He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey.  He was worn out when he arrived, but stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela.  It was his mother he was anxious for.  He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging himself on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine.  For a long time that missing day confused his calculations.

When he reached Orion’s house the family sat at breakfast.  He came in carrying a gun.  They had not been expecting him, and there was a general outcry, and a rush in his direction.  He warded them off, holding the butt of the gun in front of him.

“You wouldn’t let me buy a gun,” he said, “so I bought one myself, and I am going to use it, now, in self-defense.”

“You, Sam!  You, Sam!” cried Jane Clemens.  “Behave yourself,” for she was wary of a gun.

Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother’s arms.

XX

KEOKUK DAYS

Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office, but the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money before he would be able to afford that luxury:  He returned to his place on the St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or early spring of the following year.

He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli.  Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the boys were comrades and close friends.  Twenty-two years later Mark Twain exchanged with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier time.  Clemens wrote: 

My dear Burrough,—­As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 22 years ago.  The portrait is correct.  You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it.  You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right....  That is what I was at 19-20.

Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk.  He had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness.  He tells it himself; he says: