While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise, he was in the habit of
reserving all his "sketches" for the San Francisco newspapers, the
'Golden Era' and the 'Morning Call'. He now turns his steps to that
storied city of "Frisco," and was not long in extending his fame on that
coast. He was incorrigibly lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the
Call, soon discovered; and Kipling was told when he was in San Francisco
that Mark was in the habit of coiling himself into a heap and meditating
until the last minute, when he would produce copy having no relationship
to the subject of his assignment--"which made the editor swear horribly,
and the readers of 'The Call' ask for more." His love for practical
joking during the California days brought him unpopularity; and one
reads in a San Francisco paper of the early days: "There have been
moments in the lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of
California and Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members
of a vigilance committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or
arson, it is to be feared his shrift would have been short. What a
dramatic picture the idea conjures up, to be sure! Mark, before these
honest men, infuriated by his practical jokes, trying to show them what
an innocent creature he was when it came to mules, or how the only
policy of fire insurance he held had lapsed, how void of guile he was in
any direction, and all with that inimitable drawl, that perplexed
countenance and peculiar scraping of the left foot, like a boy speaking
his first piece at school." If he just escaped disaster, he likewise
just escaped millions; on one occasion, for the space of a few moments,
he owned the famous Comstock Lode, which was, though he never suspected
it, worth millions. His trunkful of securities, which were eminently
saleable at one time, proved to be of fictitious value when "the bottom
dropped out" of the Nevada boom; and that silver mine, which he was
commissioned to sell in New York, was finally sold for three million