March 2 Wednesday — In Hamilton, Bermuda Sam wrote to Albert B. Paine in Redding, Conn.
Dear Paine: / We sent you a list of the checks but failed the one we finished with therefore we will rectify this blunder by making a new list & bringing it down to date.
The checks begin with Jan. 10th and run to & include Feb, 29th
$50.00 $19.28
18.60 29.56
25.92 44.00
3800.00 23.48
52.59 25.25
19.40 57.73
12.00 23.63
38.41
50,00
50.00
Please refrain from limiting your postage to two cents. I have to pay 35 cents additional when the letter reaches here. Moreover—which is a still more serious matter—there is a delay here of 24 hours before the delivery of such a letter,
Sometime or other I am going to die, & I want you & Stanchfield & Lark to be sharpely on the lookout at that time because it will them begin to rain swindles & forgeries from the Ashcroft camp: theiving documents purporting to date back to the days of that power of attorney but really concocted since.
Did the last power of attorney abrogate the 1907 one? If it didn’t the 1907 one is still in force isn’t it?
The forgery published by Ashcroft in the Times & the tobacco-puff forgery indicate that Ashcroft has a supply of genuine signatures of mine in his possession on blank sheets of paper for I never signed either of those things. On this suspicision could I examine his premises with a search-warrant?
How much money has the Mark Twain Co. in bank? / Yours ever / S. L. C. / per. HSA [MTP].
Sam’s copy of Essays on Modern Novelists (1910) by William Lyon Phelps was signed by another hand: “S. L.
Clemens / from / Wm Lyon Phelps / 2 March 1910” [Gribben 542]. Note: see also Dec. 1909 entry for another Phelps book.