"Lieutenant, take a squad of men and ride north until you strike the entrance to the gorge. The water is low at this time of the year and you can easily get up to the point where the bandit and the pinto struck. This time there won't be any question about it. He won't look very pretty, but we've got to get him to the fort as soon as possible, for the weather is warm." "Right, sir; but I should like to know how he played that scurvy trick on us?" demanded the Lieutenant. "I can't get it through my head how our men ever missed him." "That is elemental. He lay down before the volley was fired!" "That's all right, Captain, but I still don't understand how he knew we were going to shoot," persisted the Lieutenant. "Because he was Jesse James. That's the only answer I can give you. I made my mistake when I failed to order a volley fired into him after he was down. That's the trouble when troops are opposed to savages and outlaws. We fight according to the rules of civilized warfare while they--well, they are just common murderers. Warfare to them is only assassination. "Have the recall sounded, then start for the gulch. Jesse James is dead for the last time." But once more the army officer had been tricked. In a pure game of wits, he with all his military training and his experience in fighting savages, had been outwitted. When it came to pitting one man in a battle of wits against another, Jesse James had no known peer. He never seemed to come to the end of his resources, and the most desperate situations, the moments of the gravest peril, gave him not the slightest apprehension as to the ultimate outcome. He was able to cope with them all, come when and how they might. As he lay, back down, on the rocks, after the first volley had been fired by the troops, the great desperado formed his plans concisely and definitely, and these plans, as it proved, he followed without the slightest deviation. Jesse had heard the command of the Captain to prepare a litter and it brought a sardonic grin to his hardy face. "They sure will need that litter themselves before I get through with them," he muttered. 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.