"It's Log!"
As they work out their plan to cross, Cash keeps telling them the coffin isn't balanced. Jewel rushes them along, and begins cursing Darl and Cash.
When they're in the water, Darl feels the wagon start to go. A log comes along, and Jewel can't pull them ahead of it. The log turns the wagon over, and the mules start floating away, hooves in the air.
Major plot points in this book are usually narrated by Darl, the most lucid:
"Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur...silent, impermanent and profoundly significant..." (141)
Note the adverb "monstrously" used to describe the river's movement.
Cash repeats himself when stressed: "I ought to come down last week and sighted" (twice) and "It ain't on a balance" (three times).
Check out this florid passage:
"...pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice" (146). Whew!
The following description of Cash is alliteratively accurate: "His face is calm, down-sloped, calculant, concerned" (147).
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