osed to dispense whisky of the "forty rod" brand--that is, a liquor
warranted to kill at that range. It was the Bulletin that was to be made
especially ridiculous. This paper had been particularly disagreeable
concerning the "dividend-cooking" system of certain of the Comstock
mines, at the same time calling invidious attention to safer investments
in California stocks. Samuel Clemens, with "half a trunkful" of Comstock
shares, had cultivated a distaste for California things in general: In a
letter of that time he says:

"How I hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like California!"
With his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying California
less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in
that Nazareth. To his great satisfaction, one of the leading California
corporations, the Spring Valley Water Company, "cooked" a dividend of
its own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless
investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash. This
afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal. With Goodman's consent
he planned for the California papers, and the Bulletin in particular, a
punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe. He believed
the papers of that State had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the
result would show he was not mistaken.

There was a point on the Carson River, four miles from Carson City,
known as "Dutch Nick's," and also as Empire City, the two being
identical. There was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush.
In the one cabin there lived a bachelor with no household. Everybody in
Virginia and Carson, of course, knew these things.

Mark Twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one
Phillip Hopkins, living "just at the edge of the great pine forest which
lies between Empire City and 'Dutch Nick's'," had suddenly gone insane
and murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and
their nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years. The
wife had been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other
two might recover. The murder had been committed in the most brutal and
ghastly fashion, after which Hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a
horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into
Carson City, dropping dead at last in front of the Magnolia saloon,
the red-haired scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand. The
article further stated