“Is there any hope for Mr. Meacham?” he asks.
“Not the least in the world; but his wife must not know it now,” replies Anderson, in a low voice; but O my God! loud enough for the quick ears of Mrs. Meacham to catch the words.
The drivers take up the lines. The stages pass. In one Gen. Canby’s body is being borne to his heart-broken wife. In the other a heart-broken wife is going to her husband, with the thought that she would be northward borne in a few days, with her husband confined in a dark coffin. The southern-bound stage reaches Jacksonville. The strange gentleman assists Mrs. Meacham to alight, and attends to her baggage while the change of coaches is being made. He then introduces another stranger to Mrs. Meacham as “your husband’s brother, who will go to Y-re-ka with you.”
It is Wednesday evening when the stage is slowly
climbing Siskiyou mountain. The occupants are but two, one a lady. She does not speak. She has no hope now. The gentleman is silent. He, too, has lost hope in the recovery of the lady’s husband.
Bringing in the Wounded.
Lieut. Eagan is being carried to his tent. The hospital is full of patients groaning with pain. Near the door lies a Warm Springs Indian scout. The surgeons are probing his wound, while he laughs and talks to the attendants, making sarcastic remarks about “the Modocs using powder that couldn’t shoot through his leg.”
The Iowa veteran announces to his brother-in-law that his wife will be in Y-re-ka that night.
The Modocs are out of water. The ice they had stored in the caves is exhausted. They determine to cut their way to the lake, but a few hundred yards distant. They concentrate their forces, and, enveloped in sage brush, they crawl up near the line of soldiers and open fire in terrible earnest. Soldiers fall on right and left. The Modocs yell and push their line. The white soldiers are massing to resist. The fire is awful. Peal after peal, volley after volley, and still the Modocs hold their ground. All night long the Modoc yell mingles with the rattle of musketry, and the shouts of defiance from the soldiers. One party is fighting in desperation; the other from duty.