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“After he got out of jail I saw him standing around for several days looking as lordly and unconscious as if he had been worth a million. But the pangs of hunger must have set his wits to work. For pretty soon he appeared on the streets with a wrinkled, decrepit, old Piute tied to a string. He had fastened the string to the old fellow’s arm and he walked behind, holding the other end, but apparently as unconscious of the whole business as if he ‘d been the sole inhabitant of Virginia City. He stalked along with his head in the air, and the old fellow trotted out in front until Johnson yanked the string. Then they stopped and the old man began to beg money of the passers-by, and Johnson turned his back on his companion and looked off down the street, proudly pretending that they weren’t together. If any one gave the old man money Johnson took it at once and it disappeared somewhere inside his blanket. Johnson and his prime minister, we used to call the combination. But Johnson would n’t beg for himself. Oh, no! He was too proud. It’s a fact, I never knew or heard of Johnson Sides himself asking for money. But he kept his prime minister trotting around for several weeks, and he never let go the string or let the old fellow keep a two-bit piece.

“But Johnson was reformed at last; and it was the power of the press that did it. Talk about the press as a moral agent! Why, bless your soul, when one newspaper can reform a whole Piute Indian and make a man of him–well, the question’s settled, then and there, and the pulpit and the platform ain’t in it after that.

“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.’