In Mark Twain's American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, weather is certainly employed to portend the danger in which Jim and Huck find themselves in the company of the King and the Duke. And, nefarious as they are, the King and the Duke use the weather as an excuse for their own selfish motives, investigating the raft:
Towards night it begun to darken up and look like rain; the heat lightning was squirting around, low down in the sky, and the leaves ws beginning to shiver--it was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see that. So the duke and the king went to overhauling our wigwam, to see what the beds was like.
The two men, who represent life on the road (and sometimes a raft) in which innocents are taken advantage of and just about anything can happen, also exploit Jim and Huck by sleeping in their beds and telling them that they must keep watch on the raft. As they do so, Huck and Jim are nearly killed by the storm by being struck by lightning or by being swept off the raft. Huck narrates,
The waves most washed me off the raft, sometimes....the lightning was glaring and flittering around so constant....
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