At last Terabon knew that most important fact of all that it was the emotions that counted. As a mere spectator, he could never hope to know the Mississippi, to describe and write it truly; the river had forced him into the activities of the river life, and had done him by that act its finest service. He was in the fervour of his most recent discovery when Rasba went out on the bow deck and looked into the night. He called Terabon a minute later, and the two looked at a phenomenon. The west was aglow, like a sunset, but with flarings and flashings instead of slowly changing lights and hues. The light under the clouds at the horizon extended through 90 degrees of the compass, and in the centre of the bright greenish flare there was a compact, black, apparently solid mass from which streaks of lightning constantly exuded on all sides. For a minute Terabon stared, cold chills goose-pimpling his flesh. Then he cried: "Cyclone, Parson! Get ready!" They were opposite the head of a long bend near the end of a big sandbar, and skirting the edge of an eddy, near its foot. Terabon sprang into the gasolene launch, started the motor, and steered for the shelter of the west bank. In the quiet he and Rasba told each other what to do. Rasba ran out two big anchors with big mooring lines tied to them. He closed the bow door but opened all the windows and other doors. Then, as they heard the storm coming, they covered the launch with the heavy canvas, heaved over the anchors into a fathom of water, let out long lines, and played the launch out over the stern on a heavy line fast to towing bits. A sweep of hail and rain was followed by a moment of calm. Then a blast of wind, which scraped over the cabin roof, was succeeded by the suck of the tornado, which swept, a waterspout, across the river a quarter of a mile down stream, struck a sandbar, and carried up a golden yellow cloud of dust, which disappeared in the gray blackness of a terrific downpour of rain. They stretched out on their anchor lines till the whole fabric of the cabin hummed and crackled with the strain, but the lines held, and the windows being open, prevented the semi-vacuum created by the storm's passing from "exploding" the boat, and tearing off the cabin, or the roof. After the varying gusts and blasts the wind settled down, colder by forty degrees, and with the steady white of a norther. It meant days and nights of waiting while the storm blew itself out. And when the danger had passed and the boats were safe against the lines, the two men turned in to sleep, more tired after their adventures than they remembered ever being before. In the morning rain was falling intermittently with some sleet, but toward afternoon there was just a cold wind. They built hot fires in their heater, burning coal with which the gamblers had filled bow and stern bins from coal barges somewhere up the river. Having plenty to eat on board, there was nothing to worry them.