Orion returned from St. Louis. He felt that he was needed in Hannibal
and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight;
there was more real return for the family fund. His sister Pamela was
teaching a class in Hannibal at this time. Orion was surprised when his
mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. Any outward display
of affection was new to him.
The family had moved back across the street by this time. With Sam
supporting himself, the earnings of Orion and Pamela provided at least
a semblance of comfort. But Orion was not satisfied. Then, as always,
he had a variety of vague ambitions. Oratory appealed to him, and he
delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music,
supplied chiefly by Pamela. He aspired to the study of law, a recurring
inclination throughout his career. He also thought of the ministry, an
ambition which Sam shared with him for a time. Every mischievous boy has
it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons.
“It was the most earnest ambition I ever had,” Mark Twain once remarked,
thoughtfully. “Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but
because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It
looked like a safe job.”
A periodical ambition of Orion's was to own and conduct a paper in
Hannibal. He felt that in such a position he might become a power in
Western journalism. Once his father had considered buying the Hannibal
Journal to give Orion a chance, and possibly to further his own
political ambitions. Now Orion considered it for himself. The paper was
for sale under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $500 which
would secure ownership. Sam's two years at Ament's were now complete,
and Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal. Henry at eleven
was taken out of school to learn typesetting.
Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and
independence.
“I followed all the advice I received,” he says in his record. “If two
or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the
last.”
He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help:
wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. The
others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He had the
feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that
all must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he wrote
afterward:
I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as
a good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I
begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and
Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form
the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained
with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry's dirty
proofs.
Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too
desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant
that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper
throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But
the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and
Orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He became
still more exacting.
It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to
become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his
natural taste for amusement. He had become more studious; but after the
long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of
fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading
beneficial books. The river was always near at hand--for swimming in the
summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it
came near claiming a heavy tribute. That was one winter's night when
with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. They were about
in the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise
near the shore. They knew what it was. The ice was breaking up, and they
set out for home forthwith. It was moonlight, and they could tell the
ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide cracks
toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close. They were an
hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they came
to a broad space of water. The ice was lifting and falling and crunching
all around them. They waited as long as they dared and decided to leap
from cake to cake. Sam made the crossing without accident, but his
companion slipped in when a few feet from shore. He was a good swimmer
and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing. He was
taken very ill. One disease followed another, ending with scarlet fever
and deafness.
There was also entertainment in the office itself. A country boy named
Jim Wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful
boy. In every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam
felt that it was his turn to play them. With John Briggs to help him,
tortures for Jim Wolfe were invented and applied.
They taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. They took him sniping
at night and left him “holding the bag” in the old traditional fashion
while they slipped off home and went to bed.
But Jim Wolfe's masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook
on his own account. Pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one
night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. Jim
would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and
always dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty Pamela
Clemens. Up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below
and could look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began
just beneath their window. Down at the eaves was the small arbor, green
in summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. They could hear the
candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy
to cool. By and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little
arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly
to the boys up-stairs. About this time there appeared on the roof from
somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel
of charge and recrimination. Jim detested the noise, and perhaps was
gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. He had nothing to
throw at them, but he said:
“For two cents I'd get out there and knock their heads off.”
“You wouldn't dare to do it,” Sam said, purringly.
This was wormwood to Jim. He was really a brave spirit.
“I would too,” he said, “and I will if you say that again.”
“Why, Jim, of course you wouldn't dare to go out there. You might catch
cold.”
“You wait and see,” said Jim Wolfe.
He grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and
crept out on the snowy roof. There was a crust of ice on the snow, but
Jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs
bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze.
Then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow
each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. The cats were on
the corner of the roof above the arbor, and Jim cautiously worked his
way in that direction. The roof was not very steep. He was doing well
enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was
nearly solid ice. He was so intent on the cats that he did not notice
this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing
yielded. A second later Jim's feet had shot out from under him, and he
vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad
arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered
there with their pans of cooling taffy. There were wild shrieks and a
general flight. Neither Jim nor Sam ever knew how he got back to their
room, but Jim was overcome with the enormity of his offense, while Sam
was in an agony of laughter.
“You did it splendidly, Jim,” he drawled, when he could speak. “Nobody
could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of
there? I never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it
that way. And it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. How did
you ever think of it?”
It was a fearful ordeal for a boy like Jim Wolfe, but he stuck to his
place in spite of what he must have suffered. The boys made him one of
them soon after that. His initiation was thought to be complete.
An account of Jim Wolfe and the cats was the first original story
Mark Twain ever told. He told it next day, which was Sunday, to Jimmy
McDaniel, the baker's son, as they sat looking out over the river,
eating gingerbread. His hearer laughed immoderately, and the
story-teller was proud and happy in his success.