Red Rain by Bruce Murkoff

Author:Bruce Murkoff [Murkoff, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59370-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

An hour later, he was lying in bed thinking about the photograph he’d sent to his father from Los Angeles. He’d had it made just a week before he left to join the army in Stockton, wearing his regulation uniform, tall Jefferson boots and carrying his old Texas musketoon. On the back of the picture he’d written, “Keeping up the family tradition. Yours, Will.”

The war was already a year old when Will joined the California Volunteers at Camp Halleck. He enjoyed his work there, treating soldiers for the usual maladies, from broken bones incurred during fights at local saloons to venereal disease picked up from the Portuguese whores who worked the port alleys along the San Joaquin River. He trained with the men and dined with the officers. In his free time he explored the pine-spotted Sierra foothills, and spent a few days riding through the dead river valleys near Murphys, filling his journals with notes and sketches. And he enjoyed the company of the post’s commander, Col. Patrick Connor, the two of them often talking of the homes they’d left behind in New York. A brash Irishman who’d already served in the Seminole and Mexican wars, Connor invited Will and some of the other officers over for brandy before they left California to establish Camp Douglas in the Utah Territory. As the sun burned out over the distant mountains, they gathered on his porch and talked about their mission.

“Hunting Indians is no more a challenge than hunting deer or elk,” Major McGarry carped when the brandy went to his head. “There’s satisfaction in the kill, but it’s just sport.”

“There’s no sport in killing a man,” Connor said.

“I’m not talking about a man; I’m talking about an Indian,” McGarry bellowed. “It lives by wits, not common sense, and ruts and howls through every phase of the moon. Though it can be as irascible as a wild boar, it’s just as easily tamed by a well-placed bullet. Now, you put me face-to-face with a rebel across a field in Virginia, that’s a fight worth honoring.”

“You’ll honor this one, too, Major,” Connor told him, “because it’s the fight we’ve been given.”

“I’ll honor it and fight like hell,” McGarry allowed, settling back in his chair to wait for the bottle to come his way again.

Connor held the same desire to take his regiment east, into the real war, but he accepted his command on the Mormon frontier with a professional soldier’s stoic resolve. “We’ll go where we’re kicked, gentlemen, and if we can’t win the war on Virginia soil, we’ll damn sure keep California in the Union,” he declared, and the officers raised their glasses to the cause.

Will knew from the start that Edward McGarry was a man to watch out for. He’d made his reputation in Los Angeles, where he owned a dry goods store and served in a local militia called the Mounted Rifles. In the first year of the war, he’d helped round up a dozen Confederate sympathizers who’d tried to sabotage the final mile of telegraph line that was coming down from San Jose.

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