A long, lean, torpedo-like shaft of blue-black cloud, breaking away from the ruck and aiming in a direction that would bring it directly over my head, produced the first splash in the pool of my perfect serenity. That _did_ look just a bit as though I might be running into the centre of a heavy thunder-storm, I confessed to myself. Perhaps, if there was a ranch-house convenient, it might be just as well to be thinking of getting under cover. Yes, there were three or four houses off to the left--places on the irrigation project, doubtless, they were so close together. I started to pull in toward a sandy flat, but sheered off again when it became apparent that a slough and marsh would cut me off from the first of the houses, a place with a silo and the inevitable red barn. Plainly the only way to reach any of the farms would be by landing at the foot of the bluff a quarter of a mile ahead, climbing up and cutting across the fields. That might not be possible before the storm broke--but what did a warm summer rain matter anyhow? Leaning hard onto my oars, I headed straight down stream for where a coal-streaked yellow bluff blocked the northerly course of the river and bent it off almost directly eastward. Swelling monstrously as it approached, the black arrow-head of the storm, deflecting slightly, began to pass overhead to the left. I distinctly remember thinking how its shape now suggested the picked skeleton of a gigantic mackerel--just a backbone and right-angling ribs. The sun dimmed and reddened as the flying clouds began to drive across its face, and the even ribs barred the dulling glow like a furnace grating. A sulphurous, copperly glare streaming through cast a weird unearthly sheen on the unrhythmically lapping wavelets of the river. My serenity was blotted out with the sun. I recalled only too well now where I had known that ghostly yellow light before--the sullen fore-glow by which the South Sea hurricane slunk upon its helpless prey. It had always been associated in my mind with the shriek of the wind, the roar of the surf and the explosive detonations of snapped coco palm boles. There were no coco palms here to snap, I reflected, but--ah, that was surely a roar, and there came the wind! Pulling in a dead calm myself, I saw the river and air at the bend turn white almost between one stroke and the next. A tongue of wind seemed to have shot out from behind a point to the right and begun scooping up hunks of the river and throwing them across the flats. This blast was at right angles to my course down stream, but I came parallel to it as I swung and headed for the sand-bar on my left. The air was coiling and twisting upon itself as I landed, but that out-licking tongue of the storm was passing me by and circling the bluffs beyond the flat.