acknowledged to be the most expert and successful pocket miner in California—indeed he is the father of all the pocket mines. He was the first to discover the laws that govern that kind of mining and reduce the business to a science. He now has eight mines running in California and every one paying. (William Wright 1891)

Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy-tale, an extravagant romance, —with Dick Stoker as the hero of it, as a general thing. Jim always ‸soberly‸ pretended that what he was relating was strictly history—veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a sweet ‸gentle‸ serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest. In one of my books—“Huckleberry Finn,” I think—I have used one of Jim’s impromptu tales, which Jim ‸he‸ called “The Tragedy of the Burning Shame.” I had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print, and this was a great damage. As Jim told it—inventing it as he went along— I think it was one of the most outrageously funny things I have ever listened to. How mild it is in the book, and how pale; how extravagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable form! I used another of Jim’s impromptus in a book of mine called “The Tramp Abroad,” a tale of how the poor innocent and ignorant woodpeckers tried to fill up a house with acorns. . . . I used another of Jim’s inventions in one of my books—the story of Jim [i.e., Dick] Baker’s cat, the remarkable Tom Quartz. Jim Baker was Dick Stoker, of course; Tom Quartz had never existed; there was no such cat—at least outside of Jim Gillis’s imagination. (AD, 26 May 1907, in MTE, 360–62)

When we got there Sam suggested that we take a walk, and so we started out. We knew of some late clingstone peaches growing on Black Creek, two miles away, so we walked over and got some. When he started back Mol[lie] said, “I know a trail through the chemisal that will cut off half the distance.” So we took it, and went a long way before we discovered that we were lost. We had to get down on our hands and knees and crawl through the chaparral. Then we decided to give up and go back and around the long way.

It was nearly midnight when we got home, and Mrs. Daniels was furious. She gave us a good tongue lashing, and she directed most of it at Sam. He said: “Mrs. Daniels, it wasn’t my fault, it was Billie’s fault[.]” She said:

“Mr. Clemens, Mr. Gillis has been walking with the girls a hundred times, and this never happened before. Besides, you are older and ought to have better sense.”

“I’m very sorry,” Sam said, “and I promise you it won’t happen again. But now we are tired and hungry. We are almost starved.”

“Well, you’ll get nothing to eat in this house tonight!” said Mrs. Daniels.

Just then Sam saw Miss Nellie’s guitar in a corner of the room. He picked it up and began playing, and presently he sang “Fly Away Moth” and then “Araby’s Daughter.” He sang very softly. Mrs. Daniels listened, and presently her face softened. When he was through she left the room and went out in the kitchen. In a few minutes we heard a chicken squawk, and a little later we fell to on hot biscuit and fried chicken and coffee.

As we were walking home Sam said to me: “Billie, you’ve read the old saying, ‘music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.’ You’ve seen how it soothed that savage old lady. If you have any talent for music, cultivate it.” (West, 18)

. . . “Chapparal Quails.” That was their pet name in the mountains where they lived. They were sisters, seventeen & eighteen years old, respectively; beautiful creatures, clean-minded, good-hearted, well meaning, favorites with old & young; yet they could outswear Satan. It was the common speech of that remote & thinly settled region, they had come by it naturally, & if there was any harm in it they were not aware of it. (SLC 1891, 106–7)

That was enough for Jim. He launched out with fervent praises of that devilish fruit, and the more he talked about it the warmer and stronger his admiration of it grew. He said that he had eaten it a thousand times; that all one needed to do was to boil it with a little sugar and there was nothing on the American continent that could compare with it for deliciousness. He was only talking to hear himself talk; and so he was brought up standing, and for just one moment, or maybe two moments‸, smitten‸ dumb, when Dick interrupted him with the remark that what he was saying was all a lie, and that if the fruit was so delicious why didn’t he invest in it on the spot?

laughing at him, ridiculing him, deriding him, blackguarding him all the while, and he retaining his serenity unruffled. At last he said the manufacture had reached the right stage, the stage of perfection. He dipped his spoon, tasted, smacked his lips, and broke into enthusiasms of contentment; ‸grateful joy;‸ then he gave us a taste apiece. From all that we could discover, those tons of sugar had not affected that fruit’s malignant sharpness in the least degree. Acid? It was all acid, vindictive acid, uncompromising acid. . . . We stopped with that one taste, but that great-hearted Jim, that dauntless martyr, went on sipping and sipping, and sipping, and praising and praising, and praising, and praising, until his teeth and tongue were raw, and Stoker and I nearly dead with gratitude and delight. During the next two days neither food nor drink passed Jim’s teeth; so sore were they ‸that‸ they could not endure the touch of anything; even his breath passing over them made him wince; nevertheless he went steadily on voicing his adulations of that ‸brutal‸ mess and praising God. It was an astonishing exhibition of grit, but Jim was like all the other Gillises, he was made of grit. (AD, 26 May 1907, in MTE, 362–64)