The twilight hour was beginning when he reached a point from which he could see, in the distance, the red roofs of the Cross-Triangle buildings. Checking his horse, he sat for a long time, motionless, looking away over the broad land that had come to mean so much to him, as though watching the passing of the day.
But the man did not note the changing colors in the western sky; he did not see the shadows deepening; he was not thinking of the coming of the night. The sight of the distant spot that, a year before, had held such possibilities for him, when, on the summit of the Divide, he had chosen between two widely separated ways of life, brought to him, now, a keener realization of the fact that he was again placed where he must choose. The sun was down upon those hopes and dreams that in the first hard weeks of his testing had inspired and strengthened him. The night of despairing, reckless abandonment of the very ideals of manhood for which he had so bravely struggled was upon him; while the spirit and strength of that manhood which he had so hardly attained fought against its surrender.
When Stanford Manning had asked, "What will you do when your game of Patches is played out?" he had said that the man whom they had known in the old days was dead. Would this new man also die? Deliberately the man turned about and started back the way he had come.
In their honeymoon camp, that evening, when the only light in the sky was the light of the stars, and the camp fire's ruddy flames made weird shadows come and go in the little glade, Helen, lying in the hammock, and Stanford, sitting near, talked of their old friend Lawrence Knight. But as they talked they did not know that a lonely horseman had stopped on the other side of the low ridge, and leaving his horse, had crept carefully through the brush, to a point on the brow of the hill, from which he could look down into the camp.
From where he lay in the darkness, the man could see against the camp fire's light the two, where the hammock was swung under the trees. He could hear the low murmur of their voices, with now and then a laugh. But it was always the man who laughed, for there was little mirth in Helen's heart that night. Then he saw Stanford go into the tent and return again to the hammock; and soon there came floating up to him the sweet, plaintive music of Helen's guitar, and then her voice, full and low, with a wealth of womanhood in every tone, as she sang a love song to her mate. Later, when the dancing flames of the camp fire had fallen to a dull red glow, he saw them go arm in arm into their tent. Then all was still. The red glow of the fire dimmed to a spark, and darkness drew close about the scene. But even in the darkness the man could still see, under the wide, sheltering arms of the trees, a lighter spot—the white tent.
"Gethsemane," said the Dean to me once, when our talk had ranged wide and touched upon many things, "Gethsemane ain't no place; it's somethin' that happens. Whenever a man goes up against himself, right there is where Gethsemane is. And right there, too, is sure to be a fight. A man may not always know about it at the time; he may be too busy fightin' to understand just what it all means; but he'll know about it afterwards—No matter which side of him wins, he'll know afterwards that it was the one big fight of his life."
