would not be here, but impulse had swept all before it when the Modoc men had thrust their ponies forward to block the way. Suddenly, after weeks of waiting, after sitting half-frozen for days in a shambling line of suppliants, he was taken by such a lust to see this man that nothing -- least of all good sense -- could stop him. Pushed by all his promises and intentions, he had forced his way past everyone and had lurched and sprawled into this elusive presence, at the dark heart of this dark house.
For one of the few times in Meacham’s life, words failed him. There was nothing he could do but wait. He held his hand out again to the chief and tried to keep it steady, afraid to think what was in the dark behind him, what was coming from the future toward him. Finally, when it was clear that Jack would not reach his own hand out to him, Meacham fished the pouch of tobacco from the parfleche, opened it. He took his pipe from his pocket, wiped it clean with his kerchief, and filled it. Pulling a burning twig from the fire, he sucked the flame into the pipe and let the smoke rise in a puff into the dark air. Through it he could see the hardened eyes of Jack’s men, watching. He wiped the pipe again carefully then handed it toward Jack, nodding, then he looked encouragingly toward the young Indian who stood next to him. Meacham noticed for the first time the deforming scar that angled over the flesh of the fellow’s right cheek from his eye nearly to the corner of his mouth. He looked, too, toward the man, evidently a bit older than the chief, with thicker, less refined, features, who sat on the fire’s other side. Was it from him the guttural sounds came? Perhaps. Meacham was not even sure he heard them. Soon they stopped, but still there was no movement. Was this John Schonchin, the next in command, he wondered. And by him, with the buffalo-mane head of hair, this would be Euchoaks -- the shaman, the kiuks -- Curley-Headed Doctor. Well named! It was as if Meacham were not there, his pipe extended, the others caught in some tableau at a wax museum. These were the players he had heard about, all right. He drew the pipe back again, tamping at the tobacco in its bowl and thinking how to breach the impenetrable void Jack kept between them. Even the women had grown quiet.
“Will we speak?” he asked at last. The scarfaced man passed on the question, but there was no answer. Well, then, it was to be silence. Meacham knocked the tobacco out of his pipe and into the fire. For some moments they stood there, frozen, until Jack relented. He gestured to a blanket folded near the fire and himself sank to the mat floor. Meacham sat where Jack had pointed, between this chief and the one who had spoken for him, across from the other men whose eyes never seemed to engage his. Still, he knew each thing about him was scrutinized. He set the now-cold pipe on the mat, picked up the tobacco pouch again and proffered it, whole, to Jack. It was as if his hand were empty, and when there was no reaction from anyone sitting there, he dropped it to his side.
At last, the small fire flickered down to embers, the scarred young man on Jack’s right, half in English, half in trade-jargon, asked sternly:
“What you want? What for you come? Keintpoos not send for you! Keintpoos got no truck with you! He don’t want to talk! He in his illahee -- his country! What for you come here! You not Keintpoos’ tyee! He don’t know you! You stranger!”
Relieved at last to use the words he had been rehearsing for days, Meacham began: “The Big Father in Washington, the new one, he cares for his children, the Modocs. He told me. He sent me all the way here to tell Jack I’m the new chief for all Oregon. He said, ‘Go see my boys, all the Indians. Care for them.’ He said to say that he has presents for Jack and all you Modocs. I bring his tobacco for you.”
“How come you bring all them people?”
“You know them. They’re here to say I speak true.”
He waited while Jack received the message, saw how his eyes narrowed, as if he were trying now to see inside Meacham, know his words for himself. Meacham wasn’t sure how to interpret the flicker of recognition when he spoke, couldn’t be sure he had even seen it. But then Jack nodded at the scar-faced man’s translation.
“No soldiers,” Meacham said.
Good. Jack nodded briefly at that.
“Knapp. The new agent….”
At the translator’s frown, Meacham figured he had better get it over with, and he rushed on:
“… who knows how to make things go right. And the Modoc women of the Klamaths, to show you we come in peace. George Nurse and Gus Horn from up at Linkville. And no brass buttons,” he repeated.
Meacham tried again to read Keintpoos as he received the words. All had now been disclosed to him. He would guess from the list that Meacham was there with more than tobacco and a greeting. He would figure out that this new man came bearing the same old intentions as the others before him. He came to return him to the reservation.
The angry burst from the man next to Jack and the others said that now he had proved it. It was just as they thought, just as they feared, just what they expected from this Superintendent Meacham.
As Jack gestured to a woman to build up the fire, Meacham raced to speak, trying to be heard above the others, forestalling with words what they were obviously urging.
“Tell him I came here, into this house, alone -- to show I think Captain Jack can be my friend. No man needs to be afraid of a friend.” He wondered whether the fragile words coming out of his mouth could hold these Bloody Point heroes, wondered whether Jack could hear the dread that clutched his insides as the men called out their opinions. “Tell him -- as friend -- I trust him.”
As if to make his point, Meacham forced himself to lean back on his elbow, his feet crossed before him near the fire, and waited.
Keintpoos listened to the shouts of the men around him, the remarks called out by the group of women until, as if driving insistent bees away from his head, he silenced them and turned to face Meacham full on.
He looked to Meacham to be a little under six feet. A stocky man, not long in his prime. In spite of the patched-together clothing, there was an athletic grace about him -- in his movements, the compact pose he assumed. He folded his arms and, looking into the fire, he began. The young man with the scarred cheek translated:
“You are lucky I am who I am. You are lucky I have heart that says to make my own enemies. You are lucky some good Boston tyees are friends to me. So I must think you might be like them. Not like all the rest. If all that were not true, I would kill you, like these men here tell me. Except that it would soil my house. You are lucky for that, too.”
He barked out an order in Modoc to the guard at the roof-hole then turned his words again toward Meacham. His voice was heavy with resentment.
“Keintpoos tell you there nothing he got to say you want to hear,” the translator said. “You don’t know us; you come to tell us anyway. Some good Bostons -- two or three -- in Yreka, that is all Jack finds in all those who came here. All others lie. They take his people’s money in the stores in Yreka, and then he sees what they sell them. Bad stuff. Stuff broke. Stuff we don’t need. And they buy our stuff, the skins we trap, the wood we cut, and don’t pay us.
“He says he’s got other things, too, to tell you, in case you don’t know them. Worse. They take us to a reservation, have our enemies to laugh. And there they let the Klamaths do things to us, same like the Bostons in Yreka. The Bostons, they teach the Klamaths that. The Bostons teach ways we should not be. They take what is not theirs and give nothing in return but a little dirt -- and lies.”
Meacham heard the sharp-edged words without argument. He was sure the miners and shopkeepers at Yreka had shown the Modocs a new way of life. He had seen the result of that kind of teaching up and down the territory. He
