The threat had a quieting effect upon poor Jim, who immediately closed his lips.  Silent but watchful he eyed the half-breed’s face.  There was something very familiar about the thin cheeks, high cheek-bones, and about the great hooked nose.  He was struggling hard to locate the man.  At this moment the third ruffian approached with three horses.  The other had been busy fixing a gag in Jake Bond’s mouth.  Jim Bowley saw the horses come up.  And, in the now brilliant moonlight, he beheld and recognized a grand-looking golden chestnut.  There was no mistaking that glorious beast.  Jim was no tenderfoot; he had been on the prairie in this district for years.  And although he had never come into actual contact with the man, he had seen him and knew about the exploits of the owner of that perfect animal.

The half-breed approached him with an improvised gag.  For the life of him Jim could not resist a temptation which at that moment assailed him.  The threatening attitude of his captor for the instant had lost its effect.  If he died for it he must blurt out his almost superstitious astonishment.

The half-breed seized his prisoner’s lower jaw in his hand and compressed the cheeks upon the teeth.  Jim’s lips parted, and a horrified amazement found vent in words.

“Holy Gawd! man.  But be ye flesh or sperrit?  Peter Retief—­as I’m a livin’—­”

He said no more, for, with a wrench, the gag was forced into his mouth by the relentless hand of the man before him.  Although he was thus silenced his eyes remained wide open and staring.  The dark stern face, as he saw it, was magnified into that of a fiend.  The keen eyes and depressed brows, he thought, might belong to some devil re-incarnated, whilst the eagle-beaked nose and thin-compressed lips denoted, to his distorted fancy, a sanguinary cruelty.  At the mention of his name this forbidding apparition flashed a vengeful look at the speaker, and a half smile of utter disdain flickered unnoticed around the corners of his mouth.

Once his prisoners were secured the dark-visaged cattle-thief turned to the horses.  At a word the trio mounted.  Then they rode off, and the wretched captives beheld, to their unspeakable dismay, the consummate skill with which the cattle were roused and driven off.  Away they went with reckless precipitance, the cattle obeying the master hand of the celebrated raider with an implicitness which seemed to indicate a strange sympathy between man and beast.  The great golden chestnut raced backwards and forwards like some well-trained greyhound, heading the leading beasts into the desired direction without effort or apparent guidance.  It was a grand display of the cowboy’s art, and, in spite of his predicament and the cruel tightness of his bonds, Jim Bowley reveled in the sight of such a display.