The eyes fluttered down, but Daylight knew the message had been
received. Again he got the helpless man's head and shoulders on the
gunwale.

"Hang on, damn you! Bite in!" he shouted, as he shifted his grip lower
down.

One weak hand slipped off the gunwale, the fingers of the other hand
relaxed, but Elijah obeyed, and his teeth held on. When the lift came,
his face ground forward, and the splintery wood tore and crushed the
skin from nose, lips, and chin; and, face downward, he slipped on and
down to the bottom of the boat till his limp middle collapsed across
the gunwale and his legs hung down outside. But they were only his
legs, and Daylight shoved them in; after him. Breathing heavily, he
turned Elijah over on his back, and covered him with his robes.

The final task remained--the launching of the boat. This, of
necessity, was the severest of all, for he had been compelled to load
his comrade in aft of the balance. It meant a supreme effort at
lifting. Daylight steeled himself and began. Something must have
snapped, for, though he was unaware of it, the next he knew he was
lying doubled on his stomach across the sharp stern of the boat.
Evidently, and for the first time in his life, he had fainted.
Furthermore, it seemed to him that he was finished, that he had not one
more movement left in him, and that, strangest of all, he did not care.
Visions came to him, clear-cut and real, and concepts sharp as steel
cutting-edges. He, who all his days had looked on naked Life, had never
seen so much of Life's nakedness before. For the first time he
experienced a doubt of his own glorious personality. For the moment
Life faltered and forgot to lie. After all, he was a little
earth-maggot, just like all the other earth-maggots, like the squirrel
he had eaten, like the other men he had seen fail and die, like Joe
Hines and Henry Finn, who had already failed and were surely dead, like
Elijah lying there uncaring, with his skinned face, in the bottom of
the boat. Daylight's position was such that from where he lay he could
look up river to the bend, around which, sooner or later, the next
ice-run would come. And as he looked he seemed to see back through the
past to a time when neither white man nor Indian was in the land, and
ever he saw the same Stewart River, winter upon winter, breasted with
ice, and spring upon spring bursting that ice asunder and running free.
And he saw also into an illimitable future, wh