“Mark’s lecture was given in Piper’s Opera House, October 30, 1866.  The Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were mere sideshows compared with Mark’s.  It could have been run to crowded houses for a week.  We begged him to give the common people a chance; but he refused to repeat himself.  He was going down to Carson, and was coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and Denis would be coming home with the money.  The Divide was a good lonely place, and was famous for its hold-ups.  We got City Marshal George Birdsall into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy Eddington, and one or two more of Sam’s old friends.  We all loved him, and would have fought for him in a moment.  That’s the kind of friends Mark had in Nevada.  If he had any enemies I never heard of them.

“We didn’t take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe’s guest, and we were afraid he would tell him.  We didn’t take in Dan because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big sensation.  That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear Mark tell the story.

“Well, everything went off pretty well.  About the time Mark was finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide to wait, but Mark’s audience gave him a kind of reception after his lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along.  By and by I went back to see what was the matter.  Sam and Denis were coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between them.  I shadowed them and blew a policeman’s whistle as a signal to the boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place.  I heard Sam say to Denis: 

“’I’m glad they’ve got a policeman on the Divide.  They never had one in my day.’

“Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their hands.  The robbers called each other ‘Beauregard’ and ’Stonewall Jackson.’  Of course Denis’s hands went up, and Mark’s, too, though Mark wasn’t a bit scared or excited.  He talked to the robbers in his regular fashion.  He said: 

“’Don’t flourish those pistols so promiscuously.  They might go off by accident.’

“They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to take his hands down they made him put them up again.  Then he asked how they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the sky.  He said his treasures didn’t lie in heaven.  He told them not to take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.