Chapter 23

April 11, 1873

“You still see them, don’t you?” Ian asked Seamus. “Your eyes younger, lad.”

Donegan stood, straining his eyes on the far meadow as the light faded beneath the clouds whipped off Tule Lake. “I see ’em moving around some. Not sure what—”

“They’re firing at the peace tent!”

In shock, Seamus looked up at the signal sergeant yelling atop the signal station erected on the bluff.

All around the Irishman soldiers snatched up their rifles and started away without command or orders. Donegan and O’Roarke found themselves among them, skidding, sliding, careening down the bluff toward the site as the sound of distant gunfire could now be plainly made out as they clattered along.

After covering no more than a half-mile, the soldiers in the lead spotted a man hurrying in their direction on foot.

“Hold your fire!” someone shouted.

“Is it a white man?” another asked.

Seamus sprinted along the side of the crude formation. “Bloody well won’t be no damned Modoc running toward us, will it?”

“It’s one of them peace fellas!”

Ian huffed to Donegan’s side and stopped. “It is at that—Dyar.”

“In God’s name help me!” Dyar screeched, tearing up the footpath. “Help them! Murdering butchers—oh, the blood! The blood!”

O’Roarke grabbed Dyar as the agent collapsed against him. Dyar’s eyes held the frightened, cornered look of a snowshoe hare chased beyond its limits by a winter-gaunt coyote.

A sergeant came up with several others. “Mr. Dyar—what happened?”

“We damned well know what happened, Sergeant,” Donegan said. “Get this man back to camp and let’s go see to the rest!”

The soldier was about to speak, his mouth hung open to protest—and instead he turned to order a squad to accompany the commissioner back to camp and a surgeon. Seamus tapped Ian on the shoulder and they were off, followed by a dozen soldiers who were leaving their sergeant behind.

The clatter of hoofbeats grew louder. Seamus turned, flinging his arms this way then that. Some of the soldiers took the left side of the road, the rest hid on the right.

Around the bend Toby Riddle galloped into view, laying low along the neck of her mount. Her hair streaming, her bloodstained hands gripping the reins close to the horse’s bit, she began to rein up, terror filling her eyes as Donegan stepped into the road.

But instead of stopping, she flailed at the horse, laying on its withers again, tearing past the Irishman in a death race.

“She looks like she’s seen the devil himself,” a soldier said, coming back onto the road.

“Maybe she has, sojur. Maybe she has at that.”

Ian was beside Donegan that next moment, gripping his nephew’s arm. “I’ve got to find Frank. He was a friend of mine.”

Seamus nodded as Ian started off again at a fast clip.

Just over the rise the small meadow opened up before them. Down to the right of center was the off-white canvas of the wall-tent. Gray smudges of smoke still climbed ghostly from the sagebrush fire ringed with deadfall and rocks used as seats.

Donegan had seen enough of war and death to know what the two dark forms were as he raced for the tent.

They stopped at Canby’s body, stripped of all clothing, lying some twenty feet from the tent.

“He’s dead,” Seamus announced quietly to the first soldiers arriving as he stood over the general’s corpse.

He trotted over to the second body, utterly naked as well. “Got in over your head, preacher.”

Quickly making the sign of the cross as the breeze shifted and his nose wrinkled with the stench of voided bowels, he rose and moved to the final dark form as more soldiers appeared in formation at the edge of the meadow.

The head commissioner still had his red flannel underwear on, some of it soaked with blood turning brown. Seamus placed an ear against Meacham’s chest.

“You got a surgeon with you?” Seamus asked the arriving soldiers.

“I’m a surgeon. Dr. Cabaniss,” an older man in army blue announced. At the end of his arm hung a tiny bag he dropped as he knelt on the far side of the body.

“This one still alive—for now,” Donegan said.

After a quick examination, Cabaniss clucked. “Damned lucky to be hanging on, I’d say.”

“Maybe not. Sometimes it’s better to get it over with quick.”

“Perhaps,” Cabaniss replied icily, pulling a flask from his kit. “Help me get him up to drink this.”

“Brandy?”

Cabaniss shook his head. “That’s all gone. Straight corn whiskey.”

“If he don’t lose it when you pour it down him, he might have a chance, surgeon.”

“Help me hold him up,” Cabaniss asked again. “He’s a bloody mess, this one.” The surgeon began to pour a dribble past the commissioner’s lips.

Meacham sputtered at the taste. “B-Brandy! No—”

“It’s whiskey, Meacham,” Cabaniss said.

“I … I can’t,” he replied weakly, trying to turn his bleeding head against the clamp the surgeon had on him. “I’m a t-temperance man, by God!”

