en the last generations
of men were gone from off the face of Alaska, when he, too, would be
gone, and he saw, ever remaining, that river, freezing and fresheting,
and running on and on.

Life was a liar and a cheat. It fooled all creatures. It had fooled
him, Burning Daylight, one of its chiefest and most joyous exponents.
He was nothing--a mere bunch of flesh and nerves and sensitiveness that
crawled in the muck for gold, that dreamed and aspired and gambled, and
that passed and was gone. Only the dead things remained, the things
that were not flesh and nerves and sensitiveness, the sand and muck and
gravel, the stretching flats, the mountains, the river itself, freezing
and breaking, year by year, down all the years. When all was said and
done, it was a scurvy game. The dice were loaded. Those that died did
not win, and all died. Who won? Not even Life, the stool-pigeon, the
arch-capper for the game--Life, the ever flourishing graveyard, the
everlasting funeral procession.

He drifted back to the immediate present for a moment and noted that
the river still ran wide open, and that a moose-bird, perched on the
bow of the boat, was surveying him impudently. Then he drifted dreamily
back to his meditations.

There was no escaping the end of the game. He was doomed surely to be
out of it all. And what of it? He pondered that question again and
again.

Conventional religion had passed Daylight by. He had lived a sort of
religion in his square dealing and right playing with other men, and he
had not indulged in vain metaphysics about future life. Death ended
all. He had always believed that, and been unafraid. And at this
moment, the boat fifteen feet above the water and immovable, himself
fainting with weakness and without a particle of strength left in him,
he still believed that death ended all, and he was still unafraid. His
views were too simply and solidly based to be overthrown by the first
squirm, or the last, of death-fearing life.

He had seen men and animals die, and into the field of his vision, by
scores, came such deaths. He saw them over again, just as he had seen
them at the time, and they did not shake him.

What of it? They were dead, and dead long since. They weren't
bothering about it. They weren't lying on their bellies across a boat
and waiting to die. Death was easy--easier than he had ever imagined;
and, now that it was near, the thought of it made him glad.

A new visi