I went to bed early. I hadn’t had much sleep for three days, so at ten o’clock in the morning I was still pounding my ear commodiously. I was awakened by long, lean, drawling Tex MacDowell.
“Take a peek at the paper and then arise and shine,” he told me. “We start for the Gulf of Mexico in exactly one hour.”
One peer at the headlines, that took up half the front page, awakened me as thoroughly as a pail of ice water would have.
“Laguna In Ruins!” the paper screamed in letters big enough to put on a signboard.
Within a moment I had the details. One of those tidal waves, estimated as at least a hundred feet high and two miles in width, had swept in from the Gulf. Doubtless the result of a volcanic eruption on the sea floor. According to the meager reports available, every house, structure and living thing existing in the portion of Laguna, within a half mile of the beach, had been doomed by that vast crush of water. The remainder of the town, back farther from the beach, had been inundated; but houses were standing, and many of the people had escaped alive. The low country—marshy ground, a lot of it, anyway—was under three feet of water, and Laguna, as well as small settlements along the beach, which had likewise been demolished, was a marooned and ruined little city. Telegraph lines down, railroads washed out, telephones useless, and at least one thousand people dead or washed out to sea.
“We go over to patrol the Gulf for survivors,” Tex said tersely. “Donovan Field ships will ferry food and water and medical supplies down. We leave in an hour. Get a move on!”
All I could think of, as I made passes at my whiskers and leaped into my clothes and gulped some food was this—how must it feel to look up and see millions of tons of water about to fall on you? A ten foot wave in a storm makes me feel like an ant bucking a steam roller.
Four men were to be left at the field for patrol. Six ships were warming up, as I ran out on the field. The roar of the half-dozen four hundred and fifty horsepower Libertys fairly shook the earth, and their propellers send clouds of dust swirling upward. As I approached the line, a car tore into the airdrome. There was Shirley, her hair blowing in the wind, as she streaked down the road toward the ships.
As I got closer, I saw her fling herself out of the roadster and make a beeline for none other than Kennedy. Penoch O’Reilly was standing near by, his face a study.