In amazement, the savages beheld the men they had been pursuing rush toward them.
"Kaw-Kaw's bewitched them! They've lost their minds! Her curses live to destroy the men who killed her!" shouted Great Bear in his native tongue, transported with joy. "At them! At them! Jesse James is the Navajos' prey. The paleface dogs must not get him first!"
Goaded to frenzy by the words of their chief, the bucks fell to lashing their ponies, riding like fiends in their effort to prevent the troopers from snatching their quarry from their very grasp.
But the cavalrymen viewed the course of the desperately pressed little band with different feelings.
"Jesse's in the bunch, all right. That move shows it," growled one of them, the stars and chevrons on whose uniform proclaimed him a captain. "No one but that murdering daredevil would have chosen to ride back toward that pack of howling savages rather than toward us.
"Curse the luck! Why couldn't we have struck the ravine half a mile farther east? Then we'd been right on top of him and could have shot him down."
"But the bucks 'll drop him," asserted a lieutenant who rode at his side. "So long as he's shot, I don't see what difference it makes whether we get him or they."
"But they won't get him!" bellowed the captain, his disappointment at losing his chance to capture the most famous desperado the world has ever known and anger at the ill-disguised rebuke of his subordinate getting the better of him.
"Won't get him?" repeated the lieutenant, as though he seemed to doubt his ears.