October 21 Tuesday – In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam wrote a postcard to Franklin G. Whitmore, who had replied the Capt. Stormfield MS was not in the safe:
If it is gone from the safe, where can it be? In the drawers under the pigeon-holes in the billiard-room? I read it aloud in the billiard room to two friends in 1891 a few days before we sailed. I have not had it in my hands since.
However, it must be in the safe if still in existence. That is where I kept it so many years [MTP].
Sam also replied on a postcard to William Dean Howells’ Oct. 20.
“Yes, keep the MS till you come.
“We are settled & have resumed life. The patient is just the same; it is like watching a thermometer when the weather is not stationary: a degree up, a degree down—repeat indefinitely” [MTP].
Note: the MS referred to was “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy”; it has not survived as a discrete work but may have been incorporated eventually into a version of The Mysterious Stranger [MTHL 2 : 748n1]. Also written was an abortive “Fifty Years Later,” which had Tom & Huck returning to Hannibal at age 60. Hill claims the MS “is one of the very few that, in his entire life, Mark Twain actually may have destroyed” [43].
Chatto & Windus’ Jan. 1, 1904 statement to Clemens shows 2,000 3s.6d. copies of HF were printed, for a total printed to date of 8,500 [1904 Financials file MTP].
Charles Bancroft Dillingham wrote from NY to Sam.
I was so glad to hear from you and to learn that Mrs. Clemens was able to take the homeward journey. We were beginning to get rather worried, and I was talking to Gillette last Saturday, and I will be glad now to let him know the news.
I hope you will be able to go to some of the rehearsals of Huckleberry Finn about Nov. 1st….[MTP].
William C. Van Benthuysen of the NY World wrote Sam a short note: “The Business office withdraws the word ‘now’ to which you object, and I again send you the check, which I hope you will feel that you can accept” [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env. “The World withdraws the obnoxious ‘now’ –I accept the check, & we stand square.”