rear-guard. The French cavalry, with their horses dead, dying or out
of condition, could not pursue. Meanwhile the army, under the burning
heat of the short summer which had known no spring, marched on.
"Into that huge wilderness, over the marshes and plains, the army
marched. Always before it lay a land bare and dumb. The vast Russian
army could never be found. In endless succession the French crossed
plains on which the grass grew, thin and bare, splendid for the grazing
of cattle, but utterly insufficient for a hundred thousand horses, now
reduced to seventy thousand. Ahead of the soldiers, every day, the sun
rose red upon an empty land, every night it set, red, behind them, upon
a land equally bare and empty. Day after day they marched through this
land without food, unmolested by the Russians, who knew well that lack
of forage and interminable marching was defeating the great Napoleon
better than they could upon the battlefield, and without the sacrifice
of a single Russian soldier. Weather, boys, always weather, is the
greatest ally or the greatest enemy in the entire history of war.
"At last the army saw in the distance a long black line. Every effort of
Napoleon to persuade the Russians to attack him had failed, the Russian
army steadily withdrew. But when the long black line of Smolensk
appeared, hope was restored to the French army. At last they would meet
the Russians on equal terms and decide the campaign against guns and
bayonets instead of against leagues and starvation! On Napoleon marched
and at last found himself before the town of Smolensk. The French army,
now only four hundred thousand strong, was yet an unwieldy force to
handle. It took two days for the various groups to form into positions
and then they charged the town.
"The soldiers fighting them had fled. Everybody had fled. The city was
utterly deserted, sad and silent as a grave-yard. There was nothing
there to eat. The Russians had destroyed everything. There was not a
handful of oats, not a loaf of bread. The French victory had gained for
them only an empty city and an empty land. It was now the end of August,
and Moscow was a long way away.
"The march continued. Before them, the sun rose red through the volcanic
dust every morning and set red every night. Had there been a
meteorologist present able to warn Napoleon, even then, the army could
have retreated safely. But the army went on and on, into the land that
the Russians themselves had swept bare and left empty. Villages and
towns were passed, each deserted, as Smolensk had been. What the people
could not carry away they had burned. The fields were scorching and
black. Smoke filled the air. For three weeks more, well into September,
the French army toiled forward, steadily growing hungrier and leaner,
losing horses and men all along the line of march.
"At last the Russians made a stand. The desperate conditions of the
march had divided the French army into scattered portions, and when,
quite suddenly, the Russian troops confronted them, only a hundred and
twenty-eight thousand men were available, the others straggling behind.
The Russians had a hundred thousand men, but the French superiority was
not enough for them to secure a final victory. The great battle of
Borodino began before sunrise, and the setting sun, red as always, sank
too early to see its end. When night fell on the scene, thirty-eight
thousand Russians had fallen and only twenty-five thousand French, but
it acted almost as a defeat upon the French, accustomed as they were to
sweeping victories.
"The red sun next morning rose on the French army, eager to continue the
battle. But in the night the Russians had fallen back again, and, before
the French, the road to Moscow lay open. Open, indeed, but burned black
and desolate as before. Seven more days of marching, with hungry
stomachs and famished horses and then, Moscow! The goal of the French!
The army beheld the city it had come so far to conquer. The red sun of
the seventh day found the spires of the Kremlin in sight. Again the
French were sure of victory.
"Moscow was as clean swept as the smallest village on the road.
Everything had been carried off or destroyed. Moscow lies far to the
north and the days began to grow perilously short. Napoleon sought to
make terms with the Russians, but met with nothing but delays. The
Russians were waiting for the approach of their great ally, the winter.
"In all Moscow there was no food and forage. All the people had gone.
Napoleon did not dare to bring his whole army into the city. There was
nothing to eat. They camped at various distances outside, tightening
their belts for hunger. Meantime the Russians, constantly retreating and
moving the provisions back with them, were steadily growing stronger in
position and men.
"The rapidly shortening days meant long cold nights. The soldiers in
Moscow made camp-fires of the costly pieces of furniture that remained
in the palaces, but those who were encamped on the plains outside had no
fire at all in the long hours of darkness. Many of them, too, were from
the south of France, unaccustomed to the cold, and, besides, were
equipped for a summer campaign, not garbed in the heavy clothing of the
Russian troops. In that country which had been abandoned for purposes of
war, there was not even wood enough to light the fires for cooking. Ever
the days grew shorter and the red sunrises and the red sunsets--which
would have meant so much had any one understood--continued.
"Then into the city came Fire! In the middle of the night, at a dozen
different points, Moscow was set aflame by the Russians. A great wave of
fire started from all quarters at the same time, swept over the city,
for the Russians had waited for the moment when the wind was high and
the night was cold. Houses and palaces flared upward in the
conflagration, then sank to smoking ashes, for almost the entire city
was built of wood.
"All in a jumble--infantry, cavalry and artillery--the French got away,
the flames howling so closely after them that the backs of their necks
were singed. Suddenly they found themselves in the midst of a tremendous
rush of water and ice. On one side, to windward, the Russians had
started the fire, on the other, where there was a possible escape from
its fury, they had turned the river into the streets. The French were
caught between the two. Some of the horses, fairly maddened, turned
backward and plunged with their riders into the flames. For an instant,
horse and man would flare up like tow and then there would be a black
twisting thing that dwindled to nothing in the blaze. Out from the
burning city, in wild and utter retreat, flew the French Grand Army, out
to a land without food, without forage, without inhabitants, and the
nearest help a thousand miles away.
