He was out with an irrigation crew, surveying levels, and in a few months had become obsessed by all things Southwest Indian. He wore moccasins and a bracelet studded with turquoise, and he could chant like a cold Navajo on his way home from a Yabachai.
“Ah’m goin’ to get me a gourd-drum, an’ go in for ‘singing,’ ” he told me, when we had become better acquainted, and he demonstrated the eerie half-croon-half-yodel of the Medicine Man. “Say, Nultsose! have yo’ heard them?—Medicine ‘sings’?” [[66]]
This was my first intimation that a title attached to my position.
“Nultsose—”
He explained it as Navajo for paper or writing, hence; one who writes on or issues papers pertaining to the mysteries of white men’s wholly unnecessary accounting. Nearly all clerks wear spectacles, as I did, and one would think that the Indian, naming his own so often because of infirmities, would have seized on this defect for a name. But not so; the check, order, issue-script, permit, or warrant, the paper, the “nultsose,” is the important thing to him. It means money in hard dollars, authority perhaps, demand for goods, leave to go on a journey with recommendation or safe-conduct; or, if fortune has waned, summons to the Chief.
“And if yo’ go to a ‘sing,’ Nultsose, remember to take change, an’ don’t give the squaws more’n two bits at a time. Yo’ll have to dance with ’em, yeh know, an’ instead of thankin’ ’em, yo’ pay ’em. Hand out a dollar, an’ Good-night—they keep the change. Now old Beck-a-shay Thlani is inviting to one sometime soon. It’ll be a reg’lar hoe-down, an’ we’ll go.”
The doctor was present, and he grinned uncomfortably. The Nahtahni, stretched in his hammock, rubbed his wig and grunted.
“Ah! yo’-all come too,” urged Roberts; “It’ll be fun. They all know me, and I’ll do the interpreting. Every old shemah with a dotter has her eye cast my way, anyhow. They pick out the handsome boys for the weddings at ‘sings.’ I’ll have to get me a Piute wedding-basket, though, next pay-day. There’s a trader over at Red Lake who’s got my order for it.”
The doctor cautioned me later not to be too hasty in [[67]]this matