H.Fisbee explained with exceeding technicality his reasons for believing that the third well would strike oil.
But with his ease of mind regarding the "Herald," Harkless found himself possessed by apathy.

He fretted no longer to get back to Plattville.
With the prospect of return it seemed an emptiness glared at him from hollow sockets, and the thought of the dreary routine he must follow when he went back gave him the same faint nausea he had felt the evening after the circus.

And, though it was partly the long sweat of anguish which had benumbed him, his apathy was pierced, at times, by a bodily horror of the scene of his struggle.

At night he faced the grotesque masks of the Cross-Roads men and the brutal odds again; over and over he felt the blows, and clapped his hand to where the close fire of Bob Skillett's pistol burned his body.
And, except for the release from pain, he rejoiced less and less in his recovery.

He remembered a tedious sickness of his childhood and how beautiful he had thought the world, when he began to get well, how electric the open air blowing in at the window, how green the smile of earth, and how glorious to live and see the open day again.