Will he do it?
I thought I should burst with amazement! Such a cruel, heartless charge! I never had seen Cochin China! I never had heard of Wakawak! I didn't know a plantain-patch from a kangaroo! I did not know what to do.

I was crazed and helpless.

I let the day slip away without doing anything at all.

The next morning the same paper had this--nothing more: SIGNIFICANT .-- Mr.

Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively silent about the Cochin China perjury.
[Mem .-- During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."] Next came the Gazette, with this: WANTED TO KNOW .-- Will the new candidate for Governor deign to explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote for him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these things having been invariably found on Mr.Twain's person or in his "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and feathered him, and rode him on a rail; and then advised him to leave a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp.
Will he do this?
Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that?
For I never was in Montana in my life.
[After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as, "Twain, the Montana Thief."] I got to picking up papers apprehensively--much as one would lift a desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it.
One day this met my eye: THE LIE NAILED .-- By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan, Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr.Snub Rafferty and Mr.Catty Mulligan, of Water Street, it is established that Mr.Mark Twain's vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-bearer, Blank J.Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal and gratuitous LIE, without a shadow of foundation in fact.
It is disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their graves, and defiling their honored names with slander.
When we think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful vengeance upon the traducer.