It usually did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to continue.  But no sooner was there stillness than it began again—­tick, tick, tick.  With a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across the floor and the light would disappear.  Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the cruel Steve slept like the criminal that he was.

At last, one night, he overdid the thing and was caught.  His tortured room-mate at first reviled him, then threatened to kill him, finally put him to shame.  It was curious, but they always loved each other, those two; there was never anything resembling an estrangement, and to his last days Mark Twain never could speak of Steve Gillis without tenderness.

They moved a great many times in San Francisco.  Their most satisfactory residence was on a bluff on California Street.  Their windows looked down on a lot of Chinese houses—­“tin-can houses,” they were called—­small wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans.  Steve and Mark would look down on these houses, waiting until all the Chinamen were inside; then one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds.  The Chinamen would swarm out and look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their fists, and pour out Chinese vituperation.  By and by, when they had retired and everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw another bottle.  This was their Sunday amusement.

At a place on Minna Street they lived with a private family.  At first Clemens was delighted.

“Just look at it, Steve,” he said.  “What a nice, quiet place.  Not a thing to disturb us.”

But next morning a dog began to howl.  Gillis woke this time, to find his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement.

“Came here, Steve,” he said.  “Come here and kill him.  I’m so chilled through I can’t get a bead on him.”

“Sam,” said Steve, “don’t shoot him.  Just swear at him.  You can easily kill him at that range with your profanity.”

Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain then let go such a scorching, singeing blast that the brute’s owner sold him next day for a Mexican hairless dog.

We gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month.  A home letter of September 25, 1864, says: 

We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging five times.  We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people.  We are the only lodgers-in a well-to-do private family . . . .  But I need change and must move again.

This was the Minna Street place—­the place of the dog.  In the same letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the Call, by which he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he says further that he has closed with the Californian for weekly articles at twelve dollars each.