Roughing It, Part 5. - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
ROUGHING IT
by Mark Twain
1880
Part 5.
CHAPTER XLI.
Captain Nye was very ill indeed, with spasmodic rheumatism. But the old
gentleman was himself--which is to say, he was kind-hearted and agreeable
when comfortable, but a singularly violent wild-cat when things did not
go well. He would be smiling along pleasantly enough, when a sudden
spasm of his disease would take him and he would go out of his smile into
a perfect fury. He would groan and wail and howl with the anguish, and
fill up the odd chinks with the most elaborate profanity that strong
convictions and a fine fancy could contrive. With fair opportunity he
could swear very well and handle his adjectives with considerable
judgment; but when the spasm was on him it was painful to listen to him,
he was so awkward. However, I had seen him nurse a sick man himself and
put up patiently with the inconveniences of the situation, and
consequently I was willing that he should have full license now that his
own turn had come. He could not disturb me, with all his raving and
ranting, for my mind had work on hand, and it labored on diligently,
night and day, whether my hands were idle or employed. I was altering
and amending the plans for my house, and thinking over the propriety of
having the billard-room in the attic, instead of on the same floor with
the dining-room; also, I was trying to decide between green and blue for
the upholstery of the drawing-room, for, although my preference was blue
I feared it was a color that would be too easily damaged by dust and
sunlight; likewise while I was content to put the coachman in a modest
livery, I was uncertain about a footman--I needed one, and was even
resolved to have one, but wished he could properly appear and perform his
functions out of livery, for I somewhat dreaded so much show; and yet,
inasmuch as my late grandfather had had a coachman and such things, but
no liveries, I felt rather drawn to beat him;--or beat his ghost, at any
rate; I was also systematizing the European trip, and managed to get it
all laid out, as to route and length of time to be devoted to it
--everything, with one exception--namely, whether to cross the desert from
Cairo to Jerusalem per camel, or go by sea to Beirut, and thence down
through the country per caravan. Meantime I was writing to the friends
at home every day, instructing them concerning all my plans and
intentions, and directing them to look up a handsome homestead for my
mother and agree upon a price for it against my coming, and also
directing them to sell my share of the Tennessee land and tender the
proceeds to the widows' and orphans' fund of the typographical union of
which I had long been a member in good standing. [This Tennessee land
had been in the possession of the family many years, and promised to
confer high fortune upon us some day; it still promises it, but in a less
violent way.]
When I had been nursing the Captain nine days he was somewhat better,
but very feeble. During the afternoon we lifted him into a chair and
gave him an alcoholic vapor bath, and then set about putting him on the
bed again. We had to be exceedingly careful, for the least jar produced
pain. Gardiner had his shoulders and I his legs; in an unfortunate
moment I stumbled and the patient fell heavily on the bed in an agony of
torture. I never heard a man swear so in my life. He raved like a
maniac, and tried to snatch a revolver from the table--but I got it.
He ordered me out of the house, and swore a world of oaths that he would
kill me wherever he caught me when he got on his feet again. It was
simply a passing fury, and meant nothing. I knew he would forget it in
an hour, and maybe be sorry for it, too; but it angered me a little, at
the moment. So much so, indeed, that I determined to go back to
Esmeralda. I thought he was able to get along alone, now, since he was
on the war path. I took supper, and as soon as the moon rose, began my
nine-mile journey, on foot.
Even millionaires needed no horses, in those days, for a mere nine-mile
jaunt without baggage.
As I "raised the hill" overlooking the town, it lacked fifteen minutes of
twelve. I glanced at the hill over beyond the canyon, and in the bright
moonlight saw what appeared to be about half the population of the
village massed on and around the Wide West croppings. My heart gave an
exulting bound, and I said to myself, "They have made a new strike
to-night--and struck it richer than ever, no doubt." I started over
there, but gave it up. I said the "strick" would keep, and I had climbed
hill enough for one night. I went on down through the town, and as I was
passing a little German bakery, a woman ran out and begged me to come in
and help her. She said her husband had a fit. I went in, and judged she
was right--he appeared to have a hundred of them, compressed into one.
