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<h2> CHAPTER XLII. </h2>
<p><br/></p>
<p>What to do next?</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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."</p>
<p>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—</p>
<p>What to do next?</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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.</p>
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<p>"It isn't sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business
like."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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."</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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