in the wind, but his kind old face
was peaceful.

The sunlight, gleaming through the crystal, made a halo of light around
the negro's head.

"Don't!" said Ross, laying his hand on Anton's shoulder. "There's mighty
few of us that'll ever get the chance to die like Dan'l."

CHAPTER IX

THE TRAIL OF THE HURRICANE

"Two o'clock, Tuesday morning, August the seventeenth, Nineteen Hundred
and Fifteen!

"Slowly down and across the white, faintly ruled paper wrapped about the
revolving drum, I watched the long-shanked, awkward pen of the barograph
in our Weather Bureau station at Galveston. In the jerky, scrawling
fashion of a child writing his first copy on a slate, I saw the pen
gradually draw what looked like a rough profile map--a long declining
plateau, a steep and then a steeper slope, a jagged ugly valley--

"The valley of the shadow of death!"

The boys clustered closer round the speaker, the man who had seen and
lived through, the Galveston hurricane.

"We knew well, the three of us in the Weather Bureau," he went on, "that
descending zig-zag line meant that the hurricane, then beginning to rage
over our heads, would increase in fury and in ruin, until the other
wall of that strangely-drawn valley should begin to form under the
halting pen. Thus we watched and waited.

"'Read the wind velocity,' my chief said to me.

"I focused a glass on the recorder, holding a lantern in my other hand.

"'Ninety miles an hour, sir,' I said.

"'It'll be a good deal more than that,' he answered. 'I only hope we
don't have a repetition of 1900.'"

"That was the worst ever, wasn't it, sir?" asked Anton.

"It was the most destructive storm that the United States ever saw," the
Galveston weather observer answered, "but, as a storm, it wasn't nearly
as violent as the one we've just been through."

The speaker, who had his arm in a sling and who was still frail and weak
from the injuries he had received during the hurricane, looked round at
the boys. Being the Forecaster's nephew, he had come to his uncle's
house to recuperate and the work of the League had fired his
imagination.

"Tell them of the 1900 storm first," said the Forecaster.

"You tell them, Uncle," his nephew replied; "you remember that better
than I do, and then I'll tell the boys my adventures in last week's
storm."

"Yes," put in Fred, "you tell us, Mr. Levin."

"Very well," said the founder of the League, and he began:

"I suppose, measure