ution. I used all the arguments about the
boys being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke
had been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to
reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on
the table; but for a time it seemed hopeless. And I could imagine
those fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in
California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:

"'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass--this time; I'll forgive them again; I've
had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve
Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning
over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'

"He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the
day after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for
California. The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he
would make no show of relenting. When they introduced themselves as
Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:

"'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day. There's been a good
deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did
it.' They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers
had worn. He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove
away he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous
admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends;
good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.' So the heaviest joke was on his
tormentors after all."

This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
headquarters. It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth
setting down in full. Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San
Francisco, received a little more punishment there.

"What kind of a trip did you boys have?" a friend asked of them.

Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide
had given him, smiled grimly:

"Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree."

He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his
Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three
times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as
given later in 'Roughing It'. People were deadly tired of that story out
there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they
thought he must be failing mentally. They did not laugh--they only felt
so