As became a decent, respectable, contented bachelor, he shied from the idea. It was absolutely ridiculous, unheard-of. The girl was all right, sensible, good-looking. She suited him as well as any woman he had ever met; but that, after all, was not saying much. He liked her—he made that concession candidly—but as for anything more—nothing to it!
But the idea, once born, refused to be disposed of thus summarily; it persisted. He found himself recalling trivial things, all pertaining to Sheila—tricks of manner, of speech, intonations, movements of the hands, body, and lips—these avalanched themselves upon him, swamping connected, reasonable thought.
"What cursed nonsense!" said Farwell angrily to himself. "I don't care a hang about her, of course. I'm dead sure she doesn't care for me. Anyway, I don't want to get married—yet. I'm not in shape to marry. Why, what the devil would I do with a wife? Where'd I put her?"
A wife! Huh! Instantly he was a prey to misgivings. He recalled shudderingly brother engineers whose wives dragged about with them, living on the edge of construction camps under canvas in summer, in rough-boarded, tar-papered shacks in the winter; or perhaps in half-furnished cottages in some nearby jerk-water town.
He had pitied the men, fought shy of the women. Most of them had put the best face upon their lives, rejoicing in the occasional streaks of fat, eating the lean uncomplainingly. They led a migratory existence, moved arbitrarily, like pawns, at the will of eminent and elderly gentlemen a thousand or so miles away, whom they did not know and who did not know them. Continually, as their temporary habitations began to take on the semblance of homes, they were transferred, from mountains to plains, from the far north to the tropics. Their few household goods bore the scars of many movings—by rail, by steamer, by freight wagon, and even by pack train.
And there were those whose responsibilities forced them to abandon life at the front. These set up establishments in the new, cheap residential districts of cities. There the wives kept camp; thither, at long intervals, the husbands took journeys ranging from hundreds of miles to thousands. True, there were those who had attained eminence. These lived properly in well-appointed houses in eligible localities; and their subordinates kept the work in hand during their frequent home-goings. But the ruck—the rank and file—had to take such marital happiness as came their way on the quick-lunch system.
Now Farwell was a bachelor, rooted and confirmed. He had always shunned married men's quarters. When his day's work was done, he foregathered with other lone males, talking shop half the night in a blue haze of tobacco around a red-hot stove or stretched in comfortable undress in front of a tent. This was his life as he had lived it for years; as he had hoped to live it until he attained fame and became a consulting engineer, a man who passed on the work of other men.
His theory of his own capacity for domesticity, though sincere, was strictly academic. He had no more idea of putting it into practice than he had of proving in his own person, before his proper time, the doctrine of eternal life.
Now, into the familiar sum of existence, which he knew from divisor to quotient, was suddenly shot a new factor—a woman. He experienced a new sensation, vague, unaccountable, restless, like the first uneasy throbs that precede a toothache. He lit a cigar; but, though he drew in the smoke hungrily, it did not satisfy. He felt a vacancy, a want, a longing.
He became aware of a dust cloud approaching. Ahead of it loped a big, clean-limbed buckskin. In the straight, wiry figure in the saddle he recognized Casey Dunne. Dunne pulled up and nodded.