For a moment the girl looked at him in indignant surprise.  Then her mood changed and she nearly laughed outright.  She had forgotten that this man as yet knew nothing of what had all along been in her thoughts.  As yet he knew nothing of the secret of this hollow.  To her it meant a world of recollection—­a world of stirring adventure and awful hazard.  When first she had seen that horse, grazing within sight of her uncle’s house, her interest had been aroused—­suspicions had been sent teeming through her brain.  Her thoughts had flown to the man whom she had once known, and who was now dead.  She had believed his horse had died with him.  And now the strange apparition had yielded up its secret.  The beast had been traced to the old, familiar haunt, and what had been only suspicion had suddenly become a startling reality.

“Ah, I forgot,” she replied, “you don’t understand.  That is Golden Eagle.  Can’t you see, he has the fragments of his saddle still tied round his body.  To think of it—­and after two years.”

Her companion still seemed dense.

“Golden Eagle?” he repeated questioningly.  “Golden Eagle?” The name seemed familiar but he failed to comprehend.

“Yes, yes,” the girl broke out impatiently.  “Golden Eagle—­Peter Retief’s horse.  The grandest beast that ever stepped the prairie.  See, he is keeping watch over his master’s old hiding-place—­faithful—­faithful to the memory of the dead.”

“And this is—­is the haunt of Peter Retief,” Bill exclaimed, his interest centering chiefly upon the yawning valley before him.

“Yes—­follow me closely, and we’ll get right along down.  Say, Bill, we must round up that animal.”

For a fleeting space the man looked dubious, then, with lips pursed, and a quiet look of resolution in his sleepy eyes, he followed in his companion’s wake.  The grandeur—­the solitude—­the mystery and associations, conveyed by the girl’s words, of the place were upon him.  These things had set him thinking.

The tortuous course of that perilous descent occupied their full attention, but, at length, they reached the valley in safety.  Now, indeed, was a wonderful scene disclosed.  Far as the eye could reach the great hollow extended.  Deep and narrow; deep in the heart of the hills which towered upon either side to heights, for the most part, inaccessible, precipitous.  It was a wondrous gulch, hidden and unsuspected in the foothills, and protected by those amazing wilds, in which the ignorant or unwary must infallibly be lost.  It was a perfect pasture, a perfect hiding-place, watered by a broad running stream; sheltered from all cold and storm.  No wonder then that the celebrated outlaw, Peter Retief, had chosen it for his haunt and the harborage of his ill-gotten stock.

With characteristic method the two set about “roping” the magnificent crested horse they had come to capture.  They soon found that he was wild—­timid as a hare.  Their task looked as though it would be one of some difficulty.