Sixty Mile could not be far away.
He was abominably weak.
His movements were slow, fumbling, and inaccurate, accompanied by panting and head-swimming, as he dragged himself into a sitting-up position in the stern, his rifle beside him.
He looked a long time at Elijah, but could not see whether he breathed or not, and he was too immeasurably far away to make an investigation.
He fell to dreaming and meditating again, dreams and thoughts being often broken by sketches of blankness, wherein he neither slept, nor was unconscious, nor was aware of anything. It seemed to him more like cogs slipping in his brain.
And in this intermittent way he reviewed the situation.
He was still alive, and most likely would be saved, but how came it that he was not lying dead across the boat on top the ice-rim?
Then he recollected the great final effort he had made.
But why had he made it? he asked himself.
It had not been fear of death.
He had not been afraid, that was sure.
Then he remembered the hunch and the big strike he believed was coming, and he knew that the spur had been his desire to sit in for a hand at that big game.
And again why?
What if he made his million?
He would die, just the same as those that never won more than grub-stakes.
Then again why?
But the blank stretches in his thinking process began to come more frequently, and he surrendered to the delightful lassitude that was creeping over him.
He roused with a start.
Something had whispered in him that he must awake.
Abruptly he saw Sixty Mile, not a hundred feet away.
The current had brought him to the very door. But the same current was now sweeping him past and on into the down-river wilderness.
No one was in sight.
The place might have been deserted, save for the smoke he saw rising from the kitchen chimney.
He tried to call, but found he had no voice left.
An unearthly guttural hiss alternately rattled and wheezed in his throat.
He fumbled for the rifle, got it to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger.
The recoil of the discharge tore through his frame, racking it with a thousand agonies.
The rifle had fallen across his knees, and an attempt to lift it to his shoulder failed.
He knew he must be quick, and felt that he was fainting, so he pulled the trigger of the gun where it lay.
This time it kicked off and overboard.
But just before darkness rushed over him, he saw the kitchen door open, and a woman look out of the big log house that was dancing a monstrous jig among the trees.
CHAPTER IX
Ten days later, Harper and Joe Ladue arrived at Sixty Mile, and Daylight, still a trifle weak, but strong enough to obey the hunch that had come to him, traded a third interest in his Stewart town site for a third interest in theirs on the Klondike.
They had faith in the Upper Country, and Harper left down-stream, with a raft-load of supplies, to start a small post at the mouth of the Klondike.
"Why don't you tackle Indian River, Daylight?" Harper advised, at parting.
"There's whole slathers of creeks and draws draining in up there, and somewhere gold just crying to be found.
That's my hunch. There's a big strike coming, and Indian River ain't going to be a million miles away."
"And the place is swarming with moose," Joe Ladue added.
"Bob Henderson's up there somewhere, been there three years now, swearing something big is going to happen, living off'n straight moose and prospecting around like a crazy man."
Daylight decided to go Indian River a flutter, as he expressed it; but Elijah could not be persuaded into accompanying him.
Elijah's soul had been seared by famine, and he was obsessed by fear of repeating the experience.
"I jest can't bear to separate from grub," he explained.
"I know it's downright foolishness, but I jest can't help it.
It's all I can do to tear myself away from the table when I know I'm full to bustin' and ain't got storage for another bite.
I'm going back to Circle to camp by a cache until I get cured."
Daylight lingered a few days longer, gathering strength and arranging his meagre outfit.
He planned to go in light, carrying a pack of seventy-five pounds and making his five dogs pack as well, Indian fashion, loading them with thirty pounds each.
Depending on the report of Ladue, he intended to follow Bob Henderson's example and live practically on straight meat.
When Jack Kearns' scow, laden with the sawmill from Lake Linderman, tied up at Sixty Mile, Daylight bundled his outfit and dogs on board, turned his town-site application over to Elijah to be filed, and the same day was landed at the mouth of Indian River.
Forty miles up the river, at what had been described to him as Quartz Creek, he came upon signs of Bob Henderson's work, and also at Australia Creek, thirty miles farther on.