August 4 Tuesday – While Sam had been laid up with a cold he invited Clement T. Rice to write local items for the Enterprise, even though he was a Union reporter. Rice played a trick and published an “apology” from Sam to Rice. “An Apology Repudiated” appeared in the Enterprise by Sam:
We are to blame for giving the ‘Unreliable’ an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result. We simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday’s paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass rabbit of the Sierras. We have done [ET&S 1: 267-9].