Two Germans were there, trying to hold him, and not making much of a
success of it. I ran up the street half a block or so and routed out a
sleeping doctor, brought him down half dressed, and we four wrestled with
the maniac, and doctored, drenched and bled him, for more than an hour,
and the poor German woman did the crying. He grew quiet, now, and the
doctor and I withdrew and left him to his friends.
It was a little after one o'clock. As I entered the cabin door, tired
but jolly, the dingy light of a tallow candle revealed Higbie, sitting by
the pine table gazing stupidly at my note, which he held in his fingers,
and looking pale, old, and haggard. I halted, and looked at him. He
looked at me, stolidly. I said:
"Higbie, what--what is it?"
"We're ruined--we didn't do the work--THE BLIND LEAD'S RELOCATED!"
It was enough. I sat down sick, grieved--broken-hearted, indeed. A
minute before, I was rich and brimful of vanity; I was a pauper now, and
very meek. We sat still an hour, busy with thought, busy with vain and
useless self-upbraidings, busy with "Why didn't I do this, and why didn't
I do that," but neither spoke a word. Then we dropped into mutual
explanations, and the mystery was cleared away. It came out that Higbie
had depended on me, as I had on him, and as both of us had on the
foreman. The folly of it! It was the first time that ever staid and
steadfast Higbie had left an important matter to chance or failed to be
true to his full share of a responsibility.
But he had never seen my note till this moment, and this moment was the
first time he had been in the cabin since the day he had seen me last.
He, also, had left a note for me, on that same fatal afternoon--had
ridden up on horseback, and looked through the window, and being in a
hurry and not seeing me, had tossed the note into the cabin through a
broken pane. Here it was, on the floor, where it had remained
undisturbed for nine days:
"Don't fail to do the work before the ten days expire. W.
has passed through and given me notice. I am to join him at
Mono Lake, and we shall go on from there to-night. He says
he will find it this time, sure. CAL."
"W." meant Whiteman, of course. That thrice accursed "cement!"
That was the way of it. An old miner, like Higbie, could no more
withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this
"cement" foolishness, than he could refrain from eating when he was
famishing. Higbie had been dreaming about the marvelous cement for
months; and now, against his better judgment, he had gone off and "taken
the chances" on my keeping secure a mine worth a million undiscovered
cement veins. They had not been followed this time. His riding out of
town in broad daylight was such a common-place thing to do that it had
not attracted any attention. He said they prosecuted their search in the
fastnesses of the mountains during nine days, without success; they could
not find the cement. Then a ghastly fear came over him that something
might have happened to prevent the doing of the necessary work to hold
the blind lead (though indeed he thought such a thing hardly possible),
and forthwith he started home with all speed. He would have reached
Esmeralda in time, but his horse broke down and he had to walk a great
part of the distance. And so it happened that as he came into Esmeralda
by one road, I entered it by another. His was the superior energy,
however, for he went straight to the Wide West, instead of turning aside
as I had done--and he arrived there about five or ten minutes too late!
The "notice" was already up, the "relocation" of our mine completed
beyond recall, and the crowd rapidly dispersing. He learned some facts
before he left the ground. The foreman had not been seen about the
streets since the night we had located the mine--a telegram had called
him to California on a matter of life and death, it was said. At any
rate he had done no work and the watchful eyes of the community were
taking note of the fact. At midnight of this woful tenth day, the ledge
would be "relocatable," and by eleven o'clock the hill was black with men
prepared to do the relocating. That was the crowd I had seen when I
fancied a new "strike" had been made--idiot that I was.
[We three had the same right to relocate the lead that other people had,
provided we were quick enough.] As midnight was announced, fourteen men,
duly armed and ready to back their proceedings, put up their "notice" and
proclaimed their ownership of the blind lead, under the new name of the
"Johnson." But A. D. Allen our partner (the foreman) put in a sudden
appearance about that time, with a cocked revolver in his hand, and said
his name must be added to the list, or he would "thin out the Johnson
company some." He was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to
be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was effected. They
put in his name for a hundred feet, reserving to themselves the customary
two hundred feet each. Such was the history of the night's events, as
Higbie gathered from a friend on the way home.
