I pulled up to Riverview Ferry, well on toward the North Dakota line, at one o'clock. Mr. and Mrs. Meadows, with whom I had lunch, once operated a pontoon bridge at this point but had given it up on account of the trouble from high water. They wanted to sell the twenty or more pontoons left on their hands but said they could not see where a buyer would come from. It occurred to me that one of these floats would make an ideal hull for a houseboat, for a Missouri-Mississippi voyage, just as Riverview would be an ideal place for launching one. I have not Mr. Meadows' address, but fancy Sidney, Montana, would reach him. I shall not take the responsibility of urging any one to attempt a trip of this kind, but should the urge have developed spontaneously I think there is a chance here to acquire the makings of an extremely serviceable house-boat at a fraction of what it would cost to go about building it in the ordinary way. Starting at high water in June, an outfit of this kind--with luck and in the hands of the right party--might well go through to New Orleans before Christmas. Manned by a party without much common sense and persistence, it might conceivably be abandoned by some wildly regretful people before it swung out into the "Big Muddy." I utterly refuse to pass upon any one's qualification, or to take other than hostile notice of letters charging me with ruining what but for me might have been a comparatively inexpensive and enjoyable holiday in Bermuda or on the Riviera. The ferryman at Riverview claimed to have made the voyage from Miles City to somewhere on the lower Mississippi in a house-boat, taking two seasons for it. He was the first ferryman I ever met who was full of doleful warnings about troubles ahead. My little tin boat might be all right for the rapids of the Yellowstone, he said, but just wait till it went up against the white caps kicked up by the winds of the Missouri and the Mississippi. He said no word about the winds of the Yellowstone. If he wasn't prepared for them, I only hope his ferryboat was not caught in midstream by a zephyr that breezed up river about three hours later. [Illustration: © _L. A. Huffman_ THE "OLD N----" CROSSING THE POWDER RIVER] It must have been toward three o'clock that I first noticed how what had been a grey murkiness to the north-east all morning was now rising in a solid bank of swiftly advancing cloud. For a while its front was smooth and rounded, like the rim of a tin-plate. Half-way up to the zenith this front began to reveal itself as a wind-riven line of madly racing nimbus, black, sinister and ominous. And yet, blissfully ignorant of the hell-broth a-brew, I worried not a whit--didn't even begin to edge away from mid-channel for a while, in fact. What a lamb it was! Never again, with so much as a man's-hand-sized cloud blinking on the windward horizon, was I to know the calm, quiet, serenity of a confident soul.