For a month Bud worked and forced himself to cheerfulness, and tried to
forget. Sometimes it was easy enough, but there were other times when
he must get away by himself and walk and walk, with his rifle over his
shoulder as a mild pretense that he was hunting game. But if he brought
any back camp it was because the game walked up and waited to be shot;
half the time Bud did not know where he was going, much less whether
there were deer within ten rods or ten miles.
During those spells of heartsickness he would sit all the evening and
smoke and stare at some object which his mind failed to register. Cash
would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his
own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come
and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his
mind to worry much over anything.
He worked then, and talked much with Cash, and made plans for the
development of their mine. In that month they had come to call it a
mine, and they had filed and recorded their claim, and had drawn up an
agreement of partnership in it. They would “sit tight” and work on it
through the winter, and when spring came they hoped to have something
tangible upon which to raise sufficient capital to develop it properly.
Or, times when they had done unusually well with their sandbank, they
would talk optimistically about washing enough gold out of that claim to
develop the other, and keep the title all in their own hands.
Then, one night Bud dreamed again of Marie, and awoke with an insistent
craving for the oblivion of drunkenness. He got up and cooked the
breakfast, washed the dishes and swept the cabin, and measured out two
ounces of gold from what they had saved.
“You're keeping tabs on everything, Cash,” he said shortly. “Just charge
this up to me. I'm going to town.”
Cash looked up at him from under a slanted eye-brow. His lips had a
twist of pained disapproval.
“Yeah. I figured you was about due in town,” he said resignedly.
“Aw, lay off that told-you-so stuff,” Bud growled. “You never figured
anything of the kind, and you know it.” He pulled his heavy sweater down
off a nail and put it on, scowling because the sleeves had to be pulled
in place on his arms.
“Too bad you can't wait a day. I figured we'd have a clean-up to-morrow,
maybe. She's been running pretty heavy---”
“Well, go ahead and clean up, then. You can do it alone. Or wait till I
get back.”
Cash laughed, as a retort cutting, and not because he was amused. Bud
swore and went out, slamming the door behind him.
It was exactly five days alter that when he opened it again. Cash was
mixing a batch of sour-dough bread into loaves, and he did not say
anything at all when Bud came in and stood beside the stove, warming his
hands and glowering around the room. He merely looked up, and then went
on with his bread making.
Bud was not a pretty sight. Four days and nights of trying to see how
much whisky he could drink, and how long he could play poker without
going to sleep or going broke, had left their mark on his face and
his trembling hands. His eyes were puffy and red, and his cheeks were
mottled, and his lips were fevered and had lost any sign of a humorous
quirk at the corners. He looked ugly; as if he would like nothing better
than an excuse to quarrel with Cash--since Cash was the only person at
hand to quarrel with.
But Cash had not knocked around the world for nothing. He had seen men
in that mood before, and he had no hankering for trouble which is vastly
easier to start than it is to stop. He paid no attention to Bud. He
made his loaves, tucked them into the pan and greased the top with bacon
grease saved in a tomato can for such use. He set the pan on a shelf
behind the stove, covered it with a clean flour sack, opened the stove
door, and slid in two sticks.
“She's getting cold,” he observed casually. “It'll be winter now before
we know it.”
Bud grunted, pulled an empty box toward him by the simple expedient of
hooking his toes behind the corner, and sat down. He set his elbows on
his thighs and buried his face in his hands. His hat dropped off
his head and lay crown down beside him. He made a pathetic figure of
miserable manhood, of strength mistreated. His fine, brown hair fell
in heavy locks down over his fingers that rested on his forehead. Five
minutes so, and he lifted his head and glanced around him apathetically.
“Gee-man-ee, I've got a headache!” he muttered, dropping his forehead
into his spread palms again.
Cash hesitated, derision hiding in the back of his eyes. Then he pushed
the dented coffeepot forward on the stove.
“Try a cup of coffee straight,” he said unemotionally, “and then lay
down. You'll sleep it off in a few hours.”
Bud did not look up, or make any move to show that he heard. But
presently he rose and went heavily over to his bunk. “I don't want any
darn coffee,” he growled, and sprawled himself stomach down on the bed,
with his face turned from the light.
Cash eyed him coldly, with the corner of his upper lip lifted a little.
Whatever weaknesses he possessed, drinking and gambling had no place in
the list. Nor had he any patience with those faults in others. Had Bud
walked down drunk to Cash's camp, that evening when they first met, he
might have received a little food doled out to him grudgingly, but
he assuredly would not have slept in Cash's bed that night. That he
tolerated drunkenness in Bud now would have been rather surprising to
any one who knew Cash well. Perhaps he had a vague understanding of the
deeps through which Bud was struggling, and so was constrained to hide
his disapproval, hoping that the moral let-down was merely a temporary
one.
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?