"Then came the snow. No longer was the red sunrise before them, but
behind them. The victorious march was a defeat. Black-gray clouds came
over the sky and obscured the sun. At first the snow was to the ankles,
then to the calves, and then to the knees. The wind was bitterly cold
and the men ill-clad. It froze the French to their marrow. Every few
minutes a soldier dropped from starvation, cold and exhaustion. The
Russians did not appear. There was no need. They had a new ally--the
wolves! No one could stop to pick up an exhausted soldier; it was all
that any man could do to keep up himself. Half the officers were on
foot. The cannons were abandoned. When a horse died, the regiment ate
him and staggered on.
"The Cossacks now began to add their terrors to those of the wolves. If
a small detachment straggled out of the blinding snow, unseen until that
time would come a rush of the furious and valiant horsemen of the
steppes, and the detachment, hungry and exhausted, would be cut to
pieces. They fought with heroic courage, but no man can fight the
Weather.
"Smolensk was reached on the return march, with the wreck of the French
army, now only fifty thousand strong. The skeletons of four hundred
thousand men lay on the Russian plains. Near a place called Krasnoi, the
Russian army suddenly appeared and a battle was fought. Napoleon
commanded with his old-time mastery and succeeded in breaking through
the Russian lines, but he had to leave Marshal Ney with six thousand men
behind him. Ney performed wonders, and with his tiny force also broke
through the Russian army, but when the French resumed their flight, Ney
had only eight hundred men. The rear-guard alone lost five thousand at
that place.
"The French Army had now reached the marshes, but the Weather was
fighting for Russia. Just at this time, a sudden and unexpected thaw set
in, making the marsh a morass. The Russians, well-provisioned, circled
around the French army, and again came in front of them at a river
called the Beresina. Waist-deep in that icy current, with masses of
floating ice being carried down by the sudden thaw, with a huge Russian
army on the opposite bank, the French soldiers fought for their homeward
way. Winter was before, winter behind, the Russians on the barrier. Yet
the French fought on and crossed the Beresina with marvellous courage,
the Russian strategy, meanwhile, sacrificing comparatively few men. The
Beresina was crossed, but when the Russians were finally swept aside and
the French passed through, less than nine thousand men answered the roll
call. Forty thousand had been lost between Smolensk and the Beresina.
"The thaw was followed by another terrible period of cold. The retreat
of the army became a fearful rout. Napoleon, himself, fell a victim to
the panic, and deserting his troops to Murat, spurred for France,
reaching Paris after a ride of three hundred and twelve hours. The
routed and disorganized French Army straggled back to Germany, to
Austria and to France. When Christmas Day that year came down over
Europe, less than five thousand men were alive of the four hundred and
fifty thousand who had started six months before to carry the eagles of
Napoleon over Russia. It was the most splendid campaign and the most
spectacular rout in history, and the foe who fought the battles that
defeated the Great Emperor was--The Weather."
CHAPTER V
THE RUNAWAY KITE
The sunset pictures made a better showing as lithographs than even their
young creator could have hoped, and the _Issaquena County Weather
Review_ became a source of personal pride to every one in the
neighborhood. The farmers and planters vied with each other in giving
information of weather happenings and the little publication was never
short of "copy."
"Dan'l," said Fred to his chief assistant, one day, "I'm going to print
an article on 'Weather Superstitions.'"
"Yas, suh," said the darky, wondering what was coming.
"And you're going to write it."
"Ah write it? Sho', now, you'se jokin', Mistah Fred. Ah can't even write
my own name."
"I know that. You don't need to write, Dan'l. You're going to collect
every rhyme and proverb and saying about the weather you can hunt up in
the neighborhood. Get Mammy Crockett to tell you all she knows. Then you
must repeat it to me. I'll write it down word for word, and it'll be
your article."
"If yo' wrote it down, it wouldn't be mine," objected Dan'l.
"Oh, yes, it would," the editor-in-chief assured him, "some of the
greatest authors in the world dictate their books."
So Dan'l went all around the neighborhood, announcing that he was a
"sho' enough autho' now," and so full of delight that there was no
holding him in at all. He proved a good collector of superstitions,
moreover, and when at last the article came out in the _Review_, it was
so complete and so original that it was reprinted in one of the big
Folk-Lore Magazines.
The visit of the journeyman printer had been of great value. Fred had
been shown just how the work should be done and his pride was involved
in keeping the paper up to the standard. Moreover, the Irishman had
secured a large box of discarded type from a printing firm in Vicksburg,
and had forwarded this to the boys. Fred returned the courtesy by
mailing Mike a copy of the _Review_ regularly, and Mike occasionally
sent a package of the printing trade magazines that he found lying
around the shop. Fred picked up many hints from these and thus secured
quite a good start in his knowledge of the printing trade.
