Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/616

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Two weeks later I went out to Linkville to buy some groceries. This place was fifteen miles from where I had settled, and the nearest trading post or settlement to me, telling my two hired men that I would be at home the next day or the day after at the outside.

The store was kept by a man named Nurse. He told me he had a band of mares that he would sell cheap, and insisted on my staying over night with him, saying that he would have them brought in the day following, which I agreed to do, and the next morning he started his men out to look for the mares. They did not get them gathered up until the afternoon, and Mr. Nurse and I were in the corral looking at them, when a man rode up at full speed, his horse foaming all over, and said in a very excited tone that the Modoc Indians had gone on the war-path and had murdered most all the settlers on Lost River and Tule Lake, the latter being only twenty miles south from Linkville. The courier that brought the news to Linkville said that the soldiers had come down to Tule Lake and fired on Captain Jack without any warning whatever, which we learned later to be all too true.