STORM By Leland S. Jamieson Illustrated by Paul Lehman A vivid and very real story of airplane adventure--by the professional pilot who gave us “Altitude” and “Crash Pilot.” The Rock Springs tornado was followed by the newspapers with credible accuracy from the time it howled down upon the little isolated village in the hills until the last one of the injured was laid safely in a hospital in San Antonio, yet the most dramatic note of the whole affair was sounded in a way that few people realized. Rock Springs, being situated upon a low bald hill in a wide valley above the source of the East Nueces River, offered no resistance to the shrieking, tearing wind that whipped down from the dusk of a spring evening and smashed it into ruin. At seven forty-four in the evening, as tired ranchers were sitting down to their usual late suppers, the air was calm; at seven fifty-one the storm lashed out of black clouds and ripped every building from its foundation; at eight o’clock there came a lull, a period of perhaps ten minutes when not a breath of breeze flicked at the dust of crumbled stone that lay strewn across the streets. The murderous force lifted itself back into the heavens, leaving over Rock Springs the inky blackness of scudding clouds above, and the far echoes of the whirling wind as it sighed into the distance. The sixty houses of the town were flattened to the earth when the wind had left them, and for a moment after the storm died there was no sound, as though the people who still lived were stunned into muteness. Then, almost immediately, there arose the cries of terror and anguish and desperation of two hundred people. Women groped in still fear for their children, calling names into the thick night, fumbling in delirium through the ruins of their homes, afraid to hope. Men sought their wives, sometimes to come upon a huddled form, silent and unmoving. A breeze stirred ominously and dispelled the heavy air; and shortly afterward a booming rain whipped down in torrents of black water. The uninjured struggled on in their search tirelessly, frantically; night wore itself along, adding, minute by minute, to the suffering and grief. Lightning thrashed down in vicious tongues of livid flame, and in these eerie flickerings the search was carried on.... Mary Collins, the telephone operator in Rock Springs, was trying to get a call through to Uvalde when the storm beat down upon the village. She heard the Uvalde operator answer; then the line snapped as the sweeping wind struck it. She was trying to reestablish the connection when she heard the buildings on the other side of town clatter into fragments. The next instant her own building was down around her; she was in darkness as the storm passed on. Stunned, groping her way out of the debris in blindness and fear, she heard the cries and shrieks and supplications of people all around her.