W:The bracketing was yours, not mine.
E:You will know that the Constitution bestows the right of due process.
W:I am not here to –
E[interrupting]:To seize a citizen with no trial but a drumhead pretense. To carry him into the night, with neither friend nor advocate, and to torture that person and put him to a beast’s death. Is that properly constitutional, to your manner of thinking?
W:I have not been to Law School. You tell me.
E:You think this a matter for levity?
W:I decline to answer.
E:Were you party to a conspiracy to burn the gubernatorial residence at Redemption Falls?
W:No.
E:You have heard the Governor say that you were.
W:A lie.
E:Did you ever sketch a plan of that house for a man?
W:No.
E:Did you cause a man or men to engage in surveillance of that house? And of Mrs Lucia O’Keeffe at the Plains Hotel, Edwardstown?
W:I decline to answer.
E:Did you conspire with others to bomb that house?
W:A lie.
E:Did you murder one Devlin who was employed to build that house?
W:No.
E:Did your party disrespect, and then cause to be destroyed, the flag of the United States at that house? Did you on many occasions despoil a lesser house, the home of a person formerly a slave, with secessionist and other slogans touching her race?
W:I decline to answer.
E:Do you love these United States, sir?
W:I hope I am a good patriot.
E:That is not what I asked you.
W:That is my answer.
[The time being five minutes after four o’clock, the proceedings were adjourned.]†
FOURTH DAY OF SEVEN
Saturday, December 29
LUCIA’S JOURNAL
Elizabeth told me the reason for her illness. It is as I had suspected, alas. Started some months ago, in left eye, she says. Bad aches, sometimes dizziness. Vision comes and goes. Told me there are moments when she can barely discern her hand before her face. I asked: ‘Can you see me now, Elizabeth?’ She answered: ‘Your shape only.’ I moved closer to her and asked again. She said nothing.
Told her we would fetch a doctor. It would not achieve, she felt. Asked me not to speak of it to C, but I felt I had no choice but to do so.
He came in and spoke to her decently. Said she would be kept on. No question whatever of dismissal. She said she could be of no use. He insisted. I saw a kindliness I used to see in former times. A gift, to be able to talk to people. Wish I had it.
Later, told him my news. That perhaps he and I are to be parents. He wept. Said he was happy for it. Pleaded with me immediately to return to Redemption. Told him I would not, for the moment.
Two more men joined us tonight. We are now fourteen.
A REGISTER OF THE RIDERS & THEIR FIREPOWER
COMPILED FOR THE TRIBUNAL-OF-INQUIRY BY US ARMORY DEPT.
Jas. C. O’keeffe: 43 yrs. Austrian Lorenz Model 1854 rifle-musket, .54 caliber, re-bored to .58. Two Colt repeaters. Regimental saber of Queen’s Own Hussars, with ‘Genl. J.F.O’K’ etched into blade (gems missing from hilt).
Patk. Edwd. Hannigan: 37 yrs. Acting Sheriff, Varina County. Veteran 127th New York, ‘The Irish Brigade’. Colt Army Model sidearm 1861,.44 caliber. Surgeon’s scalpel (x one) by Weis of Bond St, London. Modified to be scabbarded down a boot. Also garrotting chain.
Daniel Neyland Moody: 24 yrs. Acting Sheriff, Truro County. Veteran 127th NY (decorated sharpshooter). Long-range bench-rest rifle. Lethal to 1,800 yards. Machete knife (one) with serrated blade.
Owen (Known as John) Creed: 31 yrs. Confederate veteran. (1st Mississippi). Spencer rifle, metallic cartridge, primer builded in. 12 rounds per minute. Bowie knife.
Denis Arkins: (Veteran 2nd Mass, 12th Corps, 1st Division.) Acting Deputy Marshal, Edwardstown & Thomond Counties. Sharps 1859 Carbine (short barrel, breech loading). Belt of Chinese throwing knives, star-shaped.
Michael Francis English: 32 yrs. Veteran 127th New York. Acting Sheriff, Canada Borderlands. Two x Starr revolvers, .44 caliber, six-shot, double-action weapon. Also sawn-down shotgun. ‘Erin Forever’ carved into stock.
Joseph John Mounrance: 26 yrs. Veteran 127th New York. Acting Sheriff, Skibbereen County. Bespoke ‘figure 8’ revolver, claimed to have smithed it himself (while prisoner at Pentonville Gaol, London, England), .36 caliber. Not thumb-cocked. Dependable.
