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?