Driving in the rowels of his spurs until the pinto snorted with pain, Jesse fairly threw the hardy little Indian pony at the rocky canyon. "My God, he is going over!" cried the Lieutenant, aghast at the awful leap the great bandit was about to take. "He don't see it! He don't see it! "Halt! The canyon!" roared the young officer in the stress of his excitement. For the moment he had forgotten that the man he was warning was he for whose death half a continent was clamoring. "He knows it, you fool!" snarled the Captain. "Don't you see he's going to jump it?" "But its certain death." "So is this," gritted the commander of the troop. "It's death either way he takes it, back or front. "Call the halt or we'll be going over with him, the whole pack and parcel of us." The bugle sounded its warning short and sharp. On the very brink of the precipice stood a giant spreading oak, and into it's broad shadow the world-famous desperado drove his mount, a veritable living projectile in its undeviating flight. The notes of the bugle trilled again and the horses of the troopers slid to their haunches perilously near the brink. "Fire!" rang the stern command. Once more the heavy Winchesters crashed. A wild yell greeted the volley. But whether of pain or triumph they did not know. With a scream of awful fright, the pony leaped high in the air and plunged far out and over the terrible precipice. They heard his body buffeted from rock to rock in its descent. And finally as they listened they caught the sound of the impact when it struck for the last time on the rocks far below. Not a man spoke. They were too full of wonder and horror for speech. A heavy silence had fallen over the scene of death. CHAPTER XII. IN THE HANDS OF THE REDSKINS. "Well, I guess that will be about all--that settles the career of the world's greatest bandit," averred the Captain. Both officers and men stood on the brink of the black chasm, gazing down fearsomely into the apparently bottomless pit. The thought of the fearful plunge that they had just witnessed, had a sobering effect on all of them. It had stirred within the men an emotion almost akin to fear, and each trooper as he turned away, felt a little chill trickle up and down his spinal column, all in spite of his stern effort to repress it. Hated as was the great outlaw, the soldiers rated him as a brave man, a quality that touches a responsive chord in every soldier's breast. The Captain broke the silence, his words falling on them almost like a blow. "No living man could come out of that fall alive," he continued. "It is a sheer drop of more than two hundred feet to the bottom of the gulch, and there isn't a ghost of a show for anything human or inhuman that goes over it.