Why Hemingway's Three-Day Blow is a great story

I don't know when I last read Ernest Hemingway's story The Three-Day Blow - it's part of his first (?) collection, In Our Time, which I first read when I was in h.s. and which I could not possibly have understood or recognized. In those days, for some reason they always presented EH and Faulkner as a pair, and for a young reader Faulkner seemed clearly the superior; now, his work seems more flashy and uneven - what he took pages to establish, EH took phrases (at his best). Of course EH is out of vogue at present, in large part because of his obvious sexism, racism (I recently read To Have and Have Not, and it was at times appalling), and fascination with violence. That said, a story like 3-Day Blow remains a masterpiece - a simple narrative of the protagonist, Nick Adams (whom we know from other stories as a 20-something man home in Michigan after service in World War) who hikes up to a small cabin in the Michigan woods to meet up w/ a friend, Bill. The simple description of his walk to the cabin is enough to make any story, but the narrative begins when Nick and Bill get into a bout of talk and drinking. At first their conversation is tempered and trivial - baseball scores, a couple of long-forgotten authors that they like or dislike for various reasons. They get increasingly drunk, and the conversation subtly develops an edge, in particular when Bill says that Nick did the right thing in breaking off a relationship w/ a young woman. Nick's not so sure about that, and we see the pull and the tension between two aspects of his life: masculine, the outdoors, drinking, fishing, hunting, and the potential for love, a normal family and domestic life; he puts up a tough front to Bill, wearily agreeing w/ him that he was right to break off the relationship, but he can't help but think that the has turned away from something that could have saved his life. All of this EH conveys through indirection and understatement, and with an air of mystery: the pending storm, Bill's absent father (he's out shooting while the young men sit and drink, toward the end of the story they hear his shotgun - an ominous foreshadowing esp for this author).