Selms went to his pile of pelts.  There were several sheepskins and some cowhides, but only one coonskin—­the one he had that moment bought.  Selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke.

Perhaps it is not adding to Mark Twain’s reputation to say that the boy Sam Clemens—­a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this time—­was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would be less than historic.  If the band had a leader, it was he.  They were always ready to listen to him—­they would even stop fishing to do that —­and to follow his projects.  They looked to him for ideas and organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe.  When they played “Bandit” or “Pirate” or “Indian,” Sam Clemens was always chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was no less distinguished.  Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of leadership.  When the Christian Sons of Temperance came along with a regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the privilege of inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into his eyes, and he gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and swearing (which he did only under heavy excitement), also liquor (though he had never tasted it yet), and marched with the newly washed and pure in heart for a full month—­a month of splendid leadership and servitude.  Then even the red sash could not hold him in bondage.  He looked up Tom Blankenship and said: 

“Say, Tom, I’m blamed tired of this!  Let’s go somewhere and smoke!” Which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a precious thing.

Limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of Sam Clemens’s boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died.  It seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet, venerable Oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown.

He could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor.  His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement.  It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which—­a personal burlesque on certain older boys—­came near resulting in bodily damage.  But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing.  His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word—­his nod, even—­constituted sufficient law.  The river kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background for those other things.