Meagher felt there had to be a coda of grand consequence. He had lived through the genocidal horror of the famine, said goodbye to friends swept out in the migration of two million Irish. He was bound to the penal colony of Australia, had become a free man in the most clamorous of free nations, fought and nearly died trying to hold this new nation together and now was looking for a home under the big sky of Montana. He had known the Liberator of the Old World, Daniel O’Connell, and the Great Emancipator of the New World, Abraham Lincoln. He had lived a dozen lives in his two score and
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