Donegan’s mind burned, realizing in the space of a handful of minutes half of the captain’s command had been slaughtered.
Slowing behind Ticknor, surgeon Semig waved the Irishman on as he passed.
“We’re busting through! Going north!” Ticknor yelled, pointing, then hurrying to join Thomas’s soldiers.
Thomas stopped, stood a moment, hollering. “Wright! Where the devil are you, Lieutenant? Wright!”
Semig halted suddenly as Donegan crabbed up through the mahogany trees and grass, bullets spewing dirt clods around him.
“There’s two here still alive,” Semig muttered in a low voice, as if he were talking only to himself.
Seamus turned, watching a half-dozen, then more of the Modocs, leap off the ledges, working their way down into the depression to follow the retreating soldiers, shrieking their horrific war-cries. Some of them stopped momentarily, pointed their rifles at the ground and with a victorious screech fired their weapons.
“They’re killing the wounded Thomas left behind!” Seamus started to rise, his instinct to defend those who had taken shelter in the confining fissures of rock, only to find that there was no escape once the Modocs came down from the ledge.
Semig yanked him back down. “I need you here, dammit! Help me stop this bleeding. Look at this,” he implored, showing the Irishman his two hands glistening with crimson beneath the noonday sun.
“That’s Wright,” Seamus said, finally realizing.
“Four bullets—abdomen, thorax and head. Lord, how the man holds on—”
Donegan jerked Semig around. “Look around you. The Injins flanked us now.”
Semig gazed up for a moment, seeing that the warriors were hotly pursuing the soldiers, mixing in among the fleeing troopers now, picking them off one by one in their wild flight. The Modocs were letting Ticknor escape.
Looming out of the shadow of the ledge, Thomas reappeared, waving his pistol, his other arm hanging limp and useless, blood dripping from it in huge glops to the sandy, rocky soil beneath him.
Semig looked up. “I found Wright for you, Captain.”
Thomas did not glance down. “Good, Surgeon. Perhaps together we’ll get out of here.”
“Wright’s not traveling anywhere, Cap’n,” Donegan snapped. “He’s too far gone.”
Thomas fired his pistol up at the ledge above them, then wagged his head dolefully. Only then did he stare down at his lieutenant. At last his eyes turned to the Irishman, glazed.
“Then, I’ll not retreat a step farther. This is as good a place as any to die.”
“There’s no retreat for any of us now,” Donegan said as he watched the troopers hurrying away to the north, followed by a few Modocs who continued to cut the soldiers down one at a time and fall on them with glee.
“The rest of you!” Thomas shouted at what he had left of his command. “Gather in here with us—now! We’ll make a stand right here.”
A few, then a dozen, and finally sixteen, crawled, crabbed and slid into the depression to join Thomas, Semig and the tall, gray-eyed civilian with the Henry at work and the big, brass .44 caliber shells dangling between the fingers of both hands like glossy sausages.
There was nowhere to go now. The Modocs were up on the high ledges two hundred feet above them. And many were circling on the slopes, dropping into the depression where the last survivors had gathered around the captain.
“Pile up what rocks you can around you, men. We can hold—”
Thomas spun around, the side of his face gone in a red explosion. He sprawled atop a soldier who shrieked in terror as the captain trembled. Then lay still. Seamus pulled Thomas off the frightened youngster.
“Turn around, you bloody idiot—and shoot that gun of yours!”
Semig cried out in pain and anger.
He was clutching his lower calf when Donegan slid down beside him. Blood oozed between the surgeon’s fingers.
“At least they didn’t kill me,” he gritted his words out between his clenched teeth.
“Can you help yourself?” Seamus asked.
He nodded as the Irishman rolled away, plopping on his belly to fire the Henry. Up the slope he heard another unearthly scream that raised the hair on the back of his neck. He figured the Modocs had run across another wounded soldier and were making sport of their victim. He vowed they would not take him alive.
Seamus rolled on his side to pull free the pistol at his hip, not wanting to have it pinned under him when the final moments came.
