noble-hearted men like Gen. Wheaton, who rise superior to prejudice, and dare to extend to people of low degree the courtesies that all mankind owe the humblest of our race, when, in life’s extremities, the heart is dying within the body. The women and children are coming to take a last farewell of their husbands and fathers. Who that is human could look on this grief-stricken group, while listening to the notes of agony making a disconsolate march for their weary feet on this painful pilgrimage, and not bury all feelings of exultation and thirst for revenge toward this remnant of a once proud, but now humbled race; notwithstanding to the ear come despairing sobs of woe from the lips of Mrs. Boddy, Mrs. Brotherton, Mrs. Canby and Mrs. Thomas, on whom the great calamity of their lives burst like a thunder-bolt from a clear sky, shattering their hearts, and leaving them sepulchres of human happiness, illuminated only by the rainbow of Christian faith and hope, spanning the space from marble tomb to pearly gate?
These semi-savage Modoc women, with crude and jumbled ideas, made up of half-heathen, half-Christian theology, had not the clear, well-defined hopes of immortality that alone bear up the soul in life’s darkest hours.
True, they had been cradled through life in storm and convulsions. For eleven months they have heard the almost continuous howl of a terrible tempest surging and whirling around and above them. They have listened to rattling musketry, roaring cannon, and bursting shells. They have seen the lightnings of war, flashing far back into their beleaguered homes in the rocky caverns of the “Lava Beds;” but with all
these terrible lessons, they were not prepared to calmly meet this awful hour.
Human nature, unsupported by a living, tangible faith, sunk under the overshadowing grief, and struggled for extenuation through the effluence of agony in wild paroxysms of despair.
We might abate our sympathy for them in the reflection that they are lowly, degraded beings, incapable of realizing the full force of such scenes; but it would be an illusion, unworthy of a highly cultivated heart.
God made them too, with all the emotions and passions incident to mortality. Circumstances of birth forbade them the wonderful transmutation that we claim to enjoy. When we pass under the clouds of sorrow, the angel Pity walks beside us, arm in arm with sweet-faced Hope, whose finger points to brighter realms; with them, Pity, alone.
The sun is setting behind the mountains; the grief-stricken group are returning to the stockade, leaving behind them the condemned victims of treachery.
Their betrayers—Hooker, Bogus, Shacknasty and Steamboat—are invited by the officers to an interview with their victims; all decline, save Shacknasty Jim. This interview roused the nearly dead lion into life again; the meeting was characterized by bitter criminations. The other heartless villains, after declining the interview, requested Gen. Wheaton to give them a position where they could witness the execution on the morrow.
Let us drop the curtain over this sad picture, and turn our attention to the quartermaster and his men, who are just in front of the guard-house. He has a