The "official photographer" had been equally successful. One day, while
up on the levee trying to take a satisfactory picture of an elusive
"mackerel sky," which was changing from moment to moment, he met a
stranger. This stranger was sitting on a log that projected into the
river, holding a rod and line, and landing fish with an accustomed
skill.
"What in blazes are you trying to photograph?" he said after a while, as
he watched the lad focussing his camera earthwards on what looked like a
piece of black glass, which projected from the stand.
"Clouds, sir," answered Ralph.
"When I try to photograph clouds I look at the sky, not on the ground,"
the stranger remarked. "What's that contrivance you've got on your
camera stand, anyway?"
"It's just a broken piece of looking glass," said the boy, "but I
painted it on the back with black enamel."
"What for?"
"So that I could get at the clouds easier, sir," the boy replied. "I
read how to do that in a book I've got."
"I don't see why black glass should make any difference," said the
fisherman, getting up from the log and coming over to where the boy was
standing.
"It does, sir. If you look on the glass," said Ralph, "you'll see. The
clouds are ever so much sharper."
The stranger looked in. Even the fleecy white clouds, scarcely visible
in the blue sky overhead, stood out a clear white against the blackness
of the mirror. The blue sky was not reflected in the glass.
"That's queer," said the stranger, "the blue hardly shows at all. I
wonder why?"
"It said in the book," Ralph explained, "that the blue didn't show up so
much because it was partly polarized. I couldn't quite understand what
that meant. As far as I could make out, the blue color of the sky is due
to waves that are scattered sideways instead of coming straight down
like the white light does."
"I suppose it is polarized," said the fisherman, "but it hadn't ever
occurred to me that the sky wouldn't be reflected in a black mirror.
You're right, though. The clouds do stand out well! You ought to be able
to get some good pictures from your mirror."
"I have got a lot, sir," said Ralph. "I've made three cloud photographs
every day, rain or shine, for over two months now."
"Every day?"
"Yes, sir, before breakfast, after dinner, and just before I begin my
evening chores."
"What's the idea of that?"
Finding a ready listener, Ralph plunged into the story of the
Mississippi Weather League and of his crippled friend, Anton.
"It's a mighty useful piece of work," the fisherman commented, when the
lad had finished, "and I'm especially interested in these cloud
photographs of yours. I need some. Have you any prints of them?"
"Yes, sir," was the reply, "heaps."
"If they're really any good, I might be able to use a few," the
fisherman continued. "I'm writing a series of articles for an outdoor
magazine and I want some Mississippi River pictures pretty badly. Mine
haven't come out particularly well."
"I'll show you all I've got," eagerly replied Ralph, and, a little
later, he took the stranger home with him.
There he displayed, not only his cloud photographs, but also all the
snap-shots he had made with his camera during the three years he had
owned it. The magazine writer was highly delighted, for many of the
pictures were exactly what he needed, and when he went away he took with
him thirty photographs, for which he paid Ralph, as he said, the
"regular price" of three dollars apiece.
"That's what they'd have to pay if they bought them from any of the news
photo houses," he remarked, "and you might as well get the same."
To Ralph this ninety dollars was a fortune. He offered to turn the
entire sum over to the League, or at least that part of it which had
been paid for the cloud photographs. Ross vetoed this offer, on the
ground that the League itself had not earned the money. Instead, Ralph
put away some of the cash and with the rest he bought a new lens for his
camera. With this lens he was able to take cloud pictures even better
than his former ones.
A few weeks later, at the next Monthly Feast of the League, Ralph came
proudly forward with a collection of over one hundred cloud
photographs.
"I don't see, fellows," he said, "why we all couldn't have a shot at
observing the clouds. I was talking to Anton the other day, and he
didn't seem to know anything about the names of the clouds at all. I dug
'em up from a book I've got at home. I was thinking that it would be
rather jolly if each member of the League had a set of cloud photographs
for himself, with the right names of the clouds and all that sort of
thing on the back. It isn't much trouble to make prints."
"I'd like to have a set, Ralph," said Ross promptly. "I hate to feel
like a dub and not know about the clouds. It's like not knowing any of
the stars."
"There certainly ought to be a set in the office of the _Review_,"
declared its editor-in-chief.
"I've been wondering," began Anton, "whether Mr. Levin wouldn't pick out
the best ones and tell us exactly what they are. I had an awful job
trying to get Ralph to bring his pictures to-day; he said he wanted to
wait until he had perfect ones."
"You'll wait a long time, my boy," the Forecaster put in, "if you wait
until you have a perfect set. I don't know of such a set anywhere in
the world. Clayden, in England, has got some fine examples--"
"It's his book I've got," interrupted Ralph.
"There are a few good pictures in that," the weather expert said.
"Loisel, in France, has some good examples and our own Weather Bureau
has done quite a little cloud work. But those I've seen of yours, Ralph,
are quite good. If you like, I'll go over them for you and pick out the
ones that are the most characteristic. Your plan to give a set to each
of the boys is quite worth while. Let's see the pictures, Ralph."
The "official photographer" pulled out, from a bulging inside pocket, a
large bundle of photographic prints and spread them on the table. The
collection included both the pictures Ralph had taken with his new lens
and some of the old ones intensified in the way that his visitor had
showed him. They made a striking contrast, in their vivid black and
white, to the cloud pictures, printed in a pale blue, issued by the
Weather Bureau.
"I think Ralph's pictures are away ahead of the Weather Bureau ones,"
declared Fred.
The Forecaster shook his head.
"Some of them are prettier pictures," he said, "but the Weather Bureau
sheet is chosen to help observers classify the clouds. If you notice
that blue sheet of cloud forms that Washington has issued, you'll notice
that they are very carefully selected and that you really can tell the
various types of cloud from them. At the same time, clouds are hard to
classify, because, at any given time, you're looking at a stretch of
sky--counting the separate layers of cloud--several hundred square miles
in extent, and, generally, there are many different types of cloud in
the sky at the same time."
"How many kinds of clouds does the Weather Bureau name?" asked Anton.
"Ten," was the reply. "There are lots of variations in those main
groups, but that's enough to begin on. The general idea of the
classification is by the heights of clouds, the Cirrus group being the
highest, from about six to ten miles, the Alto group, ranging from two
to six miles, and the Cumulus and Stratus groups below that. Here," he
continued, picking out a photograph that showed only a few faint specks
of white, "is a true Cirrus. It is the highest of the clouds, and, as
you can see from the photograph, it is delicate and fibrous. This one,
that looks like the ghosts of feathers, is another form.
"Cirrus clouds always appear to move slowly, because they're so high up.
As a matter of fact, they fly along at the rate of from one hundred to
two hundred miles an hour, and generally in an easterly direction. This
photo that looks as if the clouds were a whole pile of spiders' webs,
all mixed up, is the second class of clouds, known as Cirro-Stratus. Did
you happen to notice, Ralph, whether there was a halo round the sun when
you took this?"
"Yes, sir, there was," the boy answered, "but it hasn't showed up on the
plate. I've got some halo pictures at home, but I didn't think of
bringing them along. I just brought my cloud stuff this time."
"Well," said the Forecaster, "suppose you put one of those in here as an
example of cirro-stratus. There couldn't be a halo without it. All the
upper clouds are made of ice crystals and it is the refraction of the
sunlight through these ice crystals that forms most halos. By the way,
boys, don't confuse a halo with a corona. They're quite easy to tell
apart, because a halo, unless it is one of the unusual white ones,
always has red as the inside color and a corona always has the red on
the outside."
"How can I tell them apart on a photograph plate, sir?" asked Ralph.
"That doesn't show any colors."
"By their distance from the sun," the meteorologist replied. "Halos are
seldom seen except at distances of about twenty-two degrees and
forty-six degrees from the sun. There are lots of others, but they are
rare. You'll soon learn to catch those distances by eye. Coronas are
usually much smaller.
"I think one of the most striking forms of cirro-stratus is the polar
'band,' which stretches from one side of the sky to the other, like a
wide white road."
"Ah knows that one, Mistah Levin," put in Dan'l. "Noah, he done stretch
that road for the animals to get out of the Ark."
The Forecaster glanced at the aged darky.
"You certainly did manage to pick up a lot of queer superstitions in
that article of yours, Dan'l. I've heard that cloud called a Noah's Ark
cloud, but I never knew why."
"Yas, suh; oh, yas, suh," Dan'l repeated earnestly, "Noah, he done make
that cloud, jest like the rainbow was made to convince Noah that there
weren't goin' to be no more floods."
"A high cirro-stratus which looks as if some cream had been poured on
the blue sky and hadn't mixed properly yet," the Forecaster continued,
"is cirro-nebula. It's very hard to photograph, and even when you do get
it on a plate, it doesn't look like much.
"Now the third one in the classification is very familiar. That's the
well-known mackerel sky. What's the rhyme about that, Dan'l?"
Proud at being thus appealed to, the darky quoted triumphantly:
"Mackerel scales and mares' tails,
Make lofty ships carry low sails."
"That's correct," said the weather expert, "because those clouds
foretell wind. Sometimes the cloud flakes are less solid and look like
the foam in the wake of a steamer.
"Beneath them come the alto clouds, which are made up of drops of
moisture instead of crystals of ice. The fourth class, called
alto-stratus, is a thick sheet of gray or bluish color, sometimes thin
enough to let the sun shine through. When lower and in heavy roundish
masses it's called alto-cumulus, which is the fifth on the list, and
when it is lower still and looks like a lot of great blue-gray footballs
wedged closely together it is known as strato-cumulus."
He shuffled the prints rapidly, selecting types of clouds as he did so,
and pencilling on the back the character of the cloud.
"Then comes the cumulus, the big round cloud, that looks like masses of
fluffy cotton wool piled on top of each other. These are the 'woolpack
clouds,' which, in summer time, throw deep shadows on the grass. It is
this cloud which, when it comes between you and the sun, gives rise to
the old saying that 'every cloud has its silver lining.'"
"Those aren't the thunder clouds, sir, are they?" the photographer
asked.
"No," the Forecaster answered. "The thunderstorm clouds are called
cumulo-nimbus. They're heavy masses of cloud rising in the forms of
mountains or towers. Isn't there a rhyme about clouds and towers,
Dan'l?"
"Yas, suh, there's a rhyme," the old darky replied, and he quoted:
"When clouds resemble domes an' towers
The earth is wet with frequent showers."
"That, boys," the weather expert said, "is another true proverb, because
the description applies to thunderstorm clouds, when the rain is likely
to fall in frequent showers."
"It doesn't look like a regular rainy sky, though, Mr. Levin," said
Anton. "I thought rainy skies were usually heavy and gray."
"They are," the Forecaster answered, "and the Weather Bureau gives all
the rain clouds the general name of Nimbus, which simply means a thick
layer of dark clouds, without shape and with ragged edges, through which
rain or snow falls steadily. Sometimes, when there is a powerful wind in
the cloud layer, the lower edges of the clouds are broken apart, or
loose clouds are seen traveling fast under the overlying gray. Sailors
call this scud."
"Mr. Levin, suh," broke in Dan'l, "Ah knows a rhyme for scud, too," and
he quoted:
"Scud above and scud below
Shows there's goin' to be a blow."
"Well," said the Forecaster, hesitating, "that's not quite as good as
some of the others, because you don't see scud until the wind has
already come. As a whole, though, it's right, because it implies that
the atmospheric currents are powerful, and if the rain disappears, a
wind is likely to follow. I noticed you missed the rhyme about the rain
before the wind, in your article, Dan'l," he continued.
"Yas, suh!" the darky answered, "Ah don't know that one."
"It runs like this," the Forecaster answered:
"When the rain comes before the wind,
Be sure to take your topsails in,
When the wind comes before the rain,
You can put them on again."
"That's a good one, too, because high winds and steady rain seldom go
together.
"The last type of clouds, which is Number Ten in the Weather Bureau
Classification, is called Stratus. It really looks like a lifted fog,
which sometimes it is. Indeed, there is no essential difference between
clouds and fogs, anyway, except that fogs are formed at the surface and
clouds above it."
"All clouds are fogs, sir?" said Anton, in a surprised voice.
"Yes, my boy. Clouds are visible water vapor. Their visibility depends
largely on condensation, just as rain depends largely on the
dew-point."
"What's the dew-point, sir?"
"The dew-point," the Forecaster explained, "is the temperature at which
the air becomes so full of vapor that it can't hold any more without
letting it down as rain or snow. It's never the same any two days in
succession, because the air can hold more water vapor when it is warm
than when it is cold."
"Is that why muggy days are so uncomfortable?" asked Ross.
"Yes. When the air is full of water vapor, it hasn't the same readiness
to absorb it. When you perspire on a dry, hot, windy day, the air
absorbs it right away, but on a day that's humid or muggy, the air can't
hold any more, so it doesn't evaporate and the perspiration trickles
down your back and into your eyes. A moist climate feels hotter in the
summer and colder in the winter than a dry one, although, in reality, it
isn't as hot or as cold. Every moist climate is a cloudy climate, and
Ireland--which is called the Green or Emerald Isle because there's so
much rain that none of the vegetation ever dries up--has some of the
most beautiful clouds in the world."
"Is there any place in the United States without clouds?" asked Ralph.
"There's no place in the world that's absolutely cloudless," was the
answer, "but clouds in some deserts are few and far between. There's one
well known hotel, in the Southwest, that advertises 'free board every
day that the sun doesn't shine.' It's a safe offer, too, for last year
they only lost two days on it. There are some clouds there, but not such
as to obscure the sun.
"In a cloudless country, boys, there are great extremes of temperature,
as much as forty to fifty degrees between noon and midnight. You'll get
sunstroke in the early part of the afternoon and shiver under blankets
in the evening. That's because there are no protecting layers of clouds
to equalize the radiation. The air, especially high up, is very cold.
Don't forget that the upper clouds are all made of ice crystals."
"I've been wondering," said Anton, "how you can find out that it's so
cold high up in the air if no one can live up there?"
"Balloonists have often passed through clouds of ice crystals and snow,"
the Forecaster answered, "though, of course, they've not been as high as
the upper clouds. Many observations have been made by releasing small
sounding balloons with an instrument attached, letting them go as high
as they could, until they burst and fell to the ground. But much of our
upper-air exploring has also been done with kites."
"Kites? Like Franklin's?"
"Not quite," said the Forecaster; "our weather kites aren't built like
that. They look more like a box. I'm expecting one here, every day."
"Here?"
"Yes, boys," the Forecaster answered, "right here. There's a young chap
I know who used to work with William A. Eddy, of New Jersey, the father
of scientific kite-flying in this country. I wrote to young Osborne, and
sent him a copy of the _Issaquena County Weather Review_, the one with
the sunset articles and pictures in it."
"Osborne, sir!" ejaculated the editor-in-chief, "I got his subscription
just a week ago."
"Did you?" said the Forecaster, interested. "That's nice of him! He
wrote to me that he was constantly improving his kite models and that he
had a couple of old ones which he now seldom flew. He sent me their
records, too, so I know they must be good kites. He wanted to know if
the Mississippi League of the Weather wouldn't do some kite-flying and
send him records of the observations."
"Would we?" cried the enthusiastic Monroe. "I should say we would!"
"It means quite a bit of trouble," the weather expert warned them;
"scientific kite-flying needs machinery."
"Why, sir?" asked Ross. "Can't we do it by hand?"
"No," was the reply, "you can't. How would you reel the kite home? It's
a very different thing sending up a Japanese paper kite on a string a
few hundred feet in the air, and making an ascent of a couple of miles
with a weather kite. For one thing, the weather kite is flown with wire
and an especially strong kind of wire at that."
"Where will we get the wire?"
"I've advanced the money for it," the Forecaster answered, "and for the
shipment of the kites. I thought, perhaps, after a while, we might hold
a kite contest and charge an admission fee, because, as you know, I
think the League should be on a self-supporting basis. I'll render you a
bill, then, and you can pay me."
"Thanks ever so much, sir," said Ross. "That's fine. We'll do it. But
who's to have charge of the kite-flying?"
"That's your affair," the Forecaster answered. "I've nothing to do with
the inner workings of the League."
"I've been wondering," said Anton, "if Tom oughtn't to do it. He's our
wind expert."
Tom flushed with pleasure at the suggestion.
"I haven't done much on the wind stuff," he admitted; "there didn't seem
anything to do but to take measurements and things."
"I seem to remember reading them weekly in the _Review_," the Forecaster
remarked.
"Oh, I've done it all regularly enough, but it didn't seem to be of much
use," the boy said.
"You'll find that it will be of a great deal of use in the League's kite
work," the weather expert rejoined.
"I think Anton's right," put in Ross. "Hands up those who think Tom
ought to do it."
Every hand shot up in the air.
Tom shuffled his feet on the ground and squirmed uneasily.
"All right," he said, "I'll try. You'll tell us what to do, Mr. Levin."
The next few weeks were busy ones for the Mississippi League of the
Weather. The building of the kite reel, more than anything else, gave
the boys a sense of the power of the new force that they were going to
handle. The _Weather Review_ announced the expected arrival of the two
kites, and the interest of the neighborhood was aroused.
Not since the days of the Civil War had anything given the farmers of
the district as much to talk about as did the weekly issues of the
_Issaquena County Weather Review_, and the people of the county took the
keenest interest in all the doings of the League. Fred had been anxious
to make the paper bigger and more important, as soon as it became
flourishing, but he was held back in this by the conservative and
laconic Bob. The wireless expert showed him that as long as the paper
was kept small and easy to get out, it could be kept good. As a result,
everything had to be condensed, and every bit of the little sheet was
interesting. Twice the _Review_ was quoted in important meteorological
journals and various weather periodicals were sent as exchanges to the
office. It meant a lot of work for the editor-in-chief, but Fred's
father, realizing that the post was an excellent training for his son,
released him from all his Saturday chores.
At last the word came that the kites had actually arrived. A farm wagon
was sent in to fetch the wooden cases, and that wagon, when it drove
into town, had every member of the League on board, all excited and
chattering like so many magpies. Rex and Lassie, the pair of four-legged
members of the League, also came along to give dignity to the occasion.
Permission had been secured from Tom's father to use part of the pasture
as a kite-flying station, and, bright and early the next Saturday, the
League gathered at the wind-measurer's home to see the cases unpacked.
Mr. Levin also came, to give advice and suggestions.
"What's the direction of the wind, Tom?" he asked.
The boy glanced up at his home-made weather-vane, which had been
adjusted so that it was right to the fraction of a degree.
"South-southeast, sir," he said.
"Is it steady or veering?" the weather expert continued. He was anxious
that Tom should feel the importance of his wind observations. "What was
it this morning?"
"I'll see, sir," said Tom, and hurried into the house for his book on
wind observations, which he had kept faithfully, though, in all the five
months of the League's work, there had been no opportunity to make use
of them.
"It was south--a quarter--east this morning," he answered quite
importantly.
"And what is the present velocity?" came the next query.
Tom ran up the short ladder to the dial of his Robinson anemometer or
wind-measurer. This consisted of four cup-shaped pieces of metal
fastened to four arms at right angles to each other, and set
horizontally in a socket. The force of the wind on the open cup-shaped
sides was so much stronger than on the convex or rounded sides that the
anemometer whirled around quite rapidly.
"Say," said one of the boys as he watched Tom, "I didn't know he had all
this down so pat! It's great!"
"Fourteen miles an hour, sir," said Tom, as he ran down the ladder, "by
the anemometer dial."
"Well," the Forecaster replied, "fourteen miles an hour is a good enough
breeze for kite-flying. How about it, boys? Shall we try a flight
to-day?"
"Oh, let's!" the boys exclaimed.
"Very well," said the Forecaster, "we'll put the kites together. Have
any of you ever seen a weather kite?" he queried.
"I've seen a picture of one, sir," said Fred. "I saw it in one of the
Weather Bureau booklets. It looked like a box with the ends knocked out.
Are these like that?"
"Yes," the weather expert replied, "all over the world the Hargrave or
box kite is used. There's a little difference in the methods of bracing
the frames, but the principle of them all is the same."
"Are they the best kites for lifting, sir?" asked Anton. "I saw a
picture, once, of a man being carried along the ground by a kite, but it
didn't look like this. It was like a lot of little triangles all piled
one on top of the other."
"That's a different kind," the Forecaster answered, "it's called a
tetrahedral kite, and was invented by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. They
will lift a man quite easily. Owing to the form of construction, they're
much heavier and harder to handle and they won't go up as high. The box
kites fly higher and more easily. They'll go up even in the lightest
wind, and that's quite important, boys, because you must remember that
sometimes there's quite a strong wind in the upper layers of the air
when there's only a zephyr below. As you see, boys, this kite consists
simply of four long sticks arranged in a square, with one third of the
length at either end covered with a specially treated and tightly
stretched muslin."
He was working rapidly as he talked, and, before long the kite was
assembled, the wire attached and wound on the reel and all was ready for
launching.
"Will that wire hold it, sir?" asked Ross, as he noted the extremely
fine line that the Forecaster was using.
"Certainly, it's piano wire. It's only a thirty-second part of an inch
in diameter, but it will stand a pull of nearly three hundred pounds.
That's more than you could pull. More even than Monroe could pull, and
he's the strongest of you."
"Couldn't I hold one of those small kites, sir?" asked Monroe.
"Yes," the Forecaster said, "you could with a well-made hand reel, and
if the wind wasn't too strong. But your arms would soon give out. Of
course, the pull of a kite depends on the amount of square feet of sail
area. Anton," he added, turning to the crippled lad, "you're the
mathematician of the League, measure that kite and tell us how many
square feet of sail area it has."
Anton took a foot rule from his pocket and measured the kite rapidly.
"A trifle over thirty-six feet, sir," he said. "I can give you the
fractions, if you like."
"No, that's near enough," said the Forecaster. "Thirty-six feet of sail
area in a fourteen mile wind will lift nearly twenty pounds of wire and,
probably, will have a pull of about sixty pounds. I don't think you'd
care to stand a sixty-pound drag very long, Monroe. We'll let our new
reel do the work."
"About how high could we make this kite go, sir?" asked Tom. "Does that
depend on the wind?"
"No," the Forecaster answered, "it depends on the sail area of the kite
and the weight of the wire. Ten square feet of sail area will lift three
pounds or, a thousand feet of wire. There are over five thousand feet to
a mile, and a kite usually ascends at about an angle of forty-five
degrees. So, if you allow for sag and so forth, you'd have to put out
eight or nine thousand feet of wire to reach a mile, wouldn't you?"
"Yes," said Tom, "I guess that's how it would go."
"It's an awful lot of line," commented Fred.
"Therefore," said the Forecaster, "if ten square feet will lift a
thousand feet of wire, for eight thousand feet, you'd need eighty
square feet of sail area."
"Then even the two of these together aren't big enough to go up a mile!"
cried Tom.
"A mile is pretty high, my boy," said the Forecaster; "you've never seen
a kite go up a quarter as far."
"What's the highest flight that ever was made?" queried Tom.
"America holds the World's Record," was the answer. "The United States
Weather Bureau sent up a string of kites at Mount Weather, in Virginia,
that ascended higher than four miles and a quarter, 21,385 feet above
the reel, to be exact."
"How many kites did they use?" Tom asked.
"Eight," the Forecaster answered, "with a lifting surface of five
hundred and forty-four square feet of sail area. There wouldn't have
been much chance for you, Monroe, if you'd tried to hold that bunch in
your hand. The kites would have picked you off the ground and whisked
away with you like a piece of rag tied to the tail of a Japanese kite.
There," he concluded as he stepped back, "I think we're ready now. Tom,
how's the wind?"
The official wind-measurer ran up the ladder to his dial, calculated
rapidly and answered:
"Freshening, sir. It's about seventeen miles an hour, now."
"That's all right," the weather expert declared. "Tom, you start her
off."
"What do I do, sir?" asked the boy.
"Just toss the kite in the air," the Forecaster answered.
"Don't I have to run with it?"
"Not a step, except when the wind is very light. Off with you!"
Tom carried the kite about a hundred feet, the line paying out as he
went, and waited the word. The boys clustered around the reel excitedly.
Monroe went along with Tom. Rex also wanted to follow, but as Ross was
afraid that he might jump at the kite and tear it with his teeth, though
in play, he called the terrier back.
"Ross," then said the Forecaster, "you take the time of the flight, and
Anton, I think you'd better watch the reel and see that the line doesn't
foul."
The excitement of the boys grew intense. The box kite looked so unlike
any of the kites that they had flown that some wondered whether it
would go up in the air. Fred, in his capacity as editor, having seen a
picture of a box-kite up in the air, was quite arrogant in his
assurances that it would really fly.
"Are you ready?" the Forecaster said, watching the whirling anemometer.
"Throw!"
At the word, Tom gave the kite a light toss in the air, against the
direction of the wind, as indicated.
The kite swayed from side to side, but having four surfaces to the wind,
did not swoop and dive like the flat kites. Only half a dozen times did
it dart from side to side, then the current of the wind caught it at the
right angle and it began to climb up into the air.
Tom waved his cap at it with an excited cheer, in which all the boys
joined.
The first kite-flight of the League was on!
Smaller and smaller grew the kite, climbing until it was almost out of
sight. The rattle of the reel, as the wire ran out, was music in the
boys' ears. When the half-mile mark on the wire was passed, the
Forecaster said:
"I think that's enough for a first flight, boys. Better pull her in."
Some of the boys begged that the kite might be allowed to go up a
little higher, but the home-made reel was a trifle rickety and would
need strengthening. Winding the reel by hand took quite a long time, but
the kite came to the ground, safely, unharmed.
From that time on, kite-flying became a passion with the boys. The
official measurements of the Weather Bureau kites were secured, together
with diagrams showing exactly how the kites were to be built. Before a
month was over, every member had a kite, and, as kite-races were to be
held, every boy had to build his kite himself, absolutely without any
outside help. It was nothing less than amazing to see how these kites,
all built on the same pattern by different boys, behaved differently. It
seemed almost as if the characters of the boys appeared in their kites.
Bob's was the slowest and most powerful, Anton's the fastest but behaved
poorly in a strong wind, Monroe's was absolutely useless in a zephyr.
Tom, who up to that time, had felt that his share in the work of the
League was extremely small, now found himself of great importance. He
thought of kites in every spare minute of the day and dreamed of kites
at night. His father had to forbid the mention of the word "kite" at
meal-times. The lad made fliers of every shape and pattern, and his
kites were usually so stable that it was upon his model that the
meteorograph was fastened which registered the pressure, humidity and
temperature of the air and the velocity of the wind, according to the
request of the young fellow who had sent the League the two first kites.
The _Issaquena County Weather Review_ was compelled to run a regular
weekly feature of "Kite Records" and few were the weeks without a
flight.
At last came the fateful Saturday, the last Saturday in October, the day
set for the kite races. Many of the boys had made new kites for the
occasion and all had overhauled them. Secret practice flights had been
made and the rivalry was keen. What was the wind going to be like? Would
the day be fine? It was hinted that Tom had some special secret, but
what it was no one knew, unless, perhaps, the Forecaster. The event had
been quite widely advertised--had it not appeared in the _Review_!--and
the neighborhood gathered as though to a country fair. The roped
inclosure was full of people and the dimes which rattled into the dried
gourd more than paid up the club's indebtedness for the wire and the
shipment of the kites.
There were all kinds of races, races for speed, to see whose kite would
reach a certain height the soonest; races for steadiness; races for
altitude. Anton created great excitement by sending up one of the
puppies in a basket attached to a parachute fastened to a kite which was
released when he pulled a string. It was a big parachute and a small
puppy, so that no one feared for the pup's safety.
Ross then came forward with his big kite. It could not be entered in the
races, because all the kites for racing had been of standard size.
"What are those little balls?" one of the boys asked, pointing to
bundles covered with paper and attached to a leading string, which were
fastened at fifty-foot intervals to the leading wire.
"You'll see," said Ross, and up went the big kite. It flew steadily and
well and when a couple of hundred yards above the ground, he made it
fast to one of the stakes. Then, while every one watched, he gave the
leading string a sharp tug, and then a succession of pulls, breaking
loose each of the little bundles attached to the leading wire. And, as
the people looked, first one and then another American flag burst out of
its covering, the lowermost and largest bundle being a big Stars and
Stripes that floated out gallantly above the kite-ground.
"Now," said Ross, turning to the Kite-Master, as the boys had begun to
call Tom, "out with your secret! What is it?"
Tom turned to the Forecaster.
"Is it all right for to-day?" he asked.
The weather expert looked keenly at the sky, glanced at the weather-vane
and the whirling anemometer, and nodded his head.
"I think so," he said. "The weather's a little gusty, but this is the
time to try. Nothing venture, nothing have!"
At the word, Tom ran off into the house. The boys watched him, wondering
what new contrivance the Kite-Master was going to produce.
He reappeared in a moment, carrying with him a new kite, a little larger
than the others, but of the same usual pattern. This was not
particularly exciting. He laid the kite down on the ground and ran into
the house again. In a moment, he was out again with another.
"Going to fly them tandem?" asked Ross.
Tom did not answer. He laid that one on the ground and returned into the
house again.
"Do you suppose he's got three?" Anton asked. This was amazing riches,
three kites. All the boys knew what a tremendous amount of careful and
exacting work went into the making of even one of them.
Out darted Tom and laid a third and then a fourth kite on the ground.
The four great kites, each of them with the forward part white and the
rear section painted black, made a noble showing in the afternoon sun.
Ralph, with his ever-ready camera, stepped forward.
"Wait a minute," said Tom, "I've got another one," and he darted into
the house to get it. He returned a moment later with a fifth kite,
similar in every detail to the other four and then, readily enough,
posed beside the kites for his picture. Overhead flew the Stars and
Stripes.
"I want that for the _Review_," said Fred.
"What are you going to do, Tom?" asked Ross.
Tom hesitated a moment and then announced:
"I'm going to try for a world's record!"
The audacity of this startled the boys for a moment, and then a shout
went up, while word was passed around the crowd that Issaquena County
was going to try for the kite record of the world.
The first kite, which no one but Tom and the Forecaster had yet seen in
flight, took the air and was off. Tom gave it four hundred feet of line
and then fastened his second kite, which
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