“He finally got the schoolhouse finished, corralled the Indian brats, and after the school was started visited it three times a week, when he did n’t go every day.  If any of the youngsters showed signs of mutiny, all the teacher had to do was to threaten to call in Johnson Sides, and immediately peace became profound.  For by that time he had more influence among the Indians, big and little, than anybody else, white or red.  They looked up to him with a veneration which he accepted as his right as calmly as he had formerly taken the quarters and half-dollars his prime minister had begged for him.

“That schoolhouse was the last stealing he ever did, even by proxy, and pretty soon he quit getting drunk.  He has never given up poker entirely but he has quit gambling away everything he gets, and only joins in a social game now and then, when he is flush, as any gentleman might.

“He was a good deal of a man, was Johnson, and everybody respected him and was glad to help him along.  He worked and earned money, and saved a little, and proved himself quite capable, and was clean and decent and respectable.  People liked to employ him, for he was industrious and sober.  That is, he was sober for a long time.  There must have been five or six years in which Johnson was never even tipsy.  He was mighty proud of himself and his good reputation, and when he did fall it hurt him bad.

“For fall he did, at last, when a big enough temptation came along.  And then he got whizzing, whooping, roaring drunk.  It was a wilder, madder, more devilish drunk than any he had ever taken in the old days when he was only a dirty Piute buck, without ambitions or achievements.  It seemed as if he were making up for all the time he had lost while he was respectable, and condensing into one all the drunks he might have taken and had n’t.

“He kept it up for three weeks.  Part of the time he was with the Indians, part in Virginia City, and part in Carson.  How he managed to escape arrest is more than I can tell, and how it happened that he did n’t massacre the whole population of Nevada is still more of a mystery.  He had fights with Indians and with whites, with men who were drunk and men who were sober, and they drew guns, knives, and fists.  But Johnson didn’t get hurt, and nobody else got killed.

“After it was all over and he had sobered up, Johnson came to me and he was so repentant and humiliated that, I declare, I never felt so sorry for anybody in all my life.  He thought it was all up with him, that he had ruined all his good repute and influence, that nobody would ever believe him, or trust him, or respect him after that, and that it was quite useless for him to try to be a good Indian again.  Of course he did n’t put it in so many words—­he expressed more by gestures and looks and grunts than by words—­but that was the meaning of it all.

“I felt so sorry for him that I made up my mind I ’d give him a lift; and as I began to talk and try to encourage him I had an inspiration that was just the thing.