Phil Acton was not ignorant of the different opinions that were held by the cattlemen regarding Honorable Patches.  Nor, as the responsible foreman of the Cross-Triangle, could he remain indifferent to them.  During those first months of Patches’ life on the ranch, when the cowboy’s heart had so often been moved to pity for the stranger who had come to them apparently from some painful crisis in his life, he had laughed at the suspicions of his old friends and associates.  But as the months had passed, and Patches had so rapidly developed into a strong, self-reliant man, with a spirit of bold recklessness that was marked even among those hardy riders of the range, Phil forgot, in a measure, those characteristics that the stranger had shown at the beginning of their acquaintance.  At the same time, the persistent suspicions of the cattlemen, together with Patches’ curious, and, in a way, secret interest in Yavapai Joe, could not but have a decided influence upon the young man who was responsible for the Dean’s property.

It was inevitable, under the circumstances, that Phil’s attitude toward Patches should change, even as the character of Patches himself had changed.  While the foreman’s manner of friendship and kindly regard remained, so far, unaltered, and while Phil still, in his heart, believed in his friend, and—­as he would have said—­“would continue to back his judgment until the show-down,” nevertheless that spirit of intimacy which had so marked those first days of their work together had gradually been lost to them.  The cowboy no longer talked to his companion, as he had talked that day when they lay in the shade of the walnut tree at Toohey, and during the following days of their range riding.  He no longer admitted his friend into his inner life, as he had done that day when he told Patches the story of the wild stallion.  And Patches, feeling the change, and unable to understand the reason for it, waited patiently for the time when the cloud that had fallen between them should lift.

So they rode together that night, homeward bound, at the end of the long, hard weeks of the rodeo, in the deepening gloom of the day’s passing, in the hushed stillness of the wild land, under the wide sky where the starry sentinel hosts were gathering for their ever-faithful watch.  And as they rode, their stirrups often touching, each was alone with his own thoughts.  Phil, still in the depth of his somber mood, brooded over his bitter trouble.  Patches, sympathetically wondering, silently questioning, wished that he could help.

There are times when a man’s very soul forces him to seek companionship.  Alone in the night with this man for whom, even at that first moment of their meeting on the Divide, he had felt a strange sense of kinship, Phil found himself drifting far from the questions that had risen to mar the closeness of their intimacy.  The work of the rodeo was over; his cowboy associates, with their suggestive talk, were far away.  Under the influence of the long, dark miles of that night, and the silent presence of his companion, the young man, for the time being, was no longer the responsible foreman of the Cross-Triangle Ranch.  In all that vast and silent world there was, for Phil Acton, only himself, his trouble, and his friend.