What the old man visioned in the silence that fell, Daughtry did not try
to guess. He was too occupied with his own vision, and vividly burned
before him the sordid barrenness of a poor-house ward, where an ancient,
very like what he himself would become, maundered and gibbered and
drooled for a crumb of tobacco for his old clay pipe, and where, of all
horrors, no sip of beer ever obtained, much less six quarts of it.

And Michael, by the dim glows of the pipe surveying the scene of the two
old men, one squatted in the dark, the other standing, knew naught of the
tragedy of age, and was only aware, and overwhelmingly aware, of the
immense likableness of this two-legged white god, who, with fingers of
magic, through ear-roots and tail-roots and spinal column, had won to the
heart of him.

The clay pipe smoked utterly out, the old black, by aid of the crutch,
with amazing celerity raised himself upstanding on his one leg and
hobbled, with his hippity-hop, to the beach. Daughtry was compelled to
lend his strength to the hauling down from the sand into the water of the
tiny canoe. It was a dug-out, as ancient and dilapidated as its owner,
and, in order to get into it without capsizing, Daughtry wet one leg to
the ankle and the other leg to the knee. The old man contorted himself
aboard, rolling his body across the gunwale so quickly, that, even while
it started to capsize, his weight was across the danger-point and
counterbalancing the canoe to its proper equilibrium.

Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not quite
made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was that lip-noise.
Dag Daughtry made the lip-noise so low that the old man did not hear, and
Michael, springing clear from sand to canoe, was on board without wetting
his feet. Using Daughtry's shoulder for a stepping-place, he passed over