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.
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.
"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.
"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."