The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain [good summer reads .TXT] 📗

confidence in Barnes and repaying him for the pain he suffered as a result of the newspaper criticisms of his course.

Orion Clemens again. To continue.

The government of the new Territory of Nevada was an interesting menagerie. Governor Nye was an old and seasoned politician from New York⁠—politician, not statesman. He had white hair. He was in fine physical condition. He had a winningly friendly face and deep lustrous brown eyes that could talk as a native language the tongue of every feeling, every passion, every emotion. His eyes could outtalk his tongue, and this is saying a good deal, for he was a very remarkable talker, both in private and on the stump. He was a shrewd man. He generally saw through surfaces and perceived what might be going on inside without being suspected of having an eye on the matter.

When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of leftover standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in the new Territory. I do not take pleasure in exposing this fact, for I liked those people; but what I am saying is true. I wish I could say a kindlier thing about them instead. If I could say they were burglars, or hatrack thieves, or something like that, that wouldn’t be utterly uncomplimentary. I would prefer it, but I can’t say those things. They would not be true. These people were practical jokers, and I will not try to disguise it. In other respects they were plenty good enough people; honest people; reputable and likable. They played practical jokes upon each other with success, and got the admiration and applause and also the envy of the rest of the community. Naturally they were eager to try their arts on big game, and that was what the Governor was. But they were not able to score. They made several efforts, but the Governor defeated these efforts without any trouble and went on smiling his pleasant smile as if nothing had happened. Finally the joker chiefs of Carson City and Virginia City conspired together to see if their combined talent couldn’t win a victory, for the jokers were getting into a very uncomfortable place. The people were laughing at them, instead of at their proposed victim. They banded themselves together to the number of ten and invited the Governor to what was a most extraordinary attention in those days⁠—pickled-oyster stew and champagne⁠—luxuries very seldom seen in that region, and existing rather as fabrics of the imagination than as facts.

The Governor took me with him. He said, disparagingly: “It’s a poor invention. It doesn’t deceive. Their idea is to get me drunk and leave me under the table, and from their standpoint this will be very funny. But they don’t know me. I am familiar with champagne and have no prejudices against it.”

The fate of the joke was not decided until two o’clock in the morning. At that hour the Governor was serene, genial, comfortable, contented, happy, and sober, although he was so full that he couldn’t laugh without shedding champagne tears. Also, at that hour the last joker joined his comrades under the table, drunk to the last perfection. The Governor remarked: “This is a dry place, Sam. Let’s go and get something to drink and go to bed.”

The Governor’s official menagerie had been drawn from the humblest ranks of his constituents at home⁠—harmless good fellows who had helped in his campaigns, and now they had their reward in petty salaries payable in greenbacks that were worth next to nothing. Those boys had a hard time to make both ends meet. Orion’s salary was eighteen hundred dollars a year, and he couldn’t even support his dictionary on it. But the Irishwoman who had come out on the Governor’s staff charged the menagerie only ten dollars a week apiece for board and lodging. Orion and I were of her boarders and lodgers; and so, on these cheap terms the silver I had brought from home held out very well.

At first I roamed about the country seeking silver, but at the end of ’62 or the beginning of ’63 when I came up from Aurora to begin a journalistic life on the Virginia City Enterprise, I was presently sent down to Carson City to report the legislative session. Orion was soon very popular with the members of the legislature, because they found that whereas they couldn’t usually trust each other, nor anybody else, they could trust him. He easily held the belt for honesty in that country, but it didn’t do him any good in a pecuniary way, because he had no talent for either persuading or scaring legislators. But I was differently situated. I was there every day in the legislature to distribute compliment and censure with evenly balanced justice and spread the same over half a page of the Enterprise every morning; consequently I was an influence. I got the legislature to pass a law requiring every corporation doing business in the territory to record its charter in full, without skipping a word, in a record to be kept by the Secretary of the Territory⁠—my brother. All the charters were framed in exactly the same words. For this record service he was authorized to charge forty cents a folio of one hundred words for making the record; five dollars for furnishing a certificate of each record, and so on. Everybody had a toll-road franchise, but no toll road. But the franchise had to be recorded and paid for. Everybody was a mining corporation, and had to have himself recorded and pay for it. Very well, we prospered. The record service paid an average of one thousand dollars a month, in gold.

Governor Nye was often absent from