At the end of a week Farwell told Keeler that he was going to ride over to Talapus. He added unnecessarily that he wanted to see how his horse was getting on. Whereat his assistant, who had very good ears, grinned internally, though outwardly he kept a decorous face. He did not expect his chief back till late.
But Farwell returned early, and spent a busy half hour in blowing up everybody from Keeler down. On this occasion he had not seen Sheila at all. She and Casey Dunne, so Mrs. McCrae informed him, were at the latter's ranch. Mr. Dunne, it appeared, was buying some house furnishings, and wanted Sheila's advice. Farwell took an abrupt departure, declining a hospitable invitation. He barely looked at the lame horse.
For another week he sulked in a poisonous temper. He was done with Talapus. He thought that McCrae girl had some sense, but if she was going traipsing all over the country with Dunne, why, that let him out. Maybe she was going to marry Dunne. It looked like it. Anyway, it was none of his business. But the end of it was that he went to Talapus again.
This time he found Sheila alone. The elder McCraes were gone to Coldstream in the buckboard. Young Alec was somewhere on the ditch. Sheila, flanked by clothesbasket and workbasket, sat on the veranda mending his shirts. The occupation was thoroughly unromantic, little calculated to appeal to the imagination. Nevertheless, it appealed to Farwell.
Largely because it is the perverse nature of man to believe that the Fates have set him in the wrong groove, Farwell, like many others whose lives have been spent in exclusively masculine surroundings, believed his tastes to be domestic. Not that he had ever pushed this belief beyond the theoretical stage; nor would he have exchanged places with any of his confrères who had taken wives. But he railed inwardly at the intense masculinity of his life, for the same reason that the sailorman curses the sea and the plainsman the plains. Just as the tragedian is certain in his inmost soul that his proper rôle is light comedy, while the popular comedian is equally positive that he should be starring in the legitimate; so Farwell, harsh, dominant, impatient, brutal on occasion, a typical lone male of his species, knowing little of and caring less for the softer side of life, cherished a firm belief that his proper place was the exact centre of a family circle.
Although he had never seen a home that he cared beans about—including the one of his childhood—the singing of "Home, Sweet Home" invariably left him pensive for half an hour. Theoretically—heretofore always strictly theoretically—he possessed a strong dulce domum impulse. And so the spectacle of Sheila mending her brother's shirts was one of which he thoroughly approved. It gave him a feeling of intimacy, as though he had been admitted to the performance of a domestic rite.
Sheila picked up a second shirt, inspected it critically, and frowned. "Now, isn't that a wreck?" she observed. "Sandy's awfully hard on his shirts." She nipped a thread recklessly between her teeth, shot the end deftly through the needle's eye, and sighed. "Oh, well, I suppose I must just do the best I can with the thing."
"Your brother is lucky," said Farwell. "My things get thrown away. No one to look after them when they begin to go."
"That's very wasteful," she reproved him. "Why don't you send them somewhere?"
"Where, for instance?"