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.