Terabon, his fountain pen racing, wrote for his own distant Sunday Editor a narrative which excited the compiler of the Magazine Supplement to deep oaths of admiration for the fertile, prolific imagination of the wandering writer--for who would believe in a romance ready made? The night of the big wind was followed by a day and a night of gusts of wind and sleety rain; then followed a day and a night of rising clouds, then a day when the clouds were scattered and the sun was cold. That day the sunset was grim, white, and freezing cold. In the morning there was a bright, warm sunrise, a breath of sweet, soft air, and unimaginable brightness and buoyancy, birds singing, squirrels barking, and all the dismal pangs banished. Shanty-boats shot out into the gay river and dotted the wide surface up and down the current for miles. The ears of the parson and the writer, keener with the acuteness of distant sounds, could hear music from a boat so far away that they could not see it, a wonderfully enchanting experience. They, too, ran out into the flood of sunshine to float down with the rest. At the foot of Brandywine Bar a little cabin-boat suddenly rowed out into the current and signalled them; somebody recognized and wanted to speak to the mission boat. They were rapidly sucking down the swift chute current, but Terabon turned over the motor, and flanked the big houseboat across the current so that the hail could be answered. The little cabin-boat, almost lost to view astern, rapidly gained, and as they ran down Beef Island chute, where the current is slow, they were overtaken. "Sho!" Parson Rasba cried aloud, "hit's Missy Carline, Missy Nelia, shore as I'm borned!" Terabon had known it for half an hour. He had been noticing river details, and he could not fail to recognize that little boat. His hands trembled as he steered the launch to take advantage of slack current and dead water, and his throat choked with an emotion which he controlled with difficulty. He looked fearfully at the gaunt River Prophet whose own cheeks were staining with warm blood, and whose eyes gazed so keenly at the young woman who was coming, leaning to her sweeps with Viking grace and abandon. She was coming to _them_, with the fatalistic certainty that is so astonishing to the student observer. Carried away by her sottish husband; threatened by the tornado; rescued, perhaps, by the storm from worse jeopardy, caught in safety under an island sandbar; her eyes, sweeping the lonesome breadths of the flowing river-sea, had seen and recognized her friend's boat, the floating mission, and pulled to join safe company. She rowed up, with her eyes on the Prophet. He stood there in his majesty while Terabon stooped unnoticed in the engine pit of the motorboat. Not till she had run down near enough to throw a line did she take her eyes off the mountain parson, and then she turned and looked into the eyes, dumb with misery, of the other man, Terabon.