Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

EPILOGUE

FUTURE, n. – That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

Senator Jennings was found guilty of the murder of Mrs. Hamon but appealed. He was dying from stomach cancer, however, and during the second trial was brought to the courtroom in a wheelchair. He did not receive much sympathy. He was represented by Bosworth Curtis.

The Morton Street Slasher murders joined the list of San Francisco’s unsolved murders. The theory that the Slasher fled to London, where he resurfaced as Jack the Ripper, gained considerable credence.

Lady Caroline Stearns and her son also returned to London. Her daughter was married to the son of the duke of Beltravers at Beltravers late in August. The wedding was an immense affair, with its shocking costs published in the London Times.

Amelia Brittain and Marshall Sloat were married in September, in Trinity Episcopalian. I rented fancy duds to attend. It may not have been as grand an affair as the Beltravers wedding, but it was too grand for me. The fanciest turnouts with the fanciest horseflesh clogged Post and Powell, and uniformed servants and footmen hung around them during the ceremony. I’d never been in an Episcopalian church before. It was pallid Roman Catholic. Amelia and her banker were very small up toward the altar. He was bald-headed, with ginger tufts of hair peaking over his ears like a wildcat. Ramparts of flowers surrounded them. Ranked in pews were the instant aristocrats of the Elite Directory of San Francisco. I didn’t enter in the hymns or the prayers. I felt heavy and loutish, as I had when I’d knocked down Beau McNair and received a bloody nose in return. There were fat gents in full regalia and various arrays of chin whiskers looking mighty comfortable with themselves, there were old women with embonpoints like kitchen ranges, there were young men and women admiring each other. I didn’t attend the reception.

When I quit The Hornet I got a job at the Chronicle, for a slight increase in wages over what Mr. Macgowan had paid me. The Chronicle was as anti-Chinese as The Hornet, but they did publish my piece on the slave girls, which I quote because it was to become important to my career as a journalist:

Chinese slave girls can be found in San Francisco in parlor-houses or cribs, the parlorhouses with all the Chinese trappings expected by tourists, musk, sandalwood, teak, silk wall hangings, comical ceramic gods, and scrolls. These houses are in Grant Avenue, Waverly Place and Ross Alley. There are only a few of them. There are cribs without number. They line Jackson and Washington Streets, and Bartlett, China and Church Alleys.

In 1869 the Chronicle reported a cargo of nine- and ten-year-old Chinese girls as though they were any commodity arrived from the Orient. “The particularly fine portions of the cargo, the fresh and pretty females who come from the interior, are used to fill special orders from wealthy merchants and prosperous tradesmen. Less fine portions of the cargo would be ‘boat-girls,’ from the seaboard towns, where contact with sailors would have reduced their value.”

That item was published six years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The girls are sold at about the age of five by their parents. Syndicates farm as many as eight hundred girls, bringing them along to an acceptable age, at which time their prices might be seventy-five or eighty dollars in China. In California they are worth from two hundred to a thousand, depending upon their degree of attractiveness. Pay for their services ranges from fifteen cents to a dollar.

The crib girls on Jackson and Washington Streets, and in the alleys, are exposed like chickens in cages. The cribs are ten or twelve feet wide, containing a front room and back, divided by a curtain. Reformers claim that up to 90 percent of the girls are sick. Their indentured prostitute contracts, which are usually for eight years, add on two weeks for every sick day. If they try to escape their indenture is changed to life. If they are too sick to work they are transported to a “hospital,” which they do not depart alive.

I played baseball with Elmer Nix once more, at the new baseball diamond at the Central Park at 8th and Market, both of us playing for teams to which we no longer rightfully belonged, for Nix had quit the police to become a dispatcher for the San Francisco Stock Brewery. I had the pleasure of throwing him out at second base in a double play.

The Girtcrest Corridor Bill passed in early 1886.

Captain Isaiah Pusey became San Francisco chief of police in 1891.

I continued to write occasional pieces for the Chronicle, on events, scandals; profiles and expositions for tourists and newcomers to the City; on Emperor Norton, on Sarah Althea Hill, Judge Terry and Senator Sharon, on King Kalakaua and Queen Liliuokalani, Lucky Baldwin, William Ralston, the Big Four, Boss Buckley and Boss Ruef. My extended piece on the Chinese slave girls was published by Bret Harte in the Atlantic Monthly. It caused a stir, and my journalistic fortunes were much enhanced.