Higbie and I cleared out on a new mining excitement the next morning,
glad to get away from the scene of our sufferings, and after a month or
two of hardship and disappointment, returned to Esmeralda once more.
Then we learned that the Wide West and the Johnson companies had
consolidated; that the stock, thus united, comprised five thousand feet,
or shares; that the foreman, apprehending tiresome litigation, and
considering such a huge concern unwieldy, had sold his hundred feet for
ninety thousand dollars in gold and gone home to the States to enjoy it.
If the stock was worth such a gallant figure, with five thousand shares
in the corporation, it makes me dizzy to think what it would have been
worth with only our original six hundred in it. It was the difference
between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it. We
would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade
one little day on our property and so secured our ownership!
It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses,
and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is
easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history. I can always have
it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million
dollars, once, for ten days.
A year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire
partner, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in
California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving,
he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred
dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way.
How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin
planning European trips and brown stone houses on Russian Hill!
CHAPTER XLII.
What to do next?
It was a momentous question. I had gone out into the world to shift for
myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had endorsed for friends;
and although he left us a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginian
stock and its national distinction, I presently found that I could not
live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down with). I had
gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled anybody
with my successes; still the list was before me, and the amplest liberty
in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to work--which I did not,
after being so wealthy. I had once been a grocery clerk, for one day,
but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I was relieved from
further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he
could have my custom. I had studied law an entire week, and then given
it up because it was so prosy and tiresome. I had engaged briefly in the
study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix the bellows
so that it would blow itself, that the master turned me adrift in
disgrace, and told me I would come to no good. I had been a bookseller's
clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read
with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to
put a limit to it. I had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but
my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps
than soda water. So I had to go. I had made of myself a tolerable
printer, under the impression that I would be another Franklin some day,
but somehow had missed the connection thus far. There was no berth open
in the Esmeralda Union, and besides I had always been such a slow
compositor that I looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices
of two years' standing; and when I took a "take," foremen were in the
habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time during the year."
I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no means
ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty
dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did long to stand behind a
wheel again and never roam any more--but I had been making such an ass of
myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my
European excursion that I did what many and many a poor disappointed
miner had done before; said "It is all over with me now, and I will never
go back home to be pitied--and snubbed." I had been a private secretary,
a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less than
nothing in each, and now--
What to do next?
I yielded to Higbie's appeals and consented to try the mining once more.
We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little
rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep. Higbie
descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened
up a deal of rock and dirt and then I went down with a long-handled
shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out.
You must brace the shovel forward with the side of your knee till it is
full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left
shoulder. I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of the
shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck.
I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home. I inwardly
resolved that I would starve before I would make a target of myself and
shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled shovel.
I sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid misery--so to
speak. Now in pleasanter days I had amused myself with writing letters
to the chief paper of the Territory, the Virginia Daily Territorial
Enterprise, and had always been surprised when they appeared in print.
My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me
that they might have found something better to fill up with than my
literature. I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from
the hill side, and finally I opened it. Eureka! [I never did know what
Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when
no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to me of
Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city editor of
the Enterprise.
I would have challenged the publisher in the "blind lead" days--I wanted
to fall down and worship him, now. Twenty-Five Dollars a week--it looked
like bloated luxury--a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money.
But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent
unfitness for the position--and straightway, on top of this, my long
array of failures rose up before me. Yet if I refused this place I must
presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing
necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a
humiliation since he was thirteen years old. Not much to be proud of,
since it is so common--but then it was all I had to be proud of. So I
was scared into being a city editor. I would have declined, otherwise.
Necessity is the mother of "taking chances." I do not doubt that if, at
that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the
original Hebrew, I would have accepted--albeit with diffidence and some
misgivings--and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.
I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation. I was a rusty
looking city editor, I am free to confess--coatless, slouch hat, blue
woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to
the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt. But I
secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver.