“Stop this nonsense, Meacham. Down with it, I say. That’s it—good. By God you just might live—you’ve got that much fight in you still!” the gruff surgeon growled, then pursed his lips into a sour smile aimed at the Irishman.

“I … hit Schonchin—bleeding…” Meacham muttered.

“Shut up, man—and drink,” ordered the surgeon.

When Cabaniss called three soldiers over to help him, Seamus stood and trotted down to the tent. Reporter H. Wallace Atwell was removing his overcoat and draping it over the bloody, naked Canby.

“Get the general a goddamned shroud, sojur,” Seamus hissed at a youngster nearby.

“Sir?” the young man asked, his eyes wide, face drained of color. He repeatedly licked his lips, refusing to look down at the bloodied corpses.

“Cut some canvas from that tent for General Canby.”

“I … I don’t have me a knife—”

“Use mine,” Ian said, slapping the handle of his skinning knife into the young soldier’s hand.

When the wide strip had been hacked from the tent, three soldiers helped wrap the general’s body in the canvas.

“An army tent,” Seamus said quietly. “No more fitting shroud for a fighting man.”

The soldiers laid the two dead and the severely wounded Meacham on stretchers and prepared to carry them back to Gillem’s camp after attending to the possibility they would be attacked by the Modocs they believed still lurking on the fringes of the meadow.

But Jack’s murderers never looked back as they escaped into their Stronghold.

There was no one to fight, and no resistance offered by the Indians, yet the officers ordered their eager soldiers about-face and returned to the tent rather than have a repeat of the debacle of 17 January.

It was there that Seamus and Ian learned how the camp had been alerted to the trouble at the peace tent.

When some unexplained shooting erupted on the far side of the Modocs’ stronghold, Mason’s signalmen sent word to Gillem’s camp that there was an attack made on two of his soldiers under a Modoc flag of truce. Gillem’s signal officer wrote his hasty note and dispatched a soldier with the news for the colonel himself, still taken to his cot.

“Gillem was just completing his own note of warning to General Canby—telling the commissioners to be watchful, suggesting they should return to camp because of the attack on Mason’s men—when another messenger come running down the hill,” explained John Fairchild who had been at the colonel’s tent during the outbreak of excitement. “You should have seen the look on Gillem’s face when that soldier ran up shouting: ‘The commissioners! The Modocs are firing on the commissioners!’”

“You get yourself a crack at any of Jack’s warriors?” Pressley Dorris asked the two Irishmen, his face hopeful as he peered at the gravity etched on every face around him. He had been in camp with Fairchild during it all.

Ian O’Roarke shook his head. “We scoured the nearby rocks hoping to find any that might be skulking about—but all Seamus could find was the three places where four of ’em stayed in hiding until it came time for the bastards to do their terrible deed.”

“The news roared through here like prairie fire,” Dorris said as they all waited quietly outside the surgeon’s tent where Meacham lay horribly wounded. “If it weren’t for a few old sergeants taking control of things—and Captain Biddle pressing things with Gillem—they’d never got that doctor down there for Alfred as fast as they did.”

Seamus turned to Dorris and gripped his arm. “What do you mean, Biddle pressed Gillem?”

Dorris glanced this way then that before he whispered, “The colonel was downright froze in indecision, he was. I don’t known if it was because he was so sick … but the bugle was already blown, and the captains already had their men lined up and ready to march—still Gillem couldn’t decide what to do. So in come Biddle, marching right into the colonel’s tent. Don’t know what he said to Gillem, but when the captain came back out, he ordered Captain Thomas to stay on duty with his battery of artillery to guard the camp. The rest of the troops Biddle was going to lead out to rescue the commissioners and do battle with the murderers if they caught up with any of ’em.”

Seamus shook his head and spit into the grass between his boots. “Damn, if that don’t sound like the truth: officers sitting on their thumbs—afraid to do something, anything! And all the while folks are butchered in cold blood.”

“Gillem’s officers and men are hopping mad to get a crack at the Modocs now, but the colonel won’t let ’em,” said Dorris.

“Why won’t he turn ’em loose?”

Dorris shrugged. “Gillem said he’s waiting for the Warm Springs Indians to get here to help before he moves in on Jack’s Stronghold.”

“You should have looked at Dyar’s face when he came running in here,” Fairchild said. “Never have I seen someone in such a state of shock.”

“Still, he got off his telegram to Washington, John,” said Dorris.

“Yes, direct to General Sherman himself,” Fairchild added.

Seamus clucked his tongue inside his cheek. “Uncle Billy? I’ll bet that old war-horse will have a lot to say about this Indian carnival now!”

“Those reporters too,” Fairchild added, with a thumb indicating a handful who stood about, asking questions of soldiers just back from the meadow, scratching on their pads with pencils. “Especially that Bill Dadd.”

