Far down the river the piercing shriek of a siren split a momentary silence that had fallen on the stream. A drumming noise was borne up to me on a fitful night breeze. From behind the black loom of a jutting wharf a steamer appeared, and came throbbing upstream. Now she was almost on me, the heart-like pulse of her engines and the thresh of her great sternwheel deadening all the other sounds which that vast river surface caught up and bandied back and forth. Remorselessly the current bore me into her path. At first I had strained every nerve to get in her way, but as the black hull with funnels belching smoke and deck-lights riding high drew near I remembered that if I missed a hold on her side I stood a fair chance of being sucked into the flailing paddles. When that filtered into my cranium I backed water in hot haste; but I had gone too far, and her speed was too great. In another minute I was pawing at the slippery bulge of her water-line, and striving to lift my voice above the chug of the engines as she slid by. The wash from her swung me away and drew me back again, and just as the nearing thresh of her broad-paddled wheel struck a chill of fear into my quaking heart my hands fouled in a trailing line and I laid hold of it more tightly than ever drowning man clutched the proverbial straw. It was a small line, and the strain of towing me was great, but it held. In the tiers of cabins above my head lights flicked out one by one. Again and again I called, bellowing upward with the regularity of a fog signal. No answer; no inquiring face peered over the rail. The docks slid by. God only knows how long I dangled at the end of that bit of twisted fiber. The glow-worm lamps of St. Louis twinkled distantly on the left, rapidly falling astern. The thin line wrapped about my wrist numbed it to the elbow; I changed hands from time to time, in peril of being cast adrift. Fervently I wished for my bit of driftwood. The on-rushing demon to which I clung offered less hope of succor. In a little while longer I should have cast loose from sheer inability to hold on. The strain on my arms was exhausting, and the least shift soused me under water, such was the speed. How I should have fared then, I do not know. But in the nick of time an answering hail came from above and when I had established the fact that a human being was clinging alongside, a cluster of heads and a lantern or two appeared at the rail and a rope ladder came wriggling down. Cramped and sore and weary as I was I climbed thankfully aboard. A knot of passengers surrounded an officer whom I took to be the mate. A deckhand or two stood by, eyeing me curiously as I heaved myself on deck. The mate held up his lantern and took a good look at me. “You look some the worse for wear, bucko,” he volunteered indifferently. “How long you been hangin’ onto us?”