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.