That’s when the bullet burrowed through him.
Cracking the collarbone, splintering it into sharp shards of icy pain that drove on through the Irishman’s shoulder and upper arm.
Never since that day when the surgeons had poured fumaric acid into the wide saber slash along the great muscles of his back had he experienced such pain. So icy-hot and intense it took his breath away. He blinked with the creeping darkness threatening to swallow him, sure it was night and him staring into the black canopy overhead filled with a meteoric splendor.
Forcing his eyes open, he clambered for the pistol, hearing more and more of the shots whine and rattle into the depression Thomas had chosen for their last stand. A few men cried out. And he knew he could hear Semig muttering in pain. Others just breathing, raspy and fluid-filled with every terror-filled suck at life into their shattered lungs.
Somewhere close a man was cursing up a storm, his voice low and filled with rage. Cursing God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and a litany of saints all in the same breath for his bad luck.
Then Seamus realized it was his voice—finding that he was doing the cursing. Consciously he bit down on his tongue until it hurt—but refused to cry out.
Instead he grabbed for the pistol, feeling how sticky it was in his hand. He could not see the hand for the shooting stars, but he knew where the hammer was beneath his thumb and pulled it back, listening to the cylinder roll amid the war-cries.
He hoped the chamber was loaded. A funny thing to pray for now. If not to shoot the first Modoc who he heard inching close, then to shoot himself—
“All you fellows that ain’t dead!” echoed a loud Indian voice from high on the ledge, speaking his best pidgin English, “you better go home now. We don’t wanna kill you all in one day!”
Laughter resounded off the black ledges above him, all around him, as more and more of the Modocs took up the wild cackle that first erupted from their war-leader.
Donegan listened carefully, blinking his eyes again and again to clear them. He couldn’t. One of the Modoc bullets had splattered against a nearby rock and blinded him. But the tears came for the pain. Tears come of the relief swelling in his breast now as he heard nearby footsteps moving off, slowly—no longer concerned with creeping in silence.
Now the many footsteps rattled rocks and rustled through the underbrush and grass along the slope of the depression.
Seamus brought the pistol up as his vision cleared for a moment in blinding sunlight. He looked down at his hand, within it the blood-covered revolver. The arm of his shirt and the entire front of his body covered with glistening crimson.
He felt faint again and fought the first eruption of his stomach with the fresh hardtack and warm water he had forced down for lunch minutes ago as the Modocs circled in for their attack.
Slowly, as his eyes cleared, Seamus rolled his head to see if anyone else was alive. The only one moving was Dr. Semig.
If you called his shallow breathing moving. Seamus watched the rise and fall of the surgeon’s chest until a blessed blackness dripped over him once more. Purging the pain from his soul.
This time Seamus did not fight its long-awaited relief.
Chapter 29
April 26, 1873
After Winema had done all she could to give sutler Patrick McManus the willies, Ian O’Roarke strolled over to the bluff and found himself a spot in the grass near the signal tower.
Through that morning the soldiers atop the tower reported that they had
the Thomas patrol in sight for the first three miles or so after the troops entered the heart of the Lava Beds. But the Warm Springs scouts who had marched out of their camp at the Stronghold that morning were still holding back and had not joined up with the soldiers by eleven o’clock.
That’s when the patrol disappeared behind a high ledge better than halfway to Big Sand Butte.
Despite the confidence of Lieutenant John Adams’s signal crew, Ian sensed the first flutters of fear trouble his belly.
“Thomas got sixty goddamned men, Mr. O’Roarke,” one of the signalmen said. “And with another platoon of those scouts going to join up with ’em—the Modocs would be crazy to try anything.”
“That’s right,” joined in another soldier. “There ain’t but forty warriors left to that bastard Jack now. We can lick ’em, they choose to come out and fight.”
“If they’ll fight,” echoed the first soldier.
“Squash ’em like bugs in those rocks!”
