Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off "alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings"--wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." "He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!--all the contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary paper in Virginia City; hell!" Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary pretensions called the _Enterprise_, which was edited and written by a group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was to the _Enterprise_ that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with profound reluctance.