“We did n’t try to reform him—­in fact, we ’d rather have kept him as he was at first.  He was more amusing.  But the aspirations of Johnson’s soul were too much for us.  I used to give him money sometimes—­he was sure to do something if he got drunk that was worth writing up—­and so he got into the habit of coming to our newspaper office whenever he felt the need of more cash.  He did n’t ask for anything, and he always made you feel that he was doing you a great favor in accepting any stray chicken-feed you might have about your clothes.  He just sat around like a bronzed and blanketed statue of Caesar, or Alexander, or Napoleon Bonaparte.  Not one of the whole lot of them ever looked more as if he owned the whole earth than Johnson did after he ’d sat there three hours waiting for somebody to give him two bits or a chew of tobacco.

“I found out after a while that he could give me scraps of news about the Indians over at Pyramid Lake or in the city that were worth making into local items, and I always paid him for them.  Nobody ever saw a prouder Indian than Johnson was the first day I did that.  I marked the paragraphs with a blue pencil and gave him a copy of the paper, and he carried it around with him until it was worn out.  The money I gave him for them he kept in his pocket for two whole days.  But at last there was a big poker game behind a barn—­six bucks down from Pyramid Lake with five dollars apiece, and it was too much for Johnson.  His proudly earned silver went into the pot with the rest.

“Johnson brought up items every day after that, and soon began to feel himself one of the profession and a man of consequence.  He always brought two or three other bucks with him to see his importance and be impressed by his superiority.  While they stood against the wall or squatted in a corner Johnson would take a chair at a dignified distance from me and begin, ’Now, you make ‘um paper talk.’  And he always ended his account with the emphatic command, ’Now, you make ’um paper talk straight.’

“But his information was not always ‘straight.’  He had all the instincts of the modern and progressive journalist, and he did n’t hesitate to fake when news was scarce and he wanted money.  For after he joined the newspaper profession he gave up begging by proxy and allowed his prime minister to beg on his own account and keep his own earnings.

“Well, it was n’t long after Johnson’s entrance into literature until he discarded his blanket and appeared in a coat.  The other Indians began to regard him with awe-struck admiration.  Every afternoon he waited in the office until the paper came out, and then he marched off with a copy in which his ‘talk’ was marked.  He showed this to every Indian he saw, and together they admired it with the paper wrong side up, sidewise, and every other way.  Johnson’s special friends among the whites were similarly favored.  He would hand the paper with a magnificent air, point a dirty finger to a marked paragraph, and say, ’Make ‘um paper talk—­me!’