I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do
so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in
order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a
subject of remark. But the other editors, and all the printers, carried
revolvers. I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will
call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some
instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town
and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the
information gained, and write them out for publication. And he added:
"Never say 'We learn' so-and-so, or 'It is reported,' or 'It is rumored,'
or 'We understand' so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute
facts, and then speak out and say 'It is so-and-so.' Otherwise, people
will not put confidence in your news. Unassailable certainly is the
thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation."
It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a
reporter commencing his article with "We understand," I gather a
suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he
ought to have done. I moralize well, but I did not always practise well
when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too
often when there was a dearth of news. I can never forget my first day's
experience as a reporter. I wandered about town questioning everybody,
boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything. At the end
of five hours my notebook was still barren. I spoke to Mr. Goodman. He
said:
"Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when
there were no fires or inquests. Are there no hay wagons in from the
Truckee? If there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all
that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know.
"It isn't sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business
like."
I canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay truck dragging
in from the country. But I made affluent use of it. I multiplied it by
sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made
sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay
as Virginia City had never seen in the world before.
This was encouraging. Two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and I was
getting along. Presently, when things began to look dismal again, a
desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more. I never
was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life. I said to the
murderer:
"Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day
which I can never forget. If whole years of gratitude can be to you any
slight compensation, they shall be yours. I was in trouble and you have
relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear. Count me
your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor."
If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of itching
desire to do it. I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to
details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret--namely,
that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work
him up too.
Next I discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the plaza and
found that they had lately come through the hostile Indian country and
had fared rather roughly. I made the best of the item that the
circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within
rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I could
add particulars that would make the article much more interesting.
However, I found one wagon that was going on to California, and made some
judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short
and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on
and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, I got ahead of the
other papers, for I took down his list of names and added his party to
the killed and wounded. Having more scope here, I put this wagon through
an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.
My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt
that I had found my legitimate occupation at last. I reasoned within
myself that news, and stirring news, too, was what a paper needed, and I
felt that I was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it.
Mr. Goodman said that I was as good a reporter as Dan. I desired no
higher commendation. With encouragement like that, I felt that I could
take my pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and
the interests of the paper demanded it.
CHAPTER XLIII.
However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and learned the
run of the sources of information I ceased to require the aid of fancy to
any large extent, and became able to fill my columns without diverging
noticeably from the domain of fact.
I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we
swapped "regulars" with each other and thus economized work. "Regulars"
are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, "clean-ups"
at the quartz mills, and inquests. Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we
had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set
down among the "regulars." We had lively papers in those days. My great
competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union. He was an
excellent reporter. Once in three or four months he would get a little
intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker
although always ready to tamper a little with the enemy. He had the
advantage of me in one thing; he could get the monthly public school
report and I could not, because the principal hated the Enterprise.
One snowy night when the report was due, I started out sadly wondering
how I was going to get it. Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted
street I stumbled on Boggs and asked him where he was going.
"After the school report."
"I'll go along with you."
"No, sir. I'll excuse you."
"Just as you say."
A saloon-keeper's boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and
Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully. He gazed fondly after the boy
and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs. I said:
"I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't,
I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get them to let me
have a proof of it after they have set it up, though I don't begin to
suppose they will. Good night."
"Hold on a minute. I don't mind getting the report and sitting around
with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down
to the principal's with me."
"Now you talk like a rational being. Come along."
We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and
returned to our office. It was a short document and soon copied.
Meantime Boggs helped himself to the punch. I gave the manuscript back
to him and we started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots
near by. We got the particulars with little loss of time, for it was
only an inferior sort of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the
public, and then we separated. Away at three o'clock in the morning,
when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual
--for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on
the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion--the proprietor of the
Union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of
Boggs or the school report. We stated the case, and all turned out to
help hunt for the delinquent. We found him standing on a table in a
saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the
other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of
squandering the public moneys on education "when hundreds and hundreds of
honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey." [Riotous
applause.] He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for
hours. We dragged him away and put him to bed.