Opportunity did not offer, however, to accept Mrs. McGovern’s kindly counsel, and, occupied with my own somewhat unhappy reflections, I resigned myself to the monotony of the voyage up the Missouri River.  We plowed along steadily, although laboriously, all night, all the next day and the next night, passing through regions rich in forest growth, marked here and there by the many clearings of the advancing settlers.  We were by this time far above the junction of the Missouri River with the Mississippi—­a point traceable by a long line of discolored water stained with the erosion of the mountains and plains far up the Missouri.  As the boat advanced, hour after hour, finally approaching the prairie country beyond the Missouri forests, I found little in the surroundings to occupy my mind; and so far as my communings with myself were concerned, they offered little satisfaction.  A sort of shuddering self-reproach overcame me.  I wondered whether or not I was less coarse, less a thing polygamous than these crowding Mormons hurrying out to their sodden temples in the West, because now (since I have volunteered in these pages to tell the truth regarding one man’s heart), I must admit that in the hours of dusk I found myself dreaming not of my fiancee back in old Virginia, but of other women seen more recently.  As to the girl of the masked ball, I admitted that she was becoming a fading memory; but this young girl who had thrust through the crowd and broken up our proceedings the other day—­the girl with the white lawn gown and the silver gray veil and the tear-stained eyes—­in some way, as I was angrily obliged to admit, her face seemed annoyingly to thrust itself again into my consciousness.  I sat near a deck lamp.  Grace Sheraton’s letter was in my pocket.  I did not draw it out to read it and re-read it.  I contented myself with watching the masked shadows on the shores.  I contented myself with dreams, dreams which I stigmatized as unwarranted and wrong.

We were running that night in the dark, before the rising of the moon, a thing which cautious steamboat men would not have ventured, although our pilot was confident that no harm could come to him.  Against assurance such as this the dangerous Missouri with its bars and snags purposed a present revenge.  Our whistle awakened the echoes along the shores as we plowed on up the yellow flood, hour after hour.  Then, some time toward midnight, while most of the passengers were attempting some sort of rest, wrapped in their blankets along the deck, there came a slight shock, a grating slide, and a rasping crash of wood.  With a forward churning of her paddles which sent water high along the rail, the River Belle shuddered and lay still, her engines throbbing and groaning.

In an instant every one on the boat was on his feet and running to the side.  I joined the rush to the bows, and leaning over, saw that we were hard aground at the lower end of a sand bar.  Imbedded in this bar was a long white snag, a tree trunk whose naked arms, thrusting far down stream, had literally impaled us.  The upper woodwork of the boat was pierced quite through; and for all that one could tell at the moment, the hull below the line was in all likelihood similarly crushed.  We hung and gently swung, apparently at the mercy of the tawny flood of old Missouri.