The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men Part 23

"I hope mine aren't smashed," Tom said eagerly. The story had given him hopes.

On the boys pounded. Fred was at the end of his strength. Ross, himself, was almost done out, but he felt that, as head of the League, he ought to go on. Seeing, however, that the editor-in-chief might really hurt himself unless he gave in, Ross decided to stop. He knew that Fred would give up if he did.

"I've had enough, Fred," he said at last. "Let the other three go ahead.

We can't hope to beat Monroe."

The editor stopped, willingly enough. He looked a little longingly at the other three, as they ran on.

"I'd have liked to be there, so as to write it up," he announced wistfully.

"You can't be everywhere, Fred," Ross answered, and the two boys turned homewards.

Monroe, Bob, and Tom, with Monroe leading, swung on their way. Twenty minutes more pa.s.sed. Tom's heart was beating like a trip-hammer and there was a drawn look about his face which showed that he was nearly done. Bob, who had not uttered a word since he first saw the kite, and who had not varied his pace by a fraction since he began, was jogging along as though he were a machine. Monroe still ran springily and with the jauntiness which betokened the practised runner.

Then, suddenly, the Forecaster pointed ahead.

"There's something caught in that tree!" he said.

In another minute the kite wire could be seen. It had hooked its coils into a bale of barbed wire, and in trying to lift this had entangled the bale in the branches.

As though he were starting for a hundred yard dash, Monroe sped ahead.

Grimly, Bob tried to catch up to him, but it was like a bull-dog chasing a deer. Tom, his face in the tense grin of exhaustion, struggled bravely, but dropped behind step by step.

Monroe was within fifty feet of the tree when a sudden thought struck him. He slowed down, and as Bob caught up to him, said in a low voice:

"Tom's made a great run! Let him be the first to get there."

Bob nodded.

As the pace slowed down, Tom, his gait a little staggering, caught up with the other two and pa.s.sed them. He reached the tree first and looked up.

"My kites!" he cried. "And I got the amateur record!" and he collapsed on the ground at the foot of the tree, worn out but supremely happy.

With the approach of winter, kite-flying became less popular as a sport, but two or three times a month Tom sent up one of his kites with the meteorograph, and the observations were faithfully forwarded to Osborne, whose original gift of the two kites had been the stimulus to the Mississippi League of the Weather.

The first few flakes of snow turned the attention of the boys to an entirely new line of weather observations. Many and many a time had the boys noticed the strange shapes of snow-flakes, but without paying much attention to them. On the first Sat.u.r.day after the light snow-fall, however, three different boys brought in rough drawings of star-like and feather-like snow forms that they had noticed.

"I've been wondering," said Anton, thoughtfully, "what makes snow-flakes take those shapes? Hail comes down in lumps, and rain-drops must be round, because when you see the first heavy drops of a shower they make round blobs on the ground with pointed splashes at the side."

"A snow-flake," the meteorologist replied, "is a collection of icy crystals. If you could look at one under the microscope, Anton, you'd see that every little projection that goes to make up the shape of the flake, is a six-sided crystal. You've eaten barley-sugar from a string some time, haven't you?"

"Sure!" said several of the boys, and one added, "Mother often makes it."

"How does she make it?" queried the Forecaster.

"Melts up some sugar and water and, as when it begins to cool off, she hangs a string in the middle of the pot and the sugar settles on that."

"It settles in regular shapes, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, those are crystals. When water cools into ice, boys, it does the same thing. Haven't you sometimes seen, after a cold night, a lot of needles shooting out from the sides from a puddle?"

"Yes, sir, often."

"Those are all six-sided crystals. Frost on the window pane is made in the same way. All those designs that look like lace work or trees or ferns are six-sided crystals produced by water-vapor, in the air, cooling and crystallizing on the cold gla.s.s. Ice crystals grow from each other quite readily. This is called twinning."

"But why are they always so regular?"

The Forecaster shook his head.

"You're always expecting everything to be regular, Ross," he said.

