“I’ll do it, but the limit must be $30,000.”

They agreed to allow Hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had already invested and for legal advice.

Hamersley consented readily enough, and when in February, 1886, the new contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the Fourth Estate.

By this time F. G. Whitmore had come into Clemens’s business affairs, and he did not altogether approve of the new contract.  Among other things, it required that Clemens should not only complete the machine, but promote it, capitalize it commercially.  Whitmore said: 

“Mr. Clemens, that clause can bankrupt you.”

Clemens answered:  “Never mind that, Whitmore; I’ve considered that.  I can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can get a perfect machine.”

He immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the waiting world.  He covered pages with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark.  Colonel Sellers in his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly.  He obtained a list of all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up the machines that would be required by each.  To his nephew, Sam Moffett, visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count the profits from the typesetter.  He realized clearly enough that a machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition.  The fact that other inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him.  Rumors came of the Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler linotype, but Mark Twain only smiled.  When the promoters of the Mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half interest in the Paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity go by.

Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year.  Then Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York.  He had discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney’s shops was building a new one from the ground up—­a machine of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive.  It was an undertaking for a millionaire.