She was entirely calm, but her mind was working rapidly:  The wagon was in the lean-to!  Could she get him into it?  The road was downhill....  Almost to Doctor Bennett’s door....

Instantly she sprang to her feet and, with the pale gleam of the lantern zigzagging across the path, she ran back to the shed; just as she reached it, a glimmer of light fell on the soaked earth, and she looked up with a start and saw the moon peering out between two ragged, swiftly moving clouds; then all was black again—­but the rain was lessening, and there had been no lightning for several minutes.  “He will die; I must save him,” she said, her lips stiff with horror.  She lifted the shafts of the wagon, and gave a little pull; it moved easily enough, and, guiding it along the slight decline, she brought it to Maurice’s 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.”