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.
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