“‘Don’t you be so discouraged, Johnson,’ I said.  ’We can make things all right again.  We ’ll get the Legislature to repeal this drunk of yours and that’ll set you right up where you were before.  I ’m going over to Carson to-morrow, and I ’ll have the Legislature make a law that will wipe out the whole business and fix everything for you as if you had n’t been drunk at all.’

“Johnson was delighted, but he did n’t feel quite sure about it.  So I had to make him understand that I knew what I was talking about.

“‘It’s all straight,’ I said.  ’They do that every session for somebody.  Why, So-and-So’—­and I mentioned the name of a prominent citizen—­’was on an awful drunk last winter; and just as soon as he sobered up he went right over to Carson and had the Legislature pass a bill repealing his spree, and you know that he is just as much respected as he was before.  I’ll attend to your business myself to-morrow, and then I ’ll publish the whole thing in the paper and everybody will read it and know that you are all right again.  But you must remember one thing, Johnson,’ I said.  ’You must remember that as you are an Indian the Legislature can’t do this for you more than once.  If you were a white man you could have as many drunks repealed as you wanted.  But being an Indian this is your last chance, and you must keep straight after this.’

“Well, the upshot of it was that Johnson put his trust in me; and I flatter myself that I was just the man he needed in the emergency.  You ’ve lived in the West, and you know what the Nevada Legislature is, and always has been.  There never was one that you couldn’t count on to do anything under the sun that tickled its sense of humor.  I thought that bill about Johnson’s drunk would strike ’em in just about the right place, and it did.  They dropped everything else and sent it through with a hurrah.

“There was a long preamble, telling about Johnson Sides’s prominence and influence and the great importance of his retaining the high position in the respect of the community which he had won, and about the misfortune into which he had fallen, and how it was the universal wish that he should be reinstated in public esteem.  And then there was a resolution which declared that Johnson Sides’s drunk should be and was thereby repealed, destroyed, wiped out, for ever and ever, and that all statutes not in accordance with that act were thereby annulled from that time forth.  They passed it through both houses unanimously, and the next day I published the bill verbatim and all the proceedings in our paper.

“Johnson’s face fairly shone with joy when I read it to him.  It was his patent of respectability, and he stowed it away in his breast pocket as carefully as if it had been his passport to heaven.  He carried it there until it was worn out, and then he came after another.  He’s worn out three or four since then, but he always keeps one in his pocket.