He was well into the hill country when, far ahead of him, he saw the clouds breaking. The storm had passed on, and the clouds were sweeping away to the southeast, leaving the clean, washed-blue that follows rain. Five minutes later they hit the wind. They had been flying in comparatively calm air, making ninety miles an hour over the ground, but when they struck the “norther” their ground speed was cut to sixty--they were bucking a thirty-mile wind. And seventy miles to go! * * * * * He dived the ship to two hundred feet, and for ten minutes flew along just above the rounded tops of hills, trying to keep as low as possible to avoid the stronger wind at higher elevations. But as the plane bored through the air mile after mile he realized that the wind was becoming stronger, even at the ground. He pulled up, then, and climbed five thousand feet, checking as closely as possible the speed the ship was making over the ground. The velocity of the wind at five thousand feet was more than fifty miles an hour! He went on up, fighting the little ship into the blasting cold of the upper reaches at ten thousand feet. But still the wind did not diminish; they seemed to crawl along, making hardly any progress whatsoever. He dived back down to a level with the higher hills. The motor began to heat again, and Nick drained more water from the tank above his head. He estimated that he was half way there--forty miles to go--and the tank was almost empty. “Never make it!” he muttered. “We’re down in these hills just as sure as hell!” They should be there now, it seemed to him. They had flown an hour and a half since the last take-off. He checked the map in his hand, but the country below was shown as a blank space, with nothing to identify the hills from one another. A creek slipped under them, but there was no creek shown upon the map. The centigrade showed the motor heating once more, and with a forlorn hope Nick reached up and let the last of the water run down to the radiator. As much leaked out as went in--half of it streamed out at the joint under the handkerchief--otherwise there would have been enough to get them through. * * * * * Minutes passed, counted off against the miles; there were more minutes than there were miles. The ground crawled back behind them in agonizing slowness. The centigrade went up again, slowly, as it had on each first warning. They could fly perhaps five minutes more--and then a welter of destruction! Then, far ahead of them, a blot on the top of a rounding hill, Nick saw Rock Springs. Ten or twelve miles away, and close, from the standpoint of an airplane, yet utterly unattainable. The motor began to knock slightly, increasing until it sounded like the hammering of loose pieces of metal in a heavy can. The needle of the centigrade was glued to the peg.