But next morning a dog began to howl. Gillis woke this time, to find his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement.
“Came here, Steve,” he said. “Come here and kill him. I’m so chilled through I can’t get a bead on him.”
“Sam,” said Steve, “don’t shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easily kill him at that range with your profanity.”
Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain then let go such a scorching, singeing blast that the brute’s owner sold him next day for a Mexican hairless dog.
We gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month. A home letter of September 25, 1864, says:
We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people. We are the only lodgers-in a well-to-do private family . . . . But I need change and must move again.
This was the Minna Street place—the place of the dog. In the same letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the Call, by which he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he says further that he has closed with the Californian for weekly articles at twelve dollars each.
XLVII
BOHEMIAN DAYS
Mark Twain’s position on the ‘Call’ was uncongenial from the start. San Francisco was a larger city than Virginia; the work there was necessarily more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and drudgery. He once set down his own memories of it:
At nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change.