The outlaw reasoned with marvelous precision, just what the soldiers would do, and, therefore, his quickly laid plans worked out without the slightest slip or miscarriage.
The great oak tree on the brink of the precipice proved Jesse's salvation, as he proposed that it should. Had it not been there, another and different ending to his escapade, might have resulted.
But the officers did not attach any special significance to the fact that the outlaw had driven his pony straight for the tree in his mad flight from them, seeing only in the act a desire to put an end to himself rather than fall into the hands of the United States Government. Still the tree was the key note to the situation—the one factor that enabled him to elude his pursuers, and at the same time save himself from being dashed to certain death on the rocks two hundred feet below.
As his pony shot into the shadow, Jesse raised himself in his stirrups and caught a low-lying limb. With the agility of a trapeeze performer he drew his body up and free of the horse just at the instant when the bullets of the troops sang by beneath him and the screaming pinto went dashing to its death.
Like a squirrel, Jesse ran up the trunk of the tree, and there he perched, his body convulsed with fiendish glee at the neat trick he had turned on the cavalry troop for the second time that night. And it was with intense interest that he listened to the comments of the officers down below.
"So, Jesse James is dead, eh?" he chuckled.
Yet at that moment the supposed dead man held with steady hand, a heavy "Colt," trained on the redoubtable captain. The officer was nearer to death than he ever knew, and Jesse himself, was not so far from it as he thought.
It was a relief, however, that he noted the final departure of the troops. Jesse was anxious to get back to the cave. He wondered that none of the band had been out in search of him. This augured trouble of some sort. And he wondered too, how successful Dew Drop had been in corralling Great Bear's medicine man, for he felt that the need of the herb doctor's services, was urgent. Perhaps that was where the rub lay—perhaps his whole outfit had been picked up by the redskins.
It suddenly occurred to the desperado too, that no redskin had shown himself during the melee. Certainly they had not been so deaf as not to have heard the bombardment of the cavalrymen.