I published some work that gave pain to the Democratic bosses of the City, the Republican bosses of the state, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. If I was by no means as brilliant as Bierce, I was not as cynical either. Later I published several books and collections on San Francisco history.

I think my father eventually became as proud of me as if I had been a fire chief. He continued to distribute boodle in the legislature on behalf of Railroad issues. We met for supper about once a month at one of the better San Francisco restaurants, the Gent paying for the repast even after I became well able to do so. The Former-Spade messages to Bierce were never mentioned, my father’s single act of disloyalty to his employers.

Some years after her marriage, I met Mrs. Sloat on Geary Street. Amelia was with another handsome young lady, both of them dressed to the nines with elegant hats and tight bodices with low necklines that revealed flesh as smooth as chamois, both of them laden with packages of purchases. They were up from Woodside for the day.

The friend went to the City of Paris while Amelia and I had tea. Her gloved hands fluttered. Once she touched my hand. She smiled and laughed like the Amelia I remembered. She seemed happy. Her husband was a dear man, she said. She loved him very much. She called him “Marshy.”

“I think I have made my husband happy,” she said.

“How could you not?” I said.

She gazed at me with her eyebrows rising up her forehead and her brown eyes filling with tears.

Looking down, she said, “Marshy is ill. It is doubtful that he can live for two more years, Doctor Byng tells me. He is very brave. I will be a very wealthy woman, Tom.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Have you read any good books lately?” she asked, changing the subject.

I said I had not had much time to read, lately.

“I have been rereading Jane Austen. She is very fine.”

“I guess so,” I said. I thought about the social elite at Amelia’s wedding. I said I didn’t much like Jane Austen.

“All the characters think about is money,” I said.

Amelia looked as though I had slapped her. She rose, daubing at her eyes. “You have not yet learned irony,” she said. She gathered up her packages, awkward in her haste.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Please forgive me!” But I didn’t know if she had heard me, for she was gone with a swish of her brown velvet skirt past the table.

I sat alone with my eyes stinging as though they had been dipped in acid.

I remembered Bierce saying that perseverance in one’s principles might be praiseworthy, but obduracy in perseverance was stupidity.

I called on Senator Jennings in his room at the Grand Hotel during a court recess. An Irish maid with a face like a side of bacon let me in and went to see if the senator was sleeping. She ushered me into sickroom stink, Jennings braced sitting in a big bed with a half dozen medicine bottles on the table beside the bed. His face was gray as blotting paper.

“I remember you, you’re Bierce’s boy Friday,” he said. He did not sound hostile. “I know your daddy. Is Clete still working for the SP?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Working for the Railroad,” he almost sang, as though he could make a song of it. “The Railroad dollar did exasperate those that wasn’t getting it. What’s that nasty son-of-a-bitch Bierce doing now?”

“He’s living in Sunol, writing ghost stories about the War.”

“Tell him I don’t hold no grudges,” he said. “We’re going to beat it this time. Bos’s just that much smarter than they are.

“I’ll live to see it,” he went on. His lips fluttered when he spoke, as though there were no muscles in them. “Sworn I’d live to see it. We’ll beat that one, but there’s another I’m not going to beat.”

I said I was sorry to see him laid up.

“See that glass of water there? Would you measure exactly twelve drops from the brown bottle into it? Otherwise I’m going to be yowling like a catamount with a cactus up his ass in about two minutes.”

I measured in the laudanum, and he swigged the water down with an explosive “Ahhhh!”

“Tell Bierce it was McNair that had Gorton cold-cocked,” he went on. “Al was one cadging, complaining, nasty piece of work. It was Nat McNair.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said and asked if he minded talking about George Payne.

“Don’t mind talking about it if you ain’t going to print it.”

“I won’t print anything you don’t want me to.”

“Promises made,” he explained. “Guess who’s paying Bos Curtis.”

I said I expected it was Lady Caroline Stearns.

He nodded once, grinning, and wiped his damp lips with the sleeve of his nightshirt.

“The woman you hate.”

“Son,” he said, “when the crabs are chewing on your innards, and old man Death is standing by with his scythe pointed at you, you don’t have time for hating. I am pleased to say I am over it. It is like shedding off your shoulder a hundred-pound sack of shit. Anyway I’d be hanged by the neck by now if it wasn’t for Bos Curtis and that lady paying him. Elza’s still sticking by his guns; that was her agreement with Bierce. But Bos is a kind of favor a man don’t have any right to expect.”

