42. 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.