From now on, he swept along in a continuous storm area. Gales seemed to roar up from nowhere and burst about the plane. From his student weather studies, that now seemed part of a long-gone past, Hal Dane had learned much about the thunderheads and twisters of the atmosphere. He knew a deal about gauging the breadth and diameter of certain type storms, their speed of movement, the velocity of the winds within these storms. Every shred of such knowledge that he had was put to severe test now. In his plane, he was like some hunted wild animal fleeing before the storm hounds, turning, twisting, riding now high, now low. Time and again he was only able to avoid a crash by feeling his way around the edges of the storms and dodging between them, never letting his plane become completely swallowed up in the maw of the storm monster. Sometimes two or three storms came together. A low-powered airplane would have been lost for lack of force to make headway in such a case, but the mighty Wind Bird courageously battled forward on these constantly changing air currents.