John ‘Flor’ Savage: 46yrs. Veteran 29th Indiana. Acting Marshal, Sequoia County. Le Mat Revolver, ‘cap and ball’, two barrels.
Francis William Dwyer: 34 yrs. Veteran 32nd South Carolina. Model 1861 Springfield Musket. $15 to $20. Springfield Armory, Mass.
Allen Winterton: 34 yrs. Captain, US Corps of Cartographers. Enfield rifled musket, manuf. England. Bore diameter .577 inches, 9 lb. 3 oz. with bayonet. Fires similar to minnie ball. True to 800 yards. Small pistol: unknown make; now lost.
Michael Martin Joyce: 52 yrs. Veteran 21st Georgia. Whitworth rifle, British manufacture (retrieved from fellow Confederate rifleman at Spotsylvania). Fires hexagonal ‘bolt’. Delivers terrible wound.
‘Eye-John’ or ‘I-John’ Thorn-berry: Age unknown. Blackfoot Indian. Colt-Root Model 1855 percussion repeating rifle .64 caliber. (US Army issue, stolen.) NOTE: DEFECTIVE WEAPON: HAS BEEN DESTROYED. (Prone to fire all cylinders at once: severed finger from rifleman’s forward hand when test-fired.)
Lucia-Cruz McLelland-O’Keeffe: Starr carbine rifle with 21 inch .54 caliber barrel. Zero misfire rate, unfailingly true. Small jewel-handled dagger, Spanish design. (Twenty diamonds in hilt, antique, used as an aide-mémoire for prayer, each diamond representing a mystery of the Rosary.)
Beth: Freed Negro. About 30 yrs. Unarmed.
OTHER ORDNANCE & WEAPONRY & cetera
Bear-trap cage, cast-iron, with chained gate & deadlocks. Williams breech-loading rapid-fire ‘Mechanical-gun’ built for Confederate War Dept, used at Seven Pines. Prone to overheat & jams its breech. Has been destroyed.
One very savage hunting hound: property of the Governor. Has been destroyed.
FIFTH DAY OF SEVEN
Sunday, December 30th
They left camp shortly after dawn and rode most of the morning, resting only measured minutes at a time. At a farmstead near the Cricklewood River, English was waiting with fresh horses, but fodder was scarce by now.
The farmer and his wife, Thomas and Kate Prunty, were Fenian sympathizers born in Liverpool. They regarded O’Keeffe as a hero, his presence as an honor. For this reason they had invited a number of Irish neighbors to their home, despite having been asked to keep his visit completely secret. He refused to meet any of them, indeed flew into a rage with his hosts and betook himself to the barn with his men. Lucia appealed to him to greet his admirers, asserting – perhaps questionably – that they were more likely to be discreet if the request came from O’Keeffe himself. At any event, he remained in the barn all day. There was a heavy fall of snow in the afternoon.
Food, drink and blankets were brought to the barn, with coats and a few pipes of tobacco. Still he refused to see his hosts. It grew dark by four o’clock. O’Keeffe slept a while in a blanket-roll. The men played dice or poker quietly; others rested in the stalls, or cleaned their guns. They had been ordered not to drink, but some did, surreptitiously, for the oncoming night was bitterly cold and no fire could be permitted in a barn. At midnight, O’Keeffe conferred with Savage and told him of an alteration of route. The plan had been compromised. He was convinced they were spied-on. They would not be proceeding directly to Stornaway.
Winterton was behaving oddly. He seemed highly-strung, visibly nervous. Flor Savage of County Cork, who was emerging as O’Keeffe’s right-hand man, would testify at the Tribunal that the mapmaker had not slept all that night, had sat awake in the barn, repeatedly searching his clothing and haversack. At dawn he told John Creed that he had mislaid an important journal. Cree
d helped him to search for it. It was not found.
About an hour after sunrise, as they made to set out, Elizabeth Longstreet became too ill to continue. Lucia insisted she remain at the farmhouse with the Prunty family, whose son agreed to see her safely back to Redemption Falls as soon as the weather permitted. He would ride the thirty miles for the doctor in the meantime. It was snow-blindness, said the farmer. Distressing but not serious. They would take good care of her, he promised.
O’Keeffe bade her good-bye at about a quarter-past eight. It was New Year’s Eve, 1866. She would never see any of the riders again.
SIXTH DAY OF SEVEN
Monday, December 31st
It was a dim, bitter day as O’Keeffe led the posse through Gunmetal Gorge, down Two Mile Hill, then over the flats of the snow-covered prairie by the north-east trail toward Canada. They must have ridden past Lake Union, which was surely frozen solid, and its sprinkling of tiny and overgrown islands. They would have had to negotiate O’Malley’s Gulch, no easy thing in fair weather on the strongest mule. In midwinter, on horseback, with the stones rolling like cannonballs, it must have been a frightening traverse.
The temperature that day was seven degrees below freezing. They passed the ghost town of Silverlode Spring. The river was forded at a place called Simoon, which Thorn Berry had been told of, but had never previously seen. By now, some of the men had an idea of where they were headed. Three, perhaps four, were unhappy.
They stopped to rest the horses at Milestone Landing, a pass connecting a tributary of the Parfleche River with a branch of the Redwolf to the west. O’Keeffe was approached by a deputation. If their assumption was correct on where they were headed, about half of the men would not accompany him further. He did not give them an argument but agreed they should wait for him here. He would return, he said, in two hours.
O’Keeffe, Lucia, Winterton, Savage and the former Confederates continued. The Pend d’Oreilles track they took is no longer in existence; at the time it was narrow, little more than a footpath, so that they rode single-file with O’Keeffe to the front and Savage, gun drawn, to the rear.
Five drumlins of stones. A fallow black meadow. At first they were uncertain this could be the place. trespassers will be shot announced a placard on the gate. And then, through gusts of swirling smoke, a tattered Confederate flag.
Chickens grubbing at a midden-heap, tugging worms from its depths. A rooster prancing slowly near the kennels. A jennet tethered to a stake, which it was circling in a grim plod. Many sacks of unsown seed.
As they rode toward the cabin of whip-sawed white fir, they saw a man in a nearby field, digging with his back to them. He might be forty or sixty: it was difficult to tell. Near him, a black child was sitting in a barrow.
O’Keeffe dismounted first. The steader did not look, though he must have heard the crunch of their hooves on his stones.
The smoke was from a bonfire of brushwood and pines that was crackling in a hollow near the creek. The fire shot sparks. There was an odor of boiling pine-sap.
‘John,’ said O’Keeffe, to the shoulders of the man. ‘An old rebel is come to see you.’
Still he did not turn. He only dug the harder, grunting as he cut, his neck reddening lividly with every thrust, then whitening again as he straightened. The child looked up at O’Keeffe and Lucia, as though waiting for them to tell him something important.
‘I hope Martha keeps well. Is she here with you or still at Richmond?’
The man made no answer but footed the spade. Its rasp sounded harsh in the schist. They could hear his breathing, so uneasy it sounded painful. He had always suffered badly with his lungs.
‘I meant to come before. To wish you fortune in the Territory. What with one thing and another I rather – ’
‘I know why you’re come.’
‘Then you have heard of what has happened. The outlaw and the boy.’
‘I know why you’re come,’ he repeated.
‘This man who has wronged me. He was once a Confederate soldier. I thought, if I may speak frankly, with your standing in the south – of all you gave in the War and so on…’
‘To liken my sons with a gunslinger. Is that what you thought?’
Now he turned to face O’Keeffe.
He was a short man, stocky, with a graying tattoo on his right forearm. A man that had once been handsome. You could tell from his accent that he had lived in different lands but that Ireland, Ulster, the city of Derry, had probably once been his home. He stood with a slight stoop, had done so for many years – result of the floggings he had received in Tasmania. The worst one he had gotten, two hundred lashes, for assisting the escape of the figure now before him.
‘I’d as lief you’d explain,’ said John Fintan Duggan. ‘Do you liken my sons to that killer?’
‘Of course I do not. I meant only to say that any southerner would surely listen to one of your standing in his country. If you were prepared to intercede. There can be a peaceful outcome. The boy is only a child. If any harm came to him…’
‘You dare talk to me of harm? After what I have endured?’
‘The day has never passed that I did not pray for the boys. Your sacrifice – and Martha’s – it was too much. It was cruel.’
‘Do not speak of my sons, sir. You are not worthy to speak of them. The prayers of your kind are not wanted here.’
‘They were fine boys, John. A credit to you and Martha. I know they will have fought with courage, always.’
‘And their godfather in the vanguard of the assassins that savaged them. How much “courage” did it take you to turn on your friends?’
‘John – if I have wronged you – I ask your forgiveness.’
‘It’s yourself you’ve wronged, sir. It’s yourself’ll pay.’
The threat seemed to bounce on the stones between them. Wild geese clattered from a cottonwood.
‘Tell me, General O’Keeffe, or whatever you call yourself now. Do they know your little secret? Should I tell them? You hypocrite. You posing, posturing fraud.’
‘John – ’
‘Then I see you have kept it quiet. That is what I had heard. Was that difficult, sir? For all of these years? Even a liar as filthied as yourself must surely have his moments in the night.’
‘Con,’ said Lucia, ‘what is he talking about?’
‘Aye,’ said Duggan. ‘What am I talking about? Tell her, why don’t you. Or should I?’
Each man faced the friend of his youth. One night in a cell they had cut open their thumbs and mingled their blood in an oath. The older looked at the younger with the impassivity of a magistrate whose conscience is untroubled by passing sentence.
‘Do you feel that fear, sir? That is your judgment. I would walk into Hell for the remainder of eternity before I would spend a single night in your mind.’
Duggan motioned to the child, who slid out of the barrow and approached him with a gourd and a bundle of rag. He poured water from the flask into Duggan’s cupped hands. Duggan plashed his face, dried his hands with the rag; took a couple of careful quaffs from the gourd. He had the neatness of a man to whom water is scarce, the neatness of a man who has been in many prisons; who might one day be prisoner again. The boy shambled back to the wheelbarrow and sat in it, crossed-legged, like Buddha observing the nothing.
‘Was there some other import?’ Duggan asked the ashes around him, which rose and fell and fell and rose and adhered to his flesh and his spade. ‘I’ve a claim needs working. Some in this country must work. We receive no Judas dollar of the Government.’
‘I come as an old friend who is fallen in trouble. I will beg for your help if that would persuade you. I am in very great danger. Some I love are in danger. The days to come, they might well be my last.’
‘Then, winter where you summered,’ John Duggan said, and turned back to slicing his dirt.
An eagle scudded slowly down a turret of wind in the northernmost quadrant of sky.
‘Con, come,’ said
Lucia, taking his arm. But he seemed reluctant to go. She beckoned to the men.
John Flor Savage brought O’Keeffe’s horse up by its rein. It was restless, twitching its ears at the cinders. The riders were silent at the repudiation they had witnessed. It was a hard thing to have had to see.
‘Can you shake my hand at least, John? For the sake of better days?’
Duggan refused to turn. But he rose from his work. He seemed to be looking at the eagle as it banked; he had always loved birds, found them beautiful and strange. O’Keeffe stepped toward his back tentatively, right hand proffered.
‘James and Con, they would surely have wanted – ’
The next thing would be remembered for many a year by every one who saw it happen. Lucia gasping. Savage’s pistol being drawn. O’Keeffe’s hand restraining him. A horse rearing up. A screamed obscenity. A black child doing nothing.
O’Keeffe wiping the spittle from his face.
The woman had come up so silently that nobody had noticed her approach. She was small and thin and pale. She was habited all in black but her clothing was old, so that its black was bleaching to gray.
‘Black day they didn’t cut you to pieces,’ Martha Duggan wept, her shoulders tremoring violently. ‘An I’d known what’d come of you, I’d’ve whetted their knife. You are filth. Do you mind me? The lowest of the low. When I think of the men you deceived into following you. Now hie your vermin out of this land –or be buried in it .’
It was Winterton who came to lead the Governor away. The black child watched them ride out.
FROM THE EVIDENCE OF FLOR SAVAGE
W:Couple hours after the Duggan place, we come to Bunclody Ford. Boss was in a blue; even for him. We pitched camp up above but he took off a while by himself. I suppose a couple hours. He went into the forest. He looked poorly when he come back down.
E:Poorly?
W:Here [indicating face]. I don’t know. Feverish I guess. I don’t mean he looked moonsad or nothing like that. But body-peaked, you know…His eyes was fierce rheumy…I heard one of the boys – I think English – asking him if he was sound. He said he was sound enough, just he tucken a bad chill. Then English asked him if he was sure we was going on with the plan.
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