I said Bierce had figured that Mrs. Hamon had made the mistake of telling him, Senator Jennings, that she was going to see Bierce with certain information, and he had met her to dissuade her from it, which encounter had ended in Morton Street.

Jennings didn’t want to talk about that.

“That is all I hear about in the courtroom, son. George Payne now, that is interesting.”

He closed his eyes, his eyelids fluttering like moths. His lips twitched. “You know, I took that German fella’s painting of High-grade Carrie out of my office in Sacramento and I had it brought down to that saloon me and another chap had on Battery Street. This young fella’d come and sit at the bar half a day staring at it.

“I don’t know when I figured out he was Carrie’s son, my son. I still don’t know how it works about twins. It was maybe my jism and the Englishman’s swapping around inside her, and the fancy twin was his and the crazy one mine.

“He knew that painting was his mother, too. He’d bartend for me Saturday nights. It was a queer sort of coincidence. He was kind of gentle, you’d never consider he was thinking about cutting doves’ guts out. There was something wrong with his peter, I guess. So whores’d made fun of him, that he didn’t forget.”

“Morton Street whores,” I said.

“I told him about the Society of Spades, and how Eddie Macomber and me’d been choused by his mother and McNair, and Al Gorton. I was still hot under the collar‌—‌I don’t deny that. But I never told him he was my son.

“Bierce was wrong about me pushing him to slash those whores, and going after Carrie. But there was maybe somebody else pushing on him, maybe the Missus Payne he’d been farmed out to, who was some kind of invalid. He knew plenty about Carrie and his brother and things in London. Isaiah Pusey’d told me about his brother in some whore-muckery over there.

“It was crazy. He loved that painting, couldn’t stop looking at it, but he hated the lady, his mother. Hated, like Bierce said.

“Hated his brother too. That had everything he’d had took from him.

“He was fixated on that mansion of Nat’s. He’d found a way to break in and he’d pretend it was his, pretend he was one of the aristocrats from up there. Steal flowers out of the vases and bring them to the saloon. I didn’t realize he was even crazier than I was about getting shat on by those people.”

“You and Captain Pusey were old friends,” I said.

“You could call it that,” Jennings said, with the floppy grin.

“I didn’t think much about the boy’s brother coming back and all that, but he was stone-set loony on his dispossession,” he went on. “I never thought of him being after Carrie‌—‌to kill her. I didn’t think about him being the Morton Street Slasher until the second one, and by that time I had some concern of my own in the matter. And he went after that skinny daughter of Jim Brittain’s, I understand.”

I said that was true, although it had been kept out of the papers.

Senator Jennings shook his head in dismay.

“I guess the Morton Street slashings will never be solved,” I said.

“Won’t be solved because of me, I can promise you. What about Bierce? “

“He made a promise to Lady Caroline.”

“She is good at that,” he said, eyes still closed. “Well, I fucked her before she got to be a grand lady; got her in a family way, she told me. That was something! She wasn’t so much of a fuck, but by God she was surely be-you-tee-full!”

He lay with his eyes closed, cheeks puffed out as he breathed. “The best,” he said, “was a little Chinee girl, couldn’t’ve been twelve years old.” He held up the first joints of his index and second fingers pressed together in a tight crack. “Like that,” he said. “Just like that! Wonder where that little nonpareil is now?”

“Probably dead,” I said. “When they come down sick they put them away.”

He puffed out his cheeks some more and asked me to prepare another glass of laudanum in water. When he had drunk it, he sat there with his head sunk on his chest and his eyes closed.

“Nobody ever figured out your Daddy was Eddie Macomber,” he said softly.

“No, they didn’t,” I said.

He snored.

The nurse came in to tell me it was time for his nap.

I called on Senator Jennings twice more, to find him lower each time. I tried to find Mrs. Payne, George Payne’s adopted mother. I had no help from Mammy Pleasant, who had nothing to gain from me. I made inquiries around Battery Street, I asked so many people if they knew of her that I got tired of hearing my voice speak her name. I never found her.

Senator Jennings died before there was a judgment in the second trial.

