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