Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire created.  It was the talk of the town, it was the talk of the territory.  Most of the citizens dropped gently into it at breakfast, and they never finished their meal.  There was something about those minutely faithful details that was a sufficing substitute for food.  Few people that were able to read took food that morning.  Dan and I (Dan was my reportorial associate) took our seats on either side of our customary table in the “Eagle Restaurant,” and, as I unfolded the shred they used to call a napkin in that establishment, I saw at the next table two stalwart innocents with that sort of vegetable dandruff sprinkled about their clothing which was the sign and evidence that they were in from the Truckee with a load of hay.  The one facing me had the morning paper folded to a long, narrow strip, and I knew, without any telling, that that strip represented the column that contained my pleasant financial satire.  From the way he was excitedly mumbling, I saw that the heedless son of a hay-mow was skipping with all his might, in order to get to the bloody details as quickly as possible; and so he was missing the guide-boards I had set up to warn him that the whole thing was a fraud.  Presently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder to take in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the face lit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement.  Then he broke into a disjointed checking off of the particulars—­his potato cooling in mid-air meantime, and his mouth making a reach for it occasionally; but always bringing up suddenly against a new and still more direful performance of my hero.  At last he looked his stunned and rigid comrade impressively in the face, and said, with an expression of concentrated awe: 

“Jim, he b’iled his baby, and he took the old ’oman’s skelp.  Cuss’d if I want any breakfast!”

And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend departed from the restaurant empty but satisfied.

He never got down to where the satire part of it began.  Nobody ever did.  They found the thrilling particulars sufficient.  To drop in with a poor little moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre was like following the expiring sun with a candle and hope to attract the world’s attention to it.

The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine occurrence never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by all those telltale absurdities and impossibilities concerning the “great pine forest,” the “dressed-stone mansion,” etc.  But I found out then, and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy.