Chapter I: Without Warning

On the morning that saw the beginning of the Storm That Had to be Stopped, Police Inspector Hines had his life saved by an amateur driver who drove a second-hand flivver into his roadster. It was pure accident, of course. Hines's left mudguard, his left front wheel, and his front bumper were all wreckage when the amateur driver stared wildly about, assured himself that he was still alive, and then burst into tears.

The amateur driver passed forthwith from history. He had nothing more to do with the affair. He merely kept Hines from driving up into the Catskills in the very early morning of August 5, when, as all the world knows, the Storm began.

You will remember that morning. There had been a heat wave over all the Atlantic States for two weeks or more. The cities sweltered. The beaches were crowded. In New York, Central Park was opened to any one who chose to sleep in the open air instead of the stifling tenements.

Those who could leave the city did so. The Catskill and Adirondack hotels were packed. The seashore resorts swarmed with people.

Kathryn Bush was up in the Catskills, and Hines had started up to be with her until Monday. The fact that his car was wrecked in Yonkers almost certainly saved his life, and quite positively determined the events that followed. If he had been up in the storm-center, he would have been utterly helpless.

* * * * *

It was curious that the storm seemed to start so gently. Kathryn Bush wrote an account of the beginning, for the New York _Star_. It was her vacation-time and she was staying in the house of Heracles Tribble, at Rosedale Farm, North Weddensdale, Greene County, New York. She expected Hines to come up, and had risen early. A room was reserved for him at the farmhouse, where there were four other boarders. She may have been sentimental, or she may have been restless. In any event she was looking out of her window when the sun rose.

While birds began to sing abstractedly in the mountain-shadows, long streaks of golden light became visible on the flanks of monster hills. The invisible sun was gilding their sides. Later, a long time later, the red disk of the storm appeared.

The sunlight was gratefully warm after the dawn-chill, though even in the first rays she thought regretfully of the blistering, terrific heat that would come at midday when this same sun would be a ball of intolerable fire, hanging overhead in a brazen sky. Irrelevantly, she remembered the weather forecast--fair and warmer.

And then, quite suddenly, the warmth seemed to go out of the sun's rays.

It was as sudden, as abrupt, as the turning off of a light, as the closing of a furnace door from which a fierce glare had poured forth. The sun was no darker, however. It seemed to shine as brightly as before. It did not give off heat.

Kathryn stared about her. She looked back at the sun. It glowed vividly, but it seemed obscurely to have changed color. She held out her hand to it to catch the warmth of its rays. There was none.

A cloud over its face? No. The sky was wholly clear. There was simply no more heat coming from the sun.

Puzzled, but quite unalarmed, it seemed to Kathryn that the sun's ruddy tint had vanished very suddenly. It even seemed as if instead of a normal gold, the great disk had taken on a faint bluish or greenish tint. The change--if it was a change--was so slight that she could not be sure.

The seeming lack of heat was so extraordinary that, instead of turning away, she gazed and gazed, and presently took a tiny reading-glass and focused it on a bit of paper. The paper should have turned brown and burned luridly. Nothing happened.

More curious still, now, she focused the light upon her hand; then upon the sensitive skin of her forearm. A vivid spot of light formed at the focus of the lens. The speck of flesh seemed white-hot. But there was not the faintest, not the tiniest sensation of heat.

It was at just this time she noticed that a wind was blowing far away. Where she stood at her window, looking eastward, the air was utterly calm. Her window, as a matter of fact, was open wide. But she suddenly saw trees, a long distance off, bending and tossing furiously as if in a gale of wind. There was a long straight stretch of white road reaching far away toward infinity. A cloud of dust was racing along it.

"It's wind!" said Kathryn vaguely.

Still she stared. Then she saw something rolling crazily across a distant pasture. It was a smother of dust and débris. But there was one gigantic, darker object that rolled and rolled. She saw suddenly that it was the top of a tree, sheared off from its trunk in some freak of wind-pressure, and rolling like a monster ball.

The wind struck a farmhouse three miles down the valley. Kathryn saw a cowshed open and vanish. She saw a fence-line disappear. The dwelling leaned and leaned.

It sank quite gently to a sloping mass of wreckage, save that its roof went ballooning off insanely and mowed down a lane of trees through a planted orchard before it crashed against an upward-jutting outcrop of granite and was torn to bits about it.

* * * * *

When the wind struck the house from which Kathryn had watched it, the windows were all down. She had shouted of a storm approaching. Clouds, too, began suddenly to appear in writhing, ominous masses. The house had been closed tightly by the agitated Mr. Heracles Tribble, who hastened out to his hen-houses to see to their security before the storm came, and did not come back.

Kathryn watched from the window. The rolling cloud of dust that was the forefront of the wind drew nearer with incredible speed. As it drew close, the monstrous size of the disturbance became apparent. It was hundreds of feet high, and it was rolling over and over upon itself like a monstrous comber.

There seemed even to be striations in it like those the stranding of a rope will make. But there were objects carried in the smoke-colored rolling cloud. Dark objects, of all shapes and sizes. Kathryn, staring and almost paralyzed by sheer astonishment, saw the tree-limbs and it seemed even whole trees caught up in the monstrous turmoil.

Somehow her eyes swept to the hen-houses at the rear of the house. Mr. Heracles Tribble was standing in the open, peculiarly puny and ineffective, staring incredulously at the thing that bore down upon him. He was small, and rotund, and bald. He wore silver-rimmed spectacles, and he stared at a rolling wave of smoke and dust and utter destruction, hundreds of feet high, that swept toward him irresistibly.

Mr. Heracles Tribble turned suddenly, and fled toward the house. Kathryn saw his mouth dropped open in horror. His fat little legs twinkled. He ran with incredible speed. But the rolling cloud of dust and débris had reached the pasture-lot. It touched the hen-houses and they vanished as if blown to atoms.

Unpausing, the monstrous thing came rolling up. Its bellying edge was over the house while its base had still not yet touched the running little fat man. But then Kathryn saw smoke-like dust envelop him. She saw--or thought she saw--that he rose crazily from the ground. And then the wave of wind struck the house.

It was absurd, but Kathryn was not frightened even the instant after she knew the wind had struck. Her first conscious thought was that the house had been lifted away from around her, leaving her untouched.

Then she realized that the house still stood. There was no roof over her head, to be sure, but the walls remained intact. The feeling of being in the open air came from the fact that without warning or a sound that could be heard above the deafening uproar of the wind, the windows had ceased to be. The glass panes broke out of them with no more disturbance than so many breaking bubble-films would have made.

Kathryn had been at one moment safely housed, behind glass panes. The next instant she was merely sheltered behind a thick brick wall while a dense fog of dust blotted out even the farther side of the room.

Something crashed into that farther wall and kicked feebly. It was a pig, picked up no one could guess where and carried no one can guess how far. Then a tree-trunk thrust itself through the brick wall, horribly splintered, and heaved upward, tearing the wall apart, and then somehow went reeling off into the thick dust-cloud.

* * * * *

Kathryn put her hand to her throat. Sheer professional training alone saved her from panic. The newspaper woman's acquired instinct said:

"What a story! I've got to get to safety. It will be a big story when the wind stops--and I saw it!"

She dropped to the floor and began to crawl past the window toward the stairway. Once she ventured a little distance away from the wall, and a solid stream of air--as solid as a board--that came through a window, rolled her over and over until she struck with a crash against the leeward wall.

It held her there, then she battled her way on hands and knees down the stairs. The wind beat at her terribly, trying to fling her up again. It came in through the smashed lower windows.

She saw the dining room table flat against the wall. Its top covered a window and it was held in place by the wind-pressure. It was very probably that measure of protection which enabled her to pass so close to the leeward wall without being picked up and hurled off into nothingness.

She heard a terrific crash upstairs, in the room she had just left. Fragments of brick came down the steps. She reached the cellar stairs, tumbled down them, and heard more terrific crashes still.

Then there was darkness, while the wind roared by overhead. The noise the wind made was not a hum, not a whistle, not a shriek. It was a steady, a terrible, deep-toned roar. That roaring of the wind was characteristic, throughout, of the Storm That Had to be Stopped.