Mark Twain's Letters — Complete (1853-1910)Twain, Mark
General
Mark Twain's Letters — Complete (1853-1910)
Twain, Mark
Authors, American -- 19th century -- Correspondence; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Correspondence
MY DEAR BRO.,--TO use a French expression I have “got my d--d satisfy”
at last. Two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything.
Therefore, we need fret and fume, and worry and doubt no more, but
just lie still and put up with privations for six months. Perhaps three
months will “let us out.” Then, if Government refuses to pay the rent on
your new office we can do it ourselves. We have got to wait six weeks,
anyhow, for a dividend, maybe longer--but that it will come there is
no shadow of a doubt, I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral
certainty. I own one-eighth of the new “Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company,”
and money can't buy a foot of it; because I know it to contain our
fortune. The ledge is six feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold
and silver in it. Phillips and I own one half of a segregated claim in
the “Flyaway” discovery, and good interests in two extensions on it. We
put men to work on our part of the discovery yesterday, and last night
they brought us some fine specimens. Rock taken from ten feet below the
surface on the other part of the discovery, has yielded $150.00 to the
ton in the mill and we are at work 300 feet from their shaft.
May 12--Yours by the mail received last night. “Eighteen hundred feet in
the C. T. Rice's Company!” Well, I am glad you did not accept of the 200
feet. Tell Rice to give it to some poor man.
But hereafter, when anybody holds up a glittering prospect before you,
just argue in this wise, viz: That, if all spare change be devoted to
working the “Monitor” and “Flyaway,” 12 months, or 24 at furthest, will
find all our earthly wishes satisfied, so far as money is concerned--and
the more “feet” we have, the more anxiety we must bear--therefore, why
not say “No--d---n your 'prospects,' I wait on a sure thing--and a man
is less than a man, if he can't wait 2 years for a fortune?” When
you and I came out here, we did not expect '63 or '64 to find us rich
men--and if that proposition had been made, we would have accepted it
gladly. Now, it is made.
Well, I am willing, now, that “Neary's tunnel,” or anybody else's tunnel
shall succeed. Some of them may beat us a few months, but we shall be
on hand in the fullness of time, as sure as fate. I would hate to swap
chances with any member of the “tribe”--in fact, I am so lost to all
sense and reason as to be capable of refusing to trade “Flyaway” (with
but 200 feet in the Company of four,) foot for foot for that splendid
“Lady Washington,” with its lists of capitalist proprietors, and its
35,000 feet of Priceless ground.
I wouldn't mind being in some of those Clear Creek claims, if I lived
in Carson and we could spare the money. But I have struck my tent in
Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but those which I can superintend
myself. I am a citizen here now, and I am satisfied--although R. and I
are strapped and we haven't three days' rations in the house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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