He finished his strictly utilitarian household labor and went off up the
flat to the sluice boxes. Bud had not moved from his first position on
the bed, but he did not breathe like a sleeping man. Not at first; after
an hour or so he did sleep, heavily and with queer, muddled dreams that
had no sequence and left only a disturbed sense of discomfort behind
then.
At noon or a little after Cash returned to the cabin, cast a sour look
of contempt at the recumbent Bud, and built a fire in the old cookstove.
He got his dinner, ate it, and washed his dishes with never a word
to Bud, who had wakened and lay with his eyes half open, sluggishly
miserable and staring dully at the rough spruce logs of the wall.
Cash put on his cap, looked at Bud and gave a snort, and went off again
to his work. Bud lay still for awhile longer, staring dully at the wall.
Finally he raised up, swung his feet to the floor, and sat there staring
around the little cabin as though he had never before seen it.
"Huh! You'd think, the way he highbrows me, that Cash never done wrong
in his life! Tin angel, him--I don't think. Next time, I'll tell a
pinheaded world I'll have to bring home a quart or two, and put on a
show right!"
Just what he meant by that remained rather obscure, even to Bud. He
got up, shut his eyes very tight and then opened them wide to clear his
vision, shook himself into his clothes and went over to the stove.
Cash had not left the coffeepot on the stove but had, with malicious
intent--or so Bud believed--put it away on the shelf so that what coffee
remained was stone cold. Bud muttered and threw out the coffee, grounds
and all--a bit of bachelor extravagance which only anger could drive him
to--and made fresh coffee, and made it strong. He did not want it. He
drank it for the work of physical regeneration it would do for him.
He lay down afterwards, and this time he dropped into a more nearly
normal sleep, which lasted until Cash returned at dusk After that he lay
with his face hidden, awake and thinking. Thinking, for the most part,
of how dull and purposeless life was, and wondering why the world
was made, or the people in it--since nobody was happy, and few even
pretended to be. Did God really make the world, and man, just to play
with--for a pastime? Then why bother about feeling ashamed for anything
one did that was contrary to God's laws?
Why be puffed up with pride for keeping one or two of them
unbroken--like Cash, for instance. Just because Cash never drank or
played cards, what right had he to charge the whole atmosphere of the
cabin with his contempt and his disapproval of Bud, who chose to do
both?