s 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.

And so it came about that, little by little, the young man told Patches
the story of his dream, and of how it was now shattered and broken.

Sometimes bitterly, as though he felt injustice; sometimes harshly, as
though in contempt for some weakness of his own; with sentences broken
by the pain he strove to subdue, with halting words and long silences,
Phil told of his plans for rebuilding the home of his boyhood, and of
restoring the business that, through the generosity of his father, had
been lost; of how, since his childhood almost, he had worked and saved
to that end; and of his love for Kitty, which had been the very light of
his dream, and without which for him there was no purpose in dreaming.
And the man who rode so close beside him listened with a fuller
understanding and a deeper sympathy than Phil knew.

"And now," said Phil hopelessly, "it's all over. I've sure come to the
end of my string. Reid has put the outfit on the market. He's going to
sell out and quit. Uncle Will told me night before last when I went home
to see about the shipping."

"Reid is going to sell!" exclaimed Patches; and there was a curious note
of exultation in his voice which Phil did not hear. Neither did Phil see
that his companion was smiling to himself under cover of the darkness.

"It's that damned Professor Parkhill that's brought it about," continued
the cowboy bitterly. "Ever since Kitty came home from the East she has
been discontented and dissatisfied with ranch life. I was all right when
she went away, but when she came back she discovered that I was nothing
but a cow-puncher.