A couple of years later Amelia Sloat telephoned me at the Chronicle. She sounded breathless. I sat in the dusty, noisy cubicle where the telephone was, the earpiece jammed up against one ear and my mouth close to the mechanism’s mouthpiece. I closed my eyes to savor her voice in my ear.

“Will you do me a favor, Tom?”

“Anything.”

“This is very difficult for me,” she rushed on. “Tom, you must understand, I love Marshy very much. And he loves me very much. But I want to have a baby, and he wants me to, but he had an illness when he was a young man that left him unable to‌—‌to father a child. But because he loves me he has given me permission to have a child that will be someone else’s child but that we will raise as our own. Do you understand, Tom?”

I was being summoned instead of Mammy Pleasant.

I didn’t mention old ironies.

We made arrangements to meet in one of the private dining rooms upstairs at the Old Poodle Dog. That was of course an evening I will not forget, no more than Jimmy Fairleigh had been able to forget Caroline LaPlante‌—‌filled with wine and laughter, but more tears than laughter, and seriousness of purpose. Arrangements were made for a second meeting a month hence, if it should be necessary.

It was not necessary, and in January of the following year I received an announcement of the birth of Arthur Brittain Sloat. On it was written in a familiar bold hand, “Thank you,” without a signature.

I saw the notice of Sloat’s death two years later in the obituaries of the Chronicle. He was survived by his widow, the former Amelia Brittain, and his son, Arthur Brittain Sloat. Mr. Brittain died about a month later and I figured that Amelia might have moved to town to be with her mother.

I walked down the steep block of Taylor Street from California Street past 913 three different times before I caught a glimpse of the boy. He was playing on the porch where once the Slasher had attacked his mother, a tow-headed child in a black and white sailor jumper running and banging things together, that I finally saw were pots and their lids. He ran and banged, and was silent and invisible behind the railing for periods, until a nurse in a blue uniform with a white doily on her head came out to bring him back inside the house. I didn’t catch sight of Amelia.

By then I was married myself.

So is time the lock and occasion the key that does not always fit.

In the society columns it was noted when Amelia Brittain Sloat left for New York with her son.

Belinda Barnacle was married in her eighteenth year, but not on her eighteenth birthday, to a young fellow named Haskell Green, who was a boarder at the Barnacles’ establishment. Green had a job as a coal salesman for the Cedar River Coal Company. He was “a real go-getter,” Mr. Barnacle assured me. I sent leather-bound, gilt-edged fine editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility as a wedding present.

Senator Sharon died before Sharon v. Sharon came to its conclusion. Knowing he was dying, he vowed that his estate would expend every penny he owned fighting Miss Hill’s outrageous fabrications. “Why, she would be the highest paid whore in history,” he was reported to have said. “The grandes horizon tales of Paris are cheapskates compared to her. I hear they charge a thousand francs a night. If Allie wins out, she’ll be netting about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per.”

On hearing of Sharon’s death, Bierce wrote in his column in the Examiner: “Death is not the end; there remains the litigation over the Estate.”

The State Superior Court ruled in Sarah Althea Hill’s favor. Mrs. Sharon was awarded $2,500 per month as alimony, and $55,000 for counsel’s fees. Mrs. Sharon promptly went on a shopping spree. Unfortunately the Federal Circuit Court was still to be heard from. There would be no more shopping sprees for Miss Hill.

I knew that Bierce had been moving from place to place. He spent some time at Larkmead with Lillie Coit. He lived briefly at the Putnam House in Auburn, and in a boardinghouse in Sunol. My wife and I called on him in Oakland, where he had taken an apartment. She was intimidated about meeting the man about whom she had heard so much, but Bierce was in a fine mood. He had a new job.

We sat on a sofa in the small, hot room, while he brought us tea and ranged before us, gesturing as he told the story of his employment, the same Ambrose Bierce, with his fair mustache like a pair of sparrow’s wings, and his curly, silvering hair, and his cold eyes beneath shaggy brows. He wore a checked suit and a high collar and tie.

“This young man came to my door,” he told us. “The youngest man, it seemed to me, that I have ever confronted. His appearance and manner were of the most extreme diffidence. I did not ask him to apply himself to my better chair but kept him on my doorstep.

“He said he had come from the San Francisco Examiner. Of course I knew that George Hearst had recently presented the Examiner to his son, Willie, as a plaything.

“ ‘Oh, you have come from Mr. Hearst,’ I said.

