How Few Remain Read Online Free PDF Page B

the writings of a fellow named Marx, Mr. Lincoln? Karl Marx?”
    Lincoln smiled. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
        “Sam!” Clay Herndon spoke sharply. “Sam, you’re woolgathering again.”
    “The devil I am,” Samuel Clemens replied, though his friend’s comment did return his attention to the cramped office of the
San Francisco Morning Call
. “I was trying to come up with something for tomorrow’s editorial, and I’m dry as the desert between the Great Salt Lake and Virginia City. I hate writing editorials, do you know that?”
    “You have mentioned it a time or two.” Now Herndon’s voice was sly. That suited the reporter’s face: he looked as if he had a fox for his maternal grandmother. His features were sharp and clever, his green eyes studied everything and respected nothing, and his rusty hair only added to the impression. Grinning, he sank his barb: “Or a hundred times or two.”
    “Still true,” Clemens snapped, running a hand through his own unruly mop of red-brown hair. “Do you have any notion of the strain on a man’s constitution, having to come up with so many column inches every day on demand?—and always something new, regardless of whether there’s anything new to write about. If I had my Tennessee lands—”
    Herndon rolled his eyes. “For God’s sake, Sam, give me the lecture on editorials if you must, but spare me the Tennessee lands. They’re stale as salt beef shipped round the Horn.”
    “You’re a scoffer, that’s what you are—nothing but a scoffer,” Clemens said, half amused but still half annoyed, too. “Forty thousand acres of fine land, with God only knows how much timber and coal and iron, and maybe gold and silver, too, and all of it in my family.”
    “It’s in another country these days,” Clay Herndon reminded him. “The Confederate States have been a going concern for a long time now.”
    “Yes, a long time ago, and in another country—and besides, the wench is dead,” Clemens said, scratching his mustache.
    Herndon gave him a quizzical look. However clever the reporter was, he wouldn’t have known Marlowe from a marlinspike. “The way you do go on,” he said. “Let’s us go on over to Martin’s and get some dinner.”
    “Now you’re talking.” Clemens rose from his chair with enthusiasm and stuck his hat on his head. “Any excuse not to work is good enough for me. Weren’t for this”—he patted the battered copy of the
American Cyclopedia
on his desk with a touch as tender as a lover’s for his beloved—”I don’t know how I’d ever manage to come out for something or against something everyday of the year. As if any man needs so blamed many opinions, or has any business holding them! Wasting my sweetness on the morning air, that’s what I’m doing.”
    Herndon pulled out his pocket watch. “As of right now, you’re wasting your sweetness on the afternoon air, and you have been for the past ten minutes. Now let’s get moving, before we can’t find a place to sit down at Martin’s.”
    Clemens followed his friend out onto the street. It was an April midday in San Francisco: not too warm, not too cold, the sun shining down from a clear but hazy sky. It might as easily have been August or November or February. To Clemens, who had grown up with real seasons, always seeming not far from spring remained strange after almost twenty years.
    When he remarked on that, Herndon snorted. “You don’t like it, go down to Fresno. It’s always July there, and a desert July at that.”
    With a lamb chop, fried potatoes, and a shot of whiskey in front of Sam Clemens, life improved. He knocked back the shot and ordered another. When it came, he knocked it back, too, with the sour toast, “Here’s to hard work every day.”
    Clay Herndon snorted again. “I’ve heard that one almost as often as the Tennessee lands, Sam. What the devil would you be doing if you weren’t running the
Morning Call?”
    “Damned if I know,”