So I was browsing through Mark Twain's first book, lurking
and enjoying it...
"When there has been a long season of quiet, people are slow
to wet their hands in blood; but once blood is spilled,
cutting and shooting come easy."
~ Mark Twain, Roughing It.
I like remembering the Father of American literature carried
a gun while he lived and wrote in San Francisco. A red-headed
thirty year old loose on the American frontier, Sam Clemens
made his bones in San Francisco. By the time he deaded east
again, he was famous as a California writer.
Then I came across his story "The Cayote."
"The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton,
with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy
tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of
forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long,
sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He
has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a
living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always
hungry."
My favorite Mark Twain story.
We know Hammett read Life on the Mississippi. That's where he
got Brigid's name. The widow with the coffin filled with
jewels.
But then I saw Sam Spade as the Cayote.
Spade is always hungry? Hmmm.
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