“And he lifted his blue eyes to me and cooed, ‘I am Mr. Hearst!’ ”

Bierce laughed and clapped his hands together. Young Hearst was assembling the finest stable of journalists in the West. Peter Bigelow and Arthur McEwen had already been employed. Hearst wanted Bierce to write a column for the Sunday Examiner.

“And I will do it!” Bierce said. “I am anxious for some City clamor and movement. I am tired of the scent of pine trees!”

And he said to me, “Perhaps you will come to the Examiner too, Tom.”

I said I was very happy at the Chronicle, but I would look forward to seeing him in the City.

“Yes, we had a pleasant association,” Bierce said. “What detectives we were!” He said to my wife, “You must persuade your husband, my dear.”

She said in a small voice that she would try.

Our association was never again to be what it was. I tried to be of some comfort to Bierce when his sixteen-year-old son, Day, with whom I had participated in double-play practice in St. Helena, shot himself in a fracas over a girl that you did not have to be Ambrose Bierce to know was a piece of utter human stupidity. His second son, Leigh, died of acute alcoholism in 1901.

That same year the first “society” novel of Amelia Brittain Sloat was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine. The title was Shadows in the Glass. The heroine of her novel, Clara Benbough, was forced by her husband’s syphilitic sterility to beg an old friend to father her child. The novel was considered quite daring.

Amelia Brittain Sloat’s novels were often compared to those of Gertrude Atherton, the most famous and daring of the California lady novelists.

A year later Sarah Althea Hill Terry was remanded to the State Insane Asylum in Stockton. Sharon v. Hill had gone against her, in appeal after appeal. She had married Judge Terry, who was thirty-four years her senior. In Sharon v. Sharon and Sharon v. Hill Terry was her most steadfast supporter, even including Mammy Pleasant. The last appeal of Sharon v. Hill was pleaded before Judge Stephan J. Field, who should have recused himself. He had been a friend of Senator Sharon’s, had sat on the State Supreme Court with Judge Terry and was his implacable enemy.

When the ultimate crushing decision was read, both Sarah Althea and Judge Terry became violent. Terry was confined in jail for six months for his outbursts, Sarah Althea for three.

A year after the decision Mr. and Mrs. Terry encountered Judge Field in a railroad station. Terry assaulted the judge, striking him twice, and was shot dead by the judge’s bodyguard, one Dave Neagle, who had served as a deputy sheriff with Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, Arizona.

Mrs. Terry’s conduct in the following years became more and more erratic. She was destitute. She had lost her famous auburn-haired looks, and she was losing her wits as well. Mammy Pleasant took her in, at the Octavia Street mansion, but Sarah Althea became more and more pathetic, and a public nuisance.

Ambrose Bierce, never notable for his compassion, wrote of her:

“The male Californian‌—‌idolater of sex and proud of abasement at the feet of his own female‌—‌has now a fine example of the results entailed by his unnatural worship. Mrs. Terry, traipsing the streets, uncommonly civic, problematically harmless but indubitably daft, is all his own work, and he ought to be proud of her.”

Mammy Pleasant signed the commitment documents.

Gertrude Atherton had an encounter with Bierce in Sunol, where, after having submitted to some savage criticism of her novels, she gained the advantage over him by laughing at his attempt to embrace her. They became fellow columnists on the San Francisco Examiner, but her contempt for her readership was without the wit that Bierce exercised, and she soon returned to New York and her career as a novelist. She and Bierce, however, embarked upon a long correspondence. He became a faithful admirer and critic of her work, and she regarded him as her muse.

Her one-time companion, Sibyl Sanderson, was established as an opera diva of international repute and continued to shock San Franciscans by becoming the mistress of the composer Massenet.

I encountered young Arthur Brittain Sloat at a meeting in New York of the Newspaper Guild, of which I was at that time an officer. He was a reporter working for James Gordon Bennett at the World. Looking at him was like seeing in a mirror not my reflection but the reflection of myself twenty-two years before. He must have thought I was drunk from the confusion of my greeting.

His mother was at that time on her third marriage and her seventh novel, which was a fictionalization of the Rose of Sharon.

