then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again and
remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of the
right. But I was too ingenious. I mixed it up rather too much; and so
all that description of the attitude, as a key to the humbuggery of the
article, was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered and
comprehended the peculiar and suggestive position of the petrified man’s
hands.
As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my petrified Man
was a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent good
faith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down
the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to
the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had
produced. 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 and
by, when the exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied and
guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction;
and as my gentleman’s field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges I
saw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory,
state after state, and land after land, till he swept the great globe and
culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London
Lancet, my cup was full, and I said I was glad I had done it. I think
that for about eleven months, as nearly as I can remember, Mr.—-‘s
daily mail-bag continued to be swollen by the addition of half a bushel
of 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 did
it for spite, not for fun.
He used to shovel them into his back yard and curse. And every day
during all those months the miners, his constituents (for miners never
quit joking a person when they get started), would call on him and ask if
he could tell them where they could get hold of a paper with the
Petrified 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 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
tumbling concern. And while abusing the Daney, those papers did not
forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver stocks and
invest in, sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring 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 hard murdered his wife
and nine children, and then committed suicide. And I said slyly, at the
bottom, that the sudden madness of which 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