There was a terrifying beauty over the river that night. A strange green light had overspread the sky after sunset, and in it every detail of the bank and the bluff stood out with unearthly clearness. The air was sultry, with no hint of the breeze that usually ruffled the water at evening. From a reedy place, shadowed by moss-draped live oaks, a pair of great white egrets rose and winged silently away to the northward. They saw a church spire above the trees at the top of the bluff, and then, low in the shadow along the waterside, the outlines of shacks and houses, with a swarm of flatboats moored to the levee. A thin tinkle of music reached their ears, and as they drew closer it resolved itself into the squeak of fiddles and the throb of banjos. They found a place to tie their craft, down at the lower end of the line, near the steamboat landing, and hardly had they made the ropes fast when a growl of thunder drowned out the music. A wind sprang up, blowing from the south, and the sky grew dark with scudding clouds. A sudden foreboding filled Tad. From that instant he had a dread of Natchez-under-the-Hill. CHAPTER XI The storm struck hard, lashing the muddy water high along the levee and tossing the broadhorns at their moorings. After the furious wind came rain in a deluge that drenched the boys under their hastily erected tarpaulins. And after the rain a pitch-black, sodden night. A few lights glowed feebly in the town, and the music struck up again after a while, but even Allen was too damp and dispirited to feel like going ashore. They got a fire started on the wet hearth, and huddling around it, finally went to sleep. The sun was shining in the morning and all along the water front a bustle of activity began. Boatmen clambered across the decks of neighboring craft to buy or sell goods or visit acquaintances. There was a constant noise of laughing, shouting, swearing, and fighting. The fiddles began their monotonous squeaking once more in the levee saloons, and Allen began to cast a restless eye shoreward, but Abe found plenty for them all to do aboard the _Katy Roby_. They cooked and ate breakfast, swabbed the decks, and spread out their bedding to dry in the sun. They watched a big, new steamboat, the _Tecumseh_, swing in to the landing, her bow a bare thirty feet from them when she made her mooring. “That’s the fastest boat on the river,” they heard a near-by ark-captain say. “She’s got new-fangled boilers with more steam pressure on ’em than the _Amazon_, even. An’ they say her cap’n is out to break all records to Louisville this trip.” From the speed with which her darky deck hands rolled molasses hogsheads aboard, it could be seen that some of the excitement of her race up river had got into their blood.