What revenge Mark Twain took on his return has not been recorded, but it was probably prompt and adequate; or he may have left it to The Unreliable.  It was clearly a mistake, however, to leave his own local work in the hands of that properly named person a little later.  Clemens was laid up with a cold, and Rice assured him on his sacred honor that he would attend faithfully to the Enterprise locals, along with his own Union items.  He did this, but he had been nursing old injuries too long.  What was Mark Twain’s amazement on looking over the Enterprise next morning to find under the heading “Apologetic” a statement over his own nom de plume, purporting to be an apology for all the sins of ridicule to the various injured ones.

To Mayor Arick, Hon. Wm. Stewart, Marshal Perry, Hon. J. B. Winters, Mr. Olin, and Samuel Wetherill, besides a host of others whom we have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position, we say to these gentlemen we acknowledge our faults, and, in all weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for anything but the best of feeling toward us.  To “Young Wilson” and The Unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have given them.  Toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man could be—­and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality.  We feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were.  We will now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days.

This in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had the effect of curing his cold.  He was back in the office forthwith, and in the next morning’s issue denounced his betrayer.

We are to blame for giving The Unreliable an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result.  We simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday’s paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass-rabbit of the Sierras.  We have done.

These were the things that enlivened Comstock journalism.  Once in a boxing bout Mark Twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell to an unusual size and shape.  He went out of town for a few days, during which De Quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune, describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of Mark Twain’s ever supposing himself to be a boxer.

De Quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written.  Soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and bruised considerably.

This was Mark’s opportunity.  He gave an account of Dan’s disaster; then, commenting, he said: