In a quarter of an hour the boat was moored to a great tree at the lower end of an island.
"We shall be snug here," he said, "and out of the way of the drift that will be coming down presently. You can turn in and take a long spell of sleep to-night, for sometimes those storms last for days when they come on this time of year, and you will see there will be a sea on that the boat could hardly live in. I wish we had stopped two hours ago; there was a creek where we could have run her in and been snug all through it, but I didn't think it was coming up so quick, and it's too far on to the next place to risk it; however, I expect we shall do very well here."
In another half-hour the gale burst upon them furiously, and Frank congratulated himself that the boat was snugly moored. The thick muddy water of the river was speedily lashed into angry waves; the rain came down in torrents, and although the left-hand bank was but a quarter of a mile distant it was soon lost to view. Frank was glad to leave the deck and crawl into the little cabin, and sit down to a hot meal which the negro cook had prepared.
"Better here than outside, my lad," Hiram said. "I can go as wet as any man if need be, but I like to keep a dry jacket when I can. The wind is just howling outside. I reckon this is going to be a bigger storm nor ordinary, and I have seen some biggish storms on the Mississippi too. I have had some narrer escapes of it, I can tell you, special in the days before there was nary a tug on the river, and we had to row or pole all the way up; besides there ain't so many trees brought down as there used to be in a flood, seeing as the country is getting more and more cleared every day.
"I reckon the time will come when you will be able to go up either the Mississippi or Missouri to the upper waters without seeing a tree drifting down, and when there won't be a snag in their beds. I mind the time when the snags were ten times worse than they is now. I mind once we ran on one of the darned things in pretty nigh as wild a night as this is going to be. I had six hands along with me, and we wanted to get down, 'cause we knew the old man would have a cargo ready for us, and we wanted a run of a day or two on shore at Orleans before we started up again, so we held on. The wind was higher than we reckoned on, and we was just saying we should have done better to tie up, when there was a crash. I thought at first that she would have gone over with the shock, but she didn't--not that it would have made much odds, for there was a snag through her bottom, and the water pouring in like a sluice. It was darkish, but we could make out there was some trees a boat's-length or two ahead which had been caught as they rolled down by another snag, and hung there. The boat didn't float more than a minute after she struck, and then we were all in the river, those who couldn't swim gripping hold of the oars and poles; half a minute and we were all clinging to the boughs, and hoisting ourselves as well as might be clear of the water.