side.
There, looking at him, she said again, rigidly:

"He will die; I must save him."

As Henry Houghton said afterward, "It was impossible!--so she did it."

It took her more than an hour to do it, to pull and lift and shove the
inert figure! Afterward she used to wonder how she had done it; wonder
how she had given the final _push_, which got his sagging body up on to
the floor of the wagon! It had strained every part of her;--her shoulder
against his hips, her head in the small of his back, her hands gripping
his heavy, dangling legs. She was soaking wet; her hair had loosened,
and stray locks were plastered across her forehead. She grunted like a
toiling animal.

It seemed as if her heart would crack with her effort, her muscles
tear; she forgot the retreating rumble of the storm, the brooding,
dripping forest stillness; she forgot even her certainty that he would
die. She entirely forgot herself. She only knew--straining, gasping,
sweating--that she must get the body--the dead body perhaps!--into the
wagon. And she did it! Just as she did it, she heard a faint groan. Her
heart stood still with terror, then beat frantically with joy.

_He was alive!_

She ran back to the cabin for the cushions he had saved from the rain,
and pushed them under his head; then tied the lantern to the whip
socket; then recalled what he had said about "roping a log on behind as
a brake." "Of course!" she thought; and managed,--the splinters tearing
her hands--to fasten a fairly heavy piece of wood under the rear axle,
so that it might bump along behind the wagon as a drag. She pondered as
she did these things why she should know so certainly how they must be
done? But when they were done, she said, _"Now!"..._ and went and stood
between the shafts.

It was after midnight when the descent began. The moon rode high among
fleecy clouds, but on either side of the road gulfs of darkness lay
under motionless foliage. Sometimes the smoky light from the swaying
lantern shone on a wet black branch, snapped by the gale and lying in
the path, and Eleanor, seeing it, wedging her heels into the mud and
sliding stones of the road, and straining backward between the shafts,
would say, "A snake.... I must save Maurice." Sometimes she would hear,
above the crunching of the wheels behind her, a faint noise in the
undergrowth: a breaking twig, a brushing sound, as of a furtive
footstep--and she would say, "A man.... I must save Maurice."

The ye