Now in real life a man who starts out in such a state of exaltation always bangs up against some immovable body good and hard before he is through. Or, more properly speaking, his getting through is more or less coincident with his banging against such a body. Why something like that didn't put a period to my mad career on this occasion has never been clear in my mind. Possibly that more or less mythical Providence that has been known (though by no means often enough to warrant the proverb) to shepherd drunks and fools had something to do with it. At any rate, I was still in mad career down midstream when the wind gave up the bootless chase at six o'clock, broke up into fitful zephyrs and went to sleep among the cottonwoods. In all that time I had not landed once, had not relinquished both oars for a single second, and had not even munched my Maryland fried chicken and gooseberry pie. Skippers have stood longer watches, but never a one has carried on with less relief. On that score, perhaps, I may have deserved to win through. On every other count I was going out of my way to ask for trouble and had nothing but my lucky star to thank for having avoided it. I passed Reed Point and Columbus early in the afternoon. Beyond the latter point I began keeping watch for a certain long line of bluffs which I knew began near the railway station called Rapids and extended easterly for three miles. Clark had called them "Black Bluffs," and that name they retain to this day, though their only claim to blackness even in Clark's time came from the presence of dark green undergrowth. Today they are brown and comparatively bare. I picked up the rounded sky-line of "Black Bluffs" at just about the time that the straight, hard-running riffle that gives Rapids Station its name began to boom ahead. The middle of the riffle was plainly no place for a little tin shallop, but down the right side there appeared to be fairly open channel. Settling that course in my mind, I let the tail of my eye steal back to the head of the bluff, and from there to a cottonwood covered flat that opened up beyond the bend where the river, thrown off a ledge of bedrock, turned sharply to the south in a stolid stream of rock-torn white. Beyond question there was going to be some fairly nice navigation demanded to find a way through that rough stuff below the bend, especially as the wind was going to come strongly abeam for a short distance. All of which was hard luck, I complained to myself, for the end of that line of bluffs pointed an unerring finger at the flat below them as the place where Clark had halted, built his boats and taken to the river. I had hoped for a better look at it than I saw I was going to get.