e a skiff. It seemed to Parson Rasba that he had never
seen a more beautiful picture in all his days.

CHAPTER XXIII

Lester Terabon rowed down the rolling river waters in the dark night. He
had, of course, looked out into the Mississippi shades from the security
of landing, anchorage, and sandbar; he knew the looks of the night but
not the activities of currents and bends when a gale is sweeping by and
the air is, by turns, penetrated by the hissing of darting whitecaps and
the roar of the blustering winds.

He would not from choice have selected a night of gale for a pull down
the Mississippi, and his first sensation as he sought a storm wave
stroke was one of doubt. What dangers might engulf him was not plain,
not the waves, for his skiff bobbed and rocked over them; not river
pirates bent on plunder, for they could not see him; perhaps a snag in
the shallows of a crossing; perhaps the leap of a sawyer, a great tree
trunk with branches fast in the mud and the roots bounding up and down
in the current; perhaps a collision with some other craft.

He had salt-water rowlocks on his boat, open-topped "U" sockets, and the
oars he used were cased with a foot of black leather and collars of
leather strips; the tips were covered with copper sheets which gave them
weight and balance. At first he pulled awkwardly, catching crabs in the
hollows and backing into the heft of the waves, but after a time he felt
the waves as they came, and the oars feathered and caught. While he
watched ahead and searched the black horizon for the distant sparkle of
government lights, he fell into the swing of his stroke before he knew
it, and he was interested and surprised to observe that he swayed to the
side-wash while he pulled to the rhythm of the waves.

The government lights guided him. He had not paid much attention to them
before; he had seen their white post standards as he dropped down, day
after day, but his skiff, drawing only five inches of water, passed over
the shallowest crossings and along the most gradually sloping sandbars.
Now he must keep to the deep water, follow the majestic curves and
sweeps of the meandering channel, lest he collide with a boiling eddy,
ram the shore line of sunken trees, or climb the point of a towhead.

It was all a new experience, and its novelty compelled him at times to
pause in his efforts to jot down a few hasty words by light of a little
electric flash to preserve in his memory the seq