Newsman H. Wallace Atwell hunched over his notes, perched on a camp stool, his pad braced atop one knee as he scribbled furiously, hoping to be the first to have this story get out to the world.

“By the saints,” Seamus said quietly, “this is the biggest story of the war yet.”

“Atwell’s hired Bill Ticknor—fella who surveyed the road around the lake,” Fairchild said. “Ticknor will carry the reporter’s story into Yreka to get it telegraphed to his paper in Sacramento.”

Seamus wagged his head. “First time a general’s been killed by Indians…”

As the sobbing wails drew closer, ever louder, the Irishman turned. Stretcher-bearers were bringing the canvas-wrapped body of General Edward R.S. Canby into camp. Half lying across the stretcher himself, stumbling along beside it at a clumsy gait, was Canby’s young orderly, Scott. He screeched in rage and lamented in grief. Captain Biddle ordered three men to comfort Scott at a nearby fire while the body was carried on to the general’s tent.

“Not a man could blame him for crying the way he is,” Ian said quietly.

Seamus saw the mist growing in his uncle’s eyes. “We all have tears inside us for someone.”

Ian gently took his nephew’s wrist in his big, callused, field-worn hand. “Were that I had been there with Liam when my brother took his last breath.”

Donegan peered at the ground a few heartbeats, his chest growing heavier. “I—I wasn’t with Liam when he died.” He gazed into Ian’s moist eyes. “Away down that bloody island when he was murdered.”

Ian put a hand to his mouth in shock. “Murdered? No. I—I thought he died—a head wound—fighting the Cheyenne.”*

“He did,” Seamus started, lips quivering of a sudden. The muscles of his face pinched in their fight to maintain composure. “We all figured he was dying already, Ian. Maybe … Lord help me, I’ve never told anyone this—had I been there, he might’n made it until the surgeon showed up nine days later.”

Ian gripped the back of his nephew’s neck, pulling the big man into a rough embrace. “Don’t go blaming yourself for the acts of other men, Seamus. Only God knows how I’ve beat myself with that same rod too many years already. It’s not yours to carry any longer, son. Set that load down and go on. Go on.”

At that moment Fairchild and Dorris turned away, perhaps a little embarrassed at Donegan’s sobbing, although it was an age of strong and open sentiment. Seamus stood there among them all, inches taller than even his uncle, hunched over into the older man’s shoulder like a child—shedding himself of that grief carried for too long, a burden much too heavy for any one man to bear alone for all those miles and all those sleepless nights spent alone.

Overhead the heavy, gray clouds had finally filled to their limit with cold. A light but icy snow began to lance out of the heavy sky, covering the countryside with a thin layer of white while the day drained out of the land.

Captain Biddle ordered three wooden rifle cases emptied of their Springfields by two regimental carpenters who would be kept busy beneath lamplight converting the boxes into tin-lined coffins.

“Three?” Ian asked in a whisper as they walked slowly by the canvas awning where the muffled hammering of nails and the screech of bending sheet tin carried through the sleety night.

Donegan shook his head. “No one expects Meacham to make it to morning with those bullet wounds.”

“They’re taking the bodies to Yreka,” Ian replied. “Thomas to San Francisco. Canby and Meacham to Portland.”

“Then this army can get back to dealing with the Modocs.”

“No one’s saying a word about talking peace with Jack any longer, Seamus.”

“I figure it’s a blood debt now.”

Ian dragged the back of his hand across his dry lips. “Jack and his bunch don’t have an idea what they’ve started now.”

He sighed anxiously. “I’m tired of this pacing, Ian. Going back to wait by the surgeon’s tent.”

“Maybe they have some news on Alfred,” O’Roarke said as they started back.

As they were coming back up to the quartermaster’s tent lit by firelight and kerosene lamps, crowded with newsmen and the curious, one of the surgeon’s hospital stewards poked his head out the tent flaps.

“Captain? Captain Biddle?”

Biddle came forward, taking his slouch hat from his head. “Is Mr. Meacham dead, private?”

“No—no, sir,” the young soldier replied in wonder. “He … he just asked to have an officer send to Linkville for his brother-in-law.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Biddle replied. “Who’s this brother-in-law?”

“Captain Ferree—Fort Klamath.”

“Ferree—I’ll send someone for him now,” Biddle said, turning back into the crowd that parted for his passing.

“Liam had that when he died, Seamus,” Ian whispered beneath the murky lamplight as the snow scudded icily along the ground. Sparks from nearby fires kicked up fireflies into the black sky.

“Had what, Ian?”

“Family.”

“Family.”

“Always lonely work—this thing of dying,” Ian said. “Made a little easier having family near.”