After dinner, Bennington picked up the book again, but found that his brain had reached the limit of spontaneous mental effort.  He looked for Old Mizzou and the cribbage game.  The miner had gone to visit Arthur again.  Bennington wandered about disconsolately.

For a time he drummed idly on the window pane.  Then he took out his revolver and tried to practise through the open doorway.  The smoke from the discharges hung heavy in the damp air, filling the room in a most disagreeable fashion.  Bennington’s trips to see the effect of his shots proved to him the fiendish propensity of everything he touched, were it never so lightly, to sprinkle him with cold water.  Above all, his skill with the weapon was not great enough as yet to make it much fun.  He abandoned pistol shooting and yawned extensively, wishing it were time to go to bed.

In the evening he played cribbage with Old Mizzou.  After a time Arthur and his wife came in and they had a dreary game of “cinch,” the man speaking but little, the woman not at all.  Old Mizzou smoked incessantly on a corncob pipe charged with a peculiarly pungent variety of tobacco, which filled the air with a blue vapour, and penetrated unpleasantly into Bennington’s mucous membranes.

The next morning it was still raining.

Bennington became very impatient indeed, but he tackled Le Conte industriously, and did well enough until he tried to get it into his head why various things happen to glaciers.  Then viscosity, the lines of swiftest motion, relegation, and directions of pressure came forth from the printed pages and mocked him.  He arose in his might and went forth into the open air.

Before going out he had put on his canvas shooting coat and a pair of hobnailed leather hunting boots, laced for a little distance at the front and sides.  He visited the horses, standing disconsolate under an open shed in the corral; he slopped, with constantly accruing masses of sticky earth at his feet, to the chicken coop, into which he cast an eye; he even took the kitchen pails and tramped down to the spring and back.  In the gulch he did not see or hear a living thing.  A newly-born and dirty little stream was trickling destructively through all manner of shivering grasses and flowers.  The water from Bennington’s sleeves ran down over the harsh canvas cuffs and turned his hands purple with the cold.  He returned to the cabin and changed his clothes.

The short walk had refreshed him, but it had spurred his impatience.  Outside, the world seemed to have changed.  His experience with the Hills, up to now, had always been in one phase of their beauty—­that of clear, bright sunshine and soft skies.  Now it was as a different country.  He could not get rid of the feeling, foolish as it was, that it was in reality different; and that the whole episode of the girl and the rock was as a vision which had passed.  It grew indistinct in the presence of this iron reality