LOG Sixth Day
The morning opened as still and dry as Boston after 11 P. M. The sun rose red as an auction flag against a cold-gravy sky, and the atmosphere is heavy with something doing. The Captain, solemn as a night-clerk in a Raines Law hotel, is at the wheel, and the Lookout is pop-eyed. A few insomniacal passengers are pacing the deck like a man who has been called for margin, and are bothering the Captain with fool questions. The Captain has put on a pair of plush ear-muffs.
11 A. M.—Dirty weather ahead. The Lithia is logging her limit, in [116] ]an effort to weather White Rock Point before the storm breaks.
11.20 A. M.—The Lookout reports a siphon-shaped cloud off the weather bow. The air is laden with dust, and is coming in dry hot puffs. Tom Ginn thinks we are running into another automobile party, but Old Medford says we are up against worse than that.
11.30 A. M.—The wind has risen to half a gale, and the dust is settling on the Lithia’s decks like the soot from a smoking nickel-plated [117] ]banquet-lamp. Most of the passengers have turned out, prepared for anything.
Gottlieb Kirschwasser has just made his will, bequeathing his collection of dried butterflies and a set of Schiller’s works to the Milwaukee Gemuthlich Society.