reenbacks that were worth next to nothing. Those boys had a
hard time to make both ends meet. Orion's salary was eighteen hundred
dollars a year, and he wouldn't even support his dictionary on it. But
the Irishwoman who had come out on the Governor's staff charged the
menagerie only ten dollars a week apiece for board and lodging. Orion
and I were of her boarders and lodgers; and so, on these cheap terms the
silver I had brought from home held out very well.

[Sidenote: ('62 or '63)]

At first I roamed about the country seeking silver, but at the end of
'62 or the beginning of '63 when I came up from Aurora to begin a
journalistic life on the Virginia City "Enterprise," I was presently
sent down to Carson City to report the legislative session. Orion was
soon very popular with the members of the legislature, because they
found that whereas they couldn't usually trust each other, nor anybody
else, they could trust him. He easily held the belt for honesty in that
country, but it didn't do him any good in a pecuniary way, because he
had no talent for either persuading or scaring legislators. But I was
differently situated. I was there every day in the legislature to
distribute compliment and censure with evenly balanced justice and
spread the same over half a page of the "Enterprise" every morning,
consequently I was an influence. I got the legislature to pass a wise
and very necessary law requiring every corporation doing business in the
Territory to record its charter in full, without skipping a word, in a
record to be kept by the Secretary of the Territory--my brother. All the
charters were framed in exactly the same words. For this record-service
he was authorized to charge forty cents a folio of one hundred words for
making the record; also five dollars for furnishing a certificate of
each record, and so on. Everybody had a toll-road franchise, but no
toll-road. But the franchise had to be recorded and paid for. Everybody
was a mining corporation, and had to have himself recorded and pay for
it. Very well, we prospered. The record-service paid an average of a
thousand dollars a month, in gold.

Governor Nye was often absent from the Territory. He liked to run down
to San Francisco every little while and enjoy a rest from Territorial
civilization. Nobody complained, for he was prodigiously popular, he
had been a stage-driver in his early days in New York or New England,
and had acquired the habit of remembering names