Gillis, as usual, was washing, and Clemens carrying the water.  Gillis, seeing the gold “color” improving with every pan, wanted to go on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of wet and cold.  Clemens, shivering and disgusted, vowed that each pail of water would be his last.  His teeth were chattering, and he was wet through.  Finally he said: 

“Jim, I won’t carry any more water.  This work too disagreeable.”

Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt.

“Bring one more pail, Sam,” he begged.

“Jim I won’t do it.  I’m-freezing.”

“Just one more pail, Sam!” Jim pleaded.

“No, sir; not a drop—­not if I knew there was a million dollars in that pan.”

Gillis tore out a page of his note-book and hastily posted a thirty-day-claim notice by the pan of dirt.  Then they set out for Angel’s Camp, never to return.  It kept on raining, and a letter came from Steve Gillis, saying he had settled all the trouble in San Francisco.  Clemens decided to return, and the miners left Angel’s without visiting their claim again.

Meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of dirt they had left standing on the hillside, exposing a handful of nuggets, pure gold.  Two strangers, Austrians, happening along, gathered it up and, seeing the claim notice posted by Jim Gillis, sat down to wait until it expired.  They did not mind the rain—­not under the circumstances—­and the moment the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and took out, some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars.  In either case it was a good pocket that Mark Twain missed by one pail of water.  Still, without knowing it, he had carried away in his note-book a single nugget of far greater value the story of “The Jumping Frog.”

He did not write it, however, immediately upon his return to San Francisco.  He went back to his “Enterprise” letters and contributed some sketches to the Californian.  Perhaps he thought the frog story too mild in humor for the slope.  By and by he wrote it, and by request sent it to Artemus Ward to be used in a book that Ward was about to issue.  It arrived too late, and the publisher handed it to the editor of the “Saturday Press,” Henry Clapp, saying: 

“Here, Clapp, is something you can use in your paper.”

The “Press” was struggling, and was glad to get a story so easily.  “Jim Smiley and his jumping Frog” appeared in the issue of November 18, 1865, and was at once copied and quoted far and near.  It carried the name of Mark Twain across the mountains and the prairies of the Middle West; it bore it up and down the Atlantic slope.  Some one said, then or later, that Mark Twain leaped into fame on the back of a jumping frog.

Curiously, this did not at first please the author.  He thought the tale poor.  To his mother he wrote: 

I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful.  I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again.  Verily, all is vanity and little worth—­save piloting.