It was shortly after noon when Ian sensed real hunger rumbling in his belly. He rose, dusting off his canvas britches as Lieutenant Adams hollered down to the pickets at the foot of the signal tower.
“Tell the colonel I’m observing some activity from the bluff, private. Receiving a signal from them … wait.”
Ian waited too, his hands gripping one of the tower support poles, knuckles gone white.
“We—have—found—the—Indians … They—are—behind—the—bluff.” Adams tore the field glasses from his eyes. “Take that message to Colonel Gillem.”
In a matter of minutes Gillem came trotting up with his staff, still buttoning his tunic.
“Is Thomas in danger?”
Adams looked down at the colonel, shaking his head. “Not from what I can see, sir. I’ve heard some distant firing—but it looks like they’re hammering the Modocs pretty hard. From the looks of it, they’ve got the Injuns running, and hard—even driving ’em this way. About fifteen of our own behind them, and heading north through a narrow gap in the rock, coming this way quick as well.”
This report would prove the beginning of another very dark day for the frontier army.
“Very well, Lieutenant,” Gillem replied with a sigh that showed his irritation at being disturbed. “Send a messenger to let me know how things develop.”
Nearly two hours of uncertainty passed. The hunger in Ian’s belly grew every bit as much as the not knowing.
“Someone’s coming in!” shouted a signalman atop the tower.
Many of the soldiers and a group of civilians hurried to the edge of the bluff to watch the first of the survivors reach Gillem’s camp. They had covered more than four miles across formidable country in something less than an hour. These first were escorted into camp to find Dr. Cabaniss.
More showed up, straggling in alone or in pairs, exhausted but all telling the same story of terror.
When all these stragglers could tell was that Thomas had been in a fight with the Modocs and that they had been cut off from the captain, Gillem decided the enlisted men were simply overcome with shock and incapacitated with fear.
“Thomas outnumbers them, pure and simple,” Gillem announced, replying to calls to send out a relief party. “I’m not alarmed in the least.”
Nearly a half hour later a bugler stumbled into camp, telling for the first time a hair-raising story that was believed. In running from the scene of the attack, the soldier had dashed right into the arms of McKay’s Tenino scouts. They had heard the firing and were finally hurrying to the scene when they were pinned down by the twenty-some men of Wright’s company who had escaped the massacre and were fleeing pell-mell from the scene.
On their way those soldiers bumped into McKay’s scouts—and in their terrified state, any dark face appeared to be an enemy. The soldiers fired on the Warm Springs Indians, cutting the scouts off and preventing them from marching to rescue the troops still pinned down at Black Ledge.
McKay had ordered the bugler to blow every call he knew. The half-breed declared that if the soldiers back in Gillem’s camp didn’t respond to the frantic call of the bugle, perhaps the Modocs killing the soldiers at Black Ledge would become fearful, believing that soldiers were on the way to rescue the encircled patrol.
More than an hour after his own capture by the Teninos, the bugler watched McKay’s men bring in a captured artillery sergeant. The half-breed asked the two soldiers to go to their frightened comrades and tell them to stop firing so his Teninos could go on to help those who were still up near the Big Sand Butte.
But when the sergeant and bugler got clear of the Indian scouts, the pair doubled back and around, heading directly for Gillem’s camp in great haste.
Only then did Gillem wake up and realize Thomas was in serious trouble.
Ordering Major Green to take all available men with him, Green found sixty-five soldiers ready to move out immediately. At the same time, Lieutenant Adams signaled the news to Major Mason’s camp near the Stronghold. Mason dispatched Captain James Jackson along with lieutenants Kyle and Miller to lead a detachment of cavalrymen to the scene.
As Green was marching his troops out of Gillem’s camp, O’Roarke watched assistant surgeon McElderry present himself to the colonel and volunteer to go along with the major.
“There’s no need of that, Doctor,” Gillem replied. “Mason will be sending out one of his three physicians with his rescue party.”
After an hour and a half of rapid march to the south, Captain Jackson joined up with Major Green’s men. A few minutes later McKay hailed the column and brought his scouts in.
The half-breed told the soldier leaders that his Teninos had gone on in to the battlesite and found only a handful of wounded men left alive. While they were certain they had not found all those who might have survived the attack, the scouts gave water and wrapped some wounds before they turned back toward Gillem’s camp.
The rest were dead.
It was only then, as darkness was beginning to swallow the land and McKay told them of the few wounded they had found, that the soldiers realized there was not a surgeon among them. After conferring, Jackson and Green agreed that the peril faced by any survivors far outweighed any difficulty in negotiating the difficult terrain in the dark. They chose to plunge ahead through the Lava Beds, heading for the faraway Big Sand Butte slowly as it slowly disappeared in the deepening twilight.
For more than three hours they fought their way through the unforgiving landforms until it became clear they might be in danger of injuring their own men as darkness seeped down upon the jagged countryside.
“We’re lost—there’s nothing else to do until morning.” Lieutenant Kyle moved among the men to explain as they were ordered to find themselves a patch of ground and pile up rocks around them in the event the Modocs returned to fight.
“We going on in the morning?” asked a soldier near Ian.
“As soon as it’s light enough for us to pass over this godforsaken ground,” Kyle replied before disappearing into the dark, only the whisper of his voice to tell a man where the lieutenant was going.
The moon hung just past mid-sky when a commotion was caused by the arrival of five soldiers—survivors of the Thomas-Wright patrol. Three were injured, limping, groaning, hauled along by the other two soldiers who had escaped with them after darkness eased their fears of being discovered by wandering Modocs.
While the three wounded troopers were sent on to Gillem’s camp with a pair of McKay’s scouts to guide them, Green asked the other two survivors if they could lead his men to the scene of the battle.
After more than an hour of wandering over the broken country, searching for some clue as to where they were or how they could reach the Thomas command, the two young soldiers admitted they too were hopelessly lost in the dark. Even though they had drawn close to the butte that loomed like a dark monolith nearby, Green decided his men had had enough of the dangerous gamble. Again the order was passed to settle in and fortify for the shank of the night.
Far behind them, to the north, the men watched the glow of a huge bonfire built at the edge of the bluff near Gillem’s camp. It made a cold, lonely light against the far sky.
“They’ll keep that lit all night—to shine as a beacon to any survivors still wandering out there in the Lava Beds,” said a soldier quietly as he settled down near O’Roarke.
Ian dragged a hand beneath his nose, hoping it was only the cold that made it and his eyes run here in the darkness. “I pray there’s survivors left to see that light, son.”
* * *
From where he lay, Seamus Donegan could not see that beacon when he came to sometime after sundown.
The depression cradled him down in its rocky bosom. As he slowly moved his eyes, he could make out the blacker outline of the rocky ledges high above him against the night sky. There were only stars out in the sky, but he was sure the moon must be up by now, as dark as the canopy was overhead. Hidden, perhaps, behind that tall butte to the east of him.
He called out once, quietly. No one answered. Then he tried to move, his right arm gone to sleep and aching. The pain was so intense he swallowed air then suddenly puked on the ground beside him. Seamus gasped as the waves of nausea subsided and blessed sleep overtook him again.
The thin rind of a linen moon hung against the starry sky when next he opened his eyes. That taste in his mouth was something awful, reminding him of younger days when he would pass out drunk after puking up a bellyful of good whiskey.
But that was before he had learned how to drink and hold it down like a man.
A lot of good that done you, Seamus, he growled at himself.
Gritting his teeth as pain swamped over him, Donegan dragged the sticky arm up and across his belly, which relieved some of the agony in the shattered shoulder. He wondered if gangrene would set in soon.
They should have been here by now.
Perhaps he would lose the arm. And that made him cry more than the fear of dying here alone.
Snorting back the tears of loneliness, Seamus decided to call out quietly again, still fearful the Modocs may have left some guards behind to watch over the white men.
Devil's Backbone: The Modoc War, 1872-3 Page 29