Sketches New and Old, Part 5. Read online

  I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.----, the new coroner andjustice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch himup a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combinepleasure with business. So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail,all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly ahundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where---- lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been toexamine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature withinfifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians; some crippledgrasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to getaway); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been ina state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, witha seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated thatas soon as Mr.----heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule,and posted off, with noble reverence for official duty, on that awfulfive days' journey, through alkali, sage brush, peril of body, andimminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had been deadand turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!And then, my hand being "in," so to speak, I went on, with the sameunflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict thatdeceased came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved meto higher flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with thatcharity so characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were aboutto give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for agesa limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stoneagainst which he was sitting, and this stuff had run under him andcemented him fast to the "bed-rock"; that the jury (they were allsilver-miners) canvassed the difficulty a moment, and then got out theirpowder and fuse, and proceeded to drill a hole under him, in order toblast him from his position, when Mr.----, "with that delicacy socharacteristic of him, forbade them, observing that it would be littleless than sacrilege to do such a thing."

  From beginning to end the "Petrified Man" squib was a string of roaringabsurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense of truth thateven imposed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger ofbelieving in my own fraud. But I really had no desire to deceiveanybody, and no expectation of doing it. I depended on the way thepetrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle.Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make itobscure--and I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and thensay his right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about hisother foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right handwere spread apart; then talk about the back of his head a little, andreturn and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger;then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again andremark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of theright. But I was too ingenious. I mixed it up rather too much; and soall that description of the attitude, as a key to the humbuggery of thearticle, was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered andcomprehended the peculiar and suggestive position of the petrified man'shands.

  As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my petrified Manwas a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent goodfaith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull downthe wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted tothe grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada hadproduced. I was so disappointed at the curious miscarriage of my scheme,that at first I was angry, and did not like to think about it; but by andby, when the exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied andguilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction;and as my gentleman's field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges Isaw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory,state after state, and land after land, till he swept the great globe andculminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august LondonLancet, my cup was full, and I said I was glad I had done it. I thinkthat for about eleven months, as nearly as I can remember, Mr.----'sdaily mail-bag continued to be swollen by the addition of half a bushelof newspapers hailing from many climes with the Petrified Man in them,marked around with a prominent belt of ink. I sent them to him. I didit for spite, not for fun.

  He used to shovel them into his back yard and curse. And every dayduring all those months the miners, his constituents (for miners neverquit joking a person when they get started), would call on him and ask ifhe could tell them where they could get hold of a paper with thePetrified Man in it. He could have accommodated a continent with them.I hated-----in those days, and these things pacified me and pleased me.I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.

  MY BLOODY MASSACRE

  The other burlesque I have referred to was my fine satire upon thefinancial expedients of "cooking dividends," a thing which becameshamefully frequent on the Pacific coast for a while. Once more, in myself-complacent simplicity I felt that the time had arrived for me torise up and be a reformer. I put this reformatory satire, in the shapeof a fearful "Massacre at Empire City." The San Francisco papers weremaking a great outcry about the iniquity of the Daney Silver-MiningCompany, whose directors had declared a "cooked" or false dividend, forthe purpose of increasing the value of their stock, so that they couldsell out at a comfortable figure, and then scramble from under thetumbling concern. And while abusing the Daney, those papers did notforget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver stocks andinvest in, sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring ValleyWater Company, etc. But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold theSpring Valley cooked a dividend too! And so, under the insidious mask ofan invented "bloody massacre," I stole upon the public unawares with myscathing satire upon the dividend cooking system. In about half a columnof imaginary human carnage I told how a citizen hard murdered his wifeand nine children, and then committed suicide. And I said slyly, at thebottom, that the sudden madness of which this melancholy massacre was theresult had been brought about by his having allowed himself to bepersuaded by the California papers to sell his sound and lucrative Nevadasilver stocks, and buy into Spring Valley just in time to get cookedalong with that company's fancy dividend, and sink every cent he had inthe world.

  Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived. But Imade the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interestingthat the public devoured them greedily, and wholly overlooked thefollowing distinctly stated facts, to wit: The murderer was perfectlywell known to every creature in the land as a bachelor, and consequentlyhe could not murder his wife and nine children; he murdered them "in hissplendid dressed-stone mansion just in the edge of the great pine forestbetween Empire City and Dutch Nick's," when even the very pickled oystersthat came on our tables knew that there was not a "dressed-stone mansion"in all Nevada Territory; also that, so far from there being a "great pineforest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's," there wasn't a solitarytree within fifteen miles of either place; and, finally, it was patentand notorious that Empire City and Dutch Nick's were one and the sameplace, and contained only six houses anyhow, and consequently there couldbe no forest between them; and on top of all these absurdities I statedthat this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself thatthe reader ought to have seen would kill an elephant in the twinkling ofan eye, jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife'sreeking scalp in the air, and thus performing entered Carson City withtremendous eclat, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envyand admiration of all beholders.

  Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that littlesatire created. It was the talk of the town, it was the talk of theterritory. Most of the citizens dropped gently into it at breakfast, andthey never finished their meal. There was something about those minutelyfaithful details that was a sufficing substitute for food. Few peoplethat were able to read took food that morning. Dan and I (Dan was myreportorial
associate) took our seats on either side of our customarytable in the "Eagle Restaurant," and, as I unfolded the shred they usedto call a napkin in that establishment, I saw at the next table twostalwart innocents with that sort of vegetable dandruff sprinkled abouttheir clothing which was the sign and evidence that they were in from theTruckee with a load of hay. The one facing me had the morning paperfolded to a long, narrow strip, and I knew, without any telling, thatthat strip represented the column that contained my pleasant financialsatire. From the way he was excitedly mumbling, I saw that the heedlessson of a hay-mow was skipping with all his might, in order to get to thebloody details as quickly as possible; and so he was missing theguide-boards I had set up to warn him that the whole thing was a fraud.Presently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder totake in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the facelit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement. Then hebroke into a disjointed checking off of the particulars--his potatocooling in mid-air meantime, and his mouth making a reach for itoccasionally; but always bringing up suddenly against a new and stillmore direful performance of my hero. At last he looked his stunned andrigid comrade impressively in the face, and said, with an expression ofconcentrated awe:

  "Jim, he b'iled his baby, and he took the old 'oman's skelp. Cuss'd if Iwant any breakfast!"

  And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his frienddeparted from the restaurant empty but satisfied.

  He never got down to where the satire part of it began. Nobody ever did.They found the thrilling particulars sufficient. To drop in with a poorlittle moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre was likefollowing the expiring sun with a candle and hope to attract the world'sattention to it.

  The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuineoccurrence never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was byall those telltale absurdities and impossibilities concerning the "greatpine forest," the "dressed-stone mansion," etc. But I found out then,and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatorysurroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion tosuppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; weskip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars andbe happy.