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MY BLOODY MASSACRE.
THE other burlesque I have referred to was my fine
satire upon the financial expedients of “cooking
dividends,” a thing which became shamefully frequent
on the Pacific coast for a while. Once more, in my
self-complacent simplicity, I felt that the time had arrived
for me to rise up and be a reformer. I put this reformatory
satire in the shape of a fearful “Massacre at Empire City.”
The San Francisco papers were making a great outcry
about the iniquity of the Daney Silver-Mining Company,
whose directors had declared a “cooked” or false dividend,
for the purpose of increasing the value of their stock, so
that they could sell out at a comfortable figure, and then
scramble from under the tambling concern. And while abusing the Daney,
those papers did not forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver
Valley Water Company, etc. But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold
the Spring Valley cooked a dividend too! And so, under the insidious mask
of an invented “bloody massacre,” I stole upon the public unawares with my
scathing satire upon the dividend-cooking system. In about half a column of
imaginary human carnage I told how a citizen had murdered his wife and nine
children, and then committed suicide. And I said slyly, at the bottom, that the
sudden madness of which the this melancholy massacre was the result, had been
brought about by his having allowed himself to be persuaded by the
California papers to sell his sound and lucrative Nevada silver stocks, and buy
into Spring Valley just in time to get cooked along with that company's fancy
dividend, and sink every cent he had in the world.
Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived. But I made
the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interesting that the public
devoured them greedily, and wholly overlooked the following distinctly-stated
facts, to wit:—The murderer was perfectly well known to every creature in the
land as a bachelor, and consequently he could not murder his wife and nine
children; he murdered them “in his splendid dressed-stone mansion just in the
edge of the great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's,” when
even the very pickled oysters that 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 pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's,” there
wasn't a solitary tree within fifteen miles of either place; and, finally, it was
patent and notorious that Empire City and Dutch Nick's were one and the
same place, and contained only six houses anyhow, and consequently there
could be no forest between them; and on top of all these absurdities I stated
that this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that the
reader ought to have seen would kill an elephant in the twinkling of an eye,
jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife's reeking scalp in the
air, and thus performing entered Carson City with tremendous éclat, and dropped
dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and admiration of all beholders.
Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire
the citizens dropped gently into it at breakfast, and they never finished their
meal. There was something about those minutely faithful details that was a
sufficing substitute for food. Few people that were able to read took food that
morning. Dan and I (Dan was my reportorial associate) took our seats on
either side of our customary table in the “Eagle Restaurant,” and, as I unfolded
the shred they used to call a napkin in that establishment, I saw at the next
table two stalwart innocents with that sort of vegetable dandruff sprinkled
about their clothing which was the
sign and evidence that they were in
from the Truckee with a load of hay.
The one facing me had the morning
paper folded to a long narrow strip,
and I knew, without any telling,
that that strip represented the column
that contained my pleasant
financial satire. From the way he
was excitedly mumbling, I saw
that the heedless son of a hay-mow
was skipping with all his might, in
order to get to the bloody details as
quickly as possible; and so he was
missing the guide-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 to take in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the
face lit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement. Then he
broke into a disjointed checking off of the particulars—his potato cooling in
mid-air meantime, and his mouth making a reach for it occasionally, but always
bringing up suddenly against a new and still more direful performance of my
hero. At last he looked his stunned and rigid comrade impressively in the face,
and said, with an expression of concentrated awe—
“Jim, he b'iled his baby, and he took the old 'oman's skelp. Cuss'd if I want
any breakfast!”
And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend
departed 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 poor little
moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre, was to follow the expiring
sun with a candle, and hope to attract the world's attention to it.
The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine occurrence
never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by all those tell-tale
absurdities and impossibilities concerning the “great pine forest,” the “dressed-stone
mansion,” etc. But I found out then, and never have forgotton since, that
we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvellously exciting things
when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying
to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling
particulars and be happy.
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