Huntington remained Bierce’s chief enemy. Crocker had died in 1888, Stanford in 1893, and Collis B. Huntington became the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1884 he had been able to cross the country entirely on lines he controlled. His dislike of Leland Stanford, which had always smoldered, caught fire in the senatorial election of 1885, when Stanford doublecrossed Huntington’s friend and faithful Railroad ally Aaron A. Sargent to capture the Republican nomination. In 1887 Stanford “trifled” again with Huntington, making a deal with George Hearst and San Francisco boss Chris Buckley to assist Hearst’s future candidacy in return for Democratic support for a second term in the U.S. Senate.

“I don’t forget those who have played me false,” Huntington said.

His chance to strike back at Stanford came when Stanford had overextended financing his son’s memorial, the Leland Stanford Jr. University. Huntington prevented the former governor’s withdrawal of Railroad funds to balance his personal accounts. The Railroad was then under heavy investigation by the government, and Stanford would have been indicted except for the timely decisions of Justice Stephan Field of the State Supreme Court, who had never been known to let down a millionaire friend.

Huntington was to take one more swipe at his old partner. When Stanford died the estate was immediately tied up in lawsuits, the most important of which was that filed by the federal government attaching assets until the Railroad’s $57,000,000 debt was settled. It seemed that the university must close its doors. “Close the circus!” Huntington growled, and let the Stanford estate fight the battle of the Big Four’s liability, which he also, in his time, would have to face.

By Mrs. Stanford’s heroic efforts the university was kept in operation. A friendly judge allowed her to claim professors and staff as personal servants. Race horses were sold, Mrs. Stanford’s household servants and gardeners were dismissed, her carriage let go. The university was kept open despite Huntington’s malignity.

As the cold-hearted old magnate grew older, he became an easy mark for cartoonists, with his bald, double-domed skull, which he kept covered with a rabbinical skullcap. Caricaturists customarily portrayed him and his railroad lines as an octopus.

The electorate had begun to take a different view of laissez-faire capitalism, and the Railroad’s rate structure, which was universally viewed as arbitrary and discriminatory, was widely blamed for the depression of the 1890s. Moreover the Railroad’s second-mortgage governmental bonds were soon to fall due, and Huntington girded his forces for the fight against their payment. He employed representatives in Washington and in state capitals, whose duty it was to “explain” to legislators what was “right.” He insisted on the American privilege of supporting the election of officials whose views coincided with his own. Payments were made when necessary, but he did not view this as bribery. A bribe was a voluntary purchase for personal advancement, the wrongdoing of which he had accused Stanford.

When I wrote a memorial piece on Bierce for the Chronicle, I was pleased to describe his final triumph over Huntington and the Railroad, which had been a long time coming:

William Randolph Hearst sent Bierce to Washington to help the Hearst newspapers fight the Railroad Funding Bill. This Bill would have been the biggest giveaway yet to the Southern Pacific Railroad. The $75,000,000 debt to the U.S. government was to be fobbed off in the form of 2 percent bonds due in 80 years. In effect it was a total gift to the Southern Pacific. Huntington had bought up enough senators, especially those of the Western states, to insure the Bill’s passage.

Bierce immediately went into action in the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Morning Journal, in the style of invective he had perfected, abusing the Railroad and Collis B. Huntington, and praising Senator John T. Morgan, chairman of the senate committee that had summoned Huntington to testify before it, and who embarrassed the president of the Railroad with probing questions.

Bierce wrote, “Huntington has been able to remove his hand from the public’s pocket long enough to raise it over a Bible. In Sacramento the Railroad’s bagmen are as common a sight as the senate pages, but instead of sending lobbyists to Washington to accomplish his crowning achievement of the purchase of the U.S. Senate, Huntington has packed his own baggage full of greenbacks and come to tend to matters himself.”

In trouble in committee, Huntington produced testimonial letters from prominent Californians attesting to the Railroad’s benefits to the state and the extraordinary ethics of its proprietors. Bierce pursued the authors of these testimonials as he had pursued Aaron Jennings. He publicized them in “Bierce’s Black Book,” where their names were broadcast until they recanted. Recant they did. The senate revelations, Huntington’s arrogance and ignorance as shown in the committee hearings, and Bierce’s harpoonings were so shocking that all but two of the testimonials were withdrawn. The senatorial tide turned against the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Huntington encountered Bierce on the steps of the capitol. “How much?” he growled in defeat, and he uttered his familiar judgment, more cynical than Ambrose Bierce had ever been: “Every man has his price!”

“Seventy-five million dollars,” Bierce said in his triumph. “Payable to the U.S. Government!”