Modocs had planned to finish the work of spoliation on that day. Captain Jack, with eighteen warriors, was to operate on the west side of Lost river to the stone ford, cross there, and join Scarface. After they had killed all the men who were out looking for the dead, and burned all the houses, they would return to Crawley's the same night, and attack Jackson's camp. Charged with these particulars, Jim returned to the stable, which had been hurriedly converted into a fort, with port-holes bristling with guns.
Scarface waited some time for the return of his supposed ally, who not coming, he cautiously advanced, and seeing the preparations made to receive him knew he had been outwitted. Fearing to make a charge from that side, he took a circuit and when out of rifle range started at a brisk gait to swoop down upon the stable from the rear. Again Jim Sconchin filled the breach of danger, darting across the open space between the stable and a hayrick, and firing the hay. It flamed up, and the attacking party retired to the shelter of the sage-brush, half a mile off.
In the meantime the party of white men under Ivan Applegate were at no great distance away, and saw much that was transpiring without understanding it. Mistaking his brother's party of Indians for the enemy, and having witnessed the pursuit of Fisck by Scarface and the subsequent burning of the hayrick, Mr Applegate supposed that the greater part of Jack's force was at the Brotherton place, and signaling his men to come together, they hastily retreated to Crawley's to inform the commander of the military forces of the whereabouts of the enemy, and also that Fisck and Monroe were killed, as he believed they were, and as they would have been but for his brother.
The guns that were fired as signals by Ivan Applegate were equally misinterpreted by those in the stable, who feared that Captain Jack had already reached that side of the river, and was attacking the other party. In this supposed imminent peril, a Klamath
