February 23 Tuesday – Sam’s PS added to the letter to Karl Gerhardt written by Livy the day before:

Here is a letter from Pond which may possibly solve the difficulty. You may write him, for me, & say I would do almost anything for him except go on the infernal platform again. I loathe it with a deathless loathing, & God knows that is the plain unexaggerated truth. And yet I will choke down this loathing & appear in his Galaxy for ten minutes gratis & pay my own expenses, on one condition, & one only: to wit: that he sell the Beecher bust for $500 (or any price he pleases, so that you get $500…). He can sell it to H.W. Sage or Mrs. Beach [the rumored adulteress with Beecher!], or some of those people without much trouble [MTP].

Showing that he did not fully trust Pond at this point, Sam insisted that Gerhardt had to show him the money, not merely a promise to pay, before he would join the “Galaxy” (a lecture/reading promotion of Pond’s at the time). Sam added that he said this to Gerhardt “privately” and that he would not commit to more than ten minutes. Note: Sam still had the bust in 1891 [Scharnhorst, p.136].

Sam also wrote to President Grover Cleveland, enclosing a newspaper clipping of “A DISGRACE TO CIVILIZATION,” a report of a Silver City, New Mexico bounty on Apache scalps. Such an offer would make nearly any Indian “a victim to the cupidity of reckless cowboys or outlaw frontiermen” [MTP].

Clarence C. Buel for Century Magazine wrote Sam a short note congratulating him on the “new book, but how will it be good for us unless you let us have a slice of it?” Buel asked if they might say Sam wrote the “Universal Tinker” in an editorial note quoting the Kansas circular (see Aug. 6 entry) [MTP].