"They're not regular at all. There are thousands of different forms. The United States is fortunate in having one man who's the world's expert on snow crystals, and he examines and photographs thousands every year and adds, perhaps, two or three new examples each season."

"Who's that, sir?" asked Fred.

"Wilson A. Bentley, of Jericho, Vermont," the Forecaster answered. "He's made thousands of photographs of snow crystals through a microscope.

What's more, he's done it for the love of the work. Why don't you send him a copy of the _Review_, Fred? I'm sure he'd like to see it. Perhaps he might send you some prints of his snow crystals. He'd appreciate a plate of Caesar's sunsets and Ralph's clouds, I'm sure."

"I'll send them to him right away," the editor answered.

"Why is it," queried Anton, "that when snow-flakes fall slowly and only a few of them at a time, they are big, but when there's a heavy snow-storm the flakes are small?"

"Because they are manufactured in different layers of the air," the Forecaster answered, "in the upper air, eight or ten miles up, where the faintest cirrus clouds are, they are not flakes at all, but tiny needle-like crystals, called spicules. In the depth of the Arctic winter, near the North Pole and especially on the Greenland ice-cap--one of the coldest regions of the world--the wind is full of these spicules, which one can't very well call snow.

"Snow-flakes that come from the cold regions of the air, three or four miles high, generally have a solid form. All, of course, show the six-sided form of the snow crystals. Being smaller and heavier in proportion to their surface they fall more quickly. In the layers of the atmosphere, one or two miles high, where the air is not as cold and where the content of water vapor is higher, the flakes have more opportunity to grow as they slowly sink through the air. Snow-flakes that have been formed only a short distance above the ground become large and feathery, the kind of which northern peoples say that 'the old woman of the sky is plucking her geese.'"

"I suppose, in the northern part of the country, sir," Ralph suggested, "snow has to be measured, as well as rain."

"Certainly," the Forecaster answered, "otherwise we wouldn't be able to tell the precipitation of a region at all. There is a regular instrument for it, called a s.h.i.+elded snow-gauge. This is like a rain-gauge, boys, only it stands ten or twenty feet above the ground, to avoid surface drifting. The snow caught is melted and expressed as so many inches of precipitation. Sometimes the depth of snow is measured by thrusting a measuring stick down to the ground.

"Of course, that's not nearly all that the Weather Bureau has to do with snow. In the northern states, especially of the Pacific Coast, snow surveys are of great importance. The Weather Bureau often sends men to determine the amount of snow that has fallen over a given area, in order to find out how much water may be expected. This is needed in flood forecasts and irrigation projects. Some of our men, boys, can tell you thrilling tales of their expeditions on snow-shoes up snow-covered slopes where there is never a trail.

"Railroads whose tracks run through the regions of heaviest snowfall build snowsheds to keep their lines from being buried in avalanches, and these sheds are built to withstand pressures calculated by the Weather Bureau. Where drifting occurs and the railroad tracks are being covered with the drifting snow, it is the combined snow and wind records of the Weather Bureau which form the basis for the work of the rotary-snow-plow.

"Even so, boys, the value of the work of the Weather Bureau in snow surveys is very small compared with the importance of frost warnings.

These save the country tens of millions of dollars every year, especially in the fruit sections."

"You mean by smoking them?" queried Ross. "Father heard about that a couple of years ago and bought a lot of fire-pots for his orchard."

"How did he succeed?" asked the Forecaster.

"He didn't succeed at all," the boy answered. "There were only two bad frosts that spring, and both times the evening before had been so warm that no one suspected that there would be frost before morning. The one night that he did start the fires, it turned warm towards midnight and we wouldn't have needed the fires any way. Old Jed Tighe, who's got the biggest fruit farm here, has made fun of Father's fire-pots ever since."

"Now, if your father had received the Weather Bureau's frost warnings in advance," the Forecaster said, "he wouldn't have wasted fuel on the night that there wasn't a frost and he wouldn't have let his crop freeze on the nights that the temperature really did drop below the danger point. For example, boys, if the League of the Weather had been in existence at that time and could have given good frost warnings, all that crop would have been saved, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, sir," said the boys, "it would."