"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 every day 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 Calll"

"Damned if I know," Clemens answered. "Writing stories, maybe, and broke. But who has time? When the big panic of '63 hit after we lost the war and hung on and on and on, the whole world turned upside down. I was damn lucky to have any sort of position, and I knew it. So I hung on like a limpet on a harbor rock. If I ever get ahead of the game-" He laughed. "About as likely as the Mormons giving up their extra wives, I expect."

Herndon had a couple of shots of whiskey in him, too. "Suppose you weren't a newspaperman? What would you do then?"

"I've tried mining-I was almost rich once, which is every bit as fine as almost being in love-and I was a Mississippi River pilot. If I wanted to take that up again, I'd have to take Confederate citizenship with it."

"Why not?" Herndon said. "Then you could have yourself another go at those Tennessee lands."

"No, thank you." Briefly, Clemens had served in a Confederate regiment operating-or rather, bungling-in Missouri, which remained one of the United States, not least because most Confederate troops there had been similarly inept. He didn't admit to that; few in the USA who had ever had anything to do with the other side admitted it these days. After a moment, he went on. "Their record isn't what you'd call good-more like what you'd call a skunk at a picnic."

Herndon laughed. "You do come up with 'em, Sam. Got to hand it to you. Maybe you ought to try writing yourself a book after all. People would buy it, I expect."

"Maybe," Clemens said, which meant no. "Don't see a lot of authors living off the fat of the land, do you? Besides, it may have taken me a while to cipher out what steady work was about, but I've got it down solid now. I lived on promises when I was a miner. I was a boy then, pretty much. I'm not a boy any more."

"All right, all right." Herndon held up a placatory hand. He looked at his plate, as if astonished the beefsteak he'd ordered had disappeared. His shot glass was empty, too. "You want one more for the road?"

"Not if I intend to get any work done this afternoon. You want to listen to me snore at my desk, that's another matter." Clemens got to his feet. He set a quarter and a small, shiny gold dollar on the table. Herndon laid down a dollar and a half. They left Martin's-a splendid place, for anyone who could afford to eat there-and walked back to the Morning Call office.

Edgar Leary, one of the junior reporters, waved a flimsy sheet of telegraph paper in their faces when they got in. He was almost hopping with excitement. "Look at this! Look at this!" He had crumbs in his sparse black beard; he brought his dinner to the Morning Call in a sack. "Didn't come in five minutes ago, or I'm a Chinaman."

"If you'll stop fanning me with it, I will have a look," Clemens said. When Leary still waved the wire around, Sam snatched it out of his hand. "Give me that, dammit." He turned it right side up and read it. The more he read, the higher his bushy eyebrows climbed. Once he'd finished, he passed it to Clay Herndon, saying, "Looks like I've got something for the editorial after all."

Herndon quickly skimmed the telegraphic report. His lips shaped a soundless whistle. "This here is more than something to feed you an editorial, Sam. This here could be trouble."

"Don't I know it," Clemens said. "But I can't do the first thing about the trouble, and I can do something about the editorial. So I'll do that, and I'll let the rest of the world get into trouble. You ever notice how it's real good about taking care of that whether anybody wants it to or not?"

He pulled a cigar from a waistcoat pocket, bit off the end, scraped a match against the sole of his shoe, lighted the cigar, and tossed the match into a shiny brass cuspidor stained here and there with errant expectorations. Then he went over to his desk and pulled out the George F. Cram Atlas of the World. He flipped through it till he found the page he needed.

His finger traced a line. Herndon and Leary were looking over his shoulder, one to the right, the other to the left. Herndon whistled again. "This is going to be big trouble," he said. "Bigger than I thought."

"That's a fact." Clemens slammed the atlas closed with a noise like a rifle shot. Behind him, Edgar Leary jumped. "Hell of a big mess." He spoke with somber anticipation. "But I don't have to worry about what I'm going to write this afternoon, so I'm as happy as Peeping Tom in Honolulu, if half of what they say about the Sandwich Islands is true."