On the other hand, why did he choose a spree as a relief from his
particular bunch of ghosts? Trading one misery for another was all
you could call it. Doing exactly the things that Marie's mother had
predicted he would do, committing the very sins that Marie was always
a little afraid he would commit--there must be some sort of twisted
revenge in that, he thought, but for the life of him he could not quite
see any real, permanent satisfaction in it--especially since Marie and
her mother would never get to hear of it.
For that matter, he was not so sure that they would not get to hear.
He remembered meeting, just on the first edge of his spree, one Joe De
Barr, a cigar salesman whom he had known in San Jose. Joe knew Marie--in
fact, Joe had paid her a little attention before Bud came into her life.
Joe had been in Alpine between trains, taking orders for goods from the
two saloons and the hotel. He had seen Bud drinking. Bud knew perfectly
well how much Joe had seen him drinking, and he knew perfectly well
that Joe was surprised to the point of amazement--and, Bud suspected,
secretly gratified as well. Wherefore Bud had deliberately done what
he could do to stimulate and emphasize both the surprise and the
gratification. Why is it that most human beings feel a sneaking
satisfaction in the downfall of another? Especially another who is, or
has been at sometime, a rival in love or in business?
Bud had no delusions concerning Joe De Barr. If Joe should happen to
meet Marie, he would manage somehow to let her know that Bud was going
to the dogs--on the toboggan--down and out--whatever it suited Joe to
declare him. It made Bud sore now to think of Joe standing so smug and
so well dressed and so immaculate beside the bar, smiling and twisting
the ends of his little brown mustache while he watched Bud make such
a consummate fool of himself. At the time, though, Bud had taken a
perverse delight in making himself appear more soddenly drunken, more
boisterous and reckless than he really was.
Oh, well, what was the odds? Marie couldn't think any worse of him than
she already thought. And whatever she thought, their trails had parted,
and they would never cross again--not if Bud could help it. Probably
Marie would say amen to that. He would like to know how she was getting
along--and the baby, too. Though the baby had never seemed quite real
to Bud, or as if it were a permanent member of the household. It was a
leather-lunged, red-faced, squirming little mite, and in his heart of
hearts Bud had not felt as though it belonged to him at all. He had
never rocked it, for instance, or carried it in his arms. He had been
afraid he might drop it, or squeeze it too hard, or break it somehow
with his man's strength. When he thought of Marie he did not necessarily
think of the baby, though sometimes he did, wondering vaguely how much
it had grown, and if it still hollered for its bottle, all hours of the
day and night.
Coming back to Marie and Joe--it was not at all certain that they would
meet; or that Joe would mention him, even if they did. A wrecked home is
always a touchy subject, so touchy that Joe had never intimated in his
few remarks to Bud that there had ever been a Marie, and Bud, drunk
as he had been, was still not too drunk to hold back the question that
clamored to be spoken.
Whether he admitted it to himself or not, the sober Bud Moore who lay on
his bunk nursing a headache and a grouch against the world was ashamed
of the drunken Bud Moore who had paraded his drunkenness before the man
who knew Marie. He did not want Marie to hear what Joe might tell There
was no use, he told himself miserably, in making Marie despise him as
well as hate him. There was a difference. She might think him a brute,
and she might accuse him of failing to be a kind and loving husband; but
she could not, unless Joe told of his spree, say that she had ever heard
of his carousing around. That it would be his own fault if she did hear,
served only to embitter his mood.
He rolled over and glared at Cash, who had cooked his supper and was
sitting down to eat it alone. Cash was looking particularly misanthropic
as he bent his head to meet the upward journey of his coffee cup, and
his eyes, when they lifted involuntarily with Bud's sudden movement, had
still that hard look of bottled-up rancor that had impressed itself upon
Bud earlier in the day.
Neither man spoke, or made any sign of friendly recognition. Bud would
not have talked to any one in his present state of self-disgust, but for
all that Cash's silence rankled. A moment their eyes met and held; then
with shifted glances the souls of them drew apart--farther apart than
they had ever been, even when they quarreled over Pete, down in Arizona.
When Cash had finished and was filing his pipe, Bud got up and reheated
the coffee, and fried more bacon and potatoes, Cash having cooked just
enough for himself. Cash smoked and gave no heed, and Bud retorted by
eating in silence and in straightway washing his own cup, plate, knife,
and fork and wiping clean the side of the table where he always sat. He
did not look at Cash, but he felt morbidly that Cash was regarding him
with that hateful sneer hidden under his beard. He knew that it was
silly to keep that stony silence, but he kept telling himself that if
Cash wanted to talk, he had a tongue, and it was not tied. Besides,
Cash had registered pretty plainly his intentions and his wishes when he
excluded Bud from his supper.
It was a foolish quarrel, but it was that kind of foolish quarrel which
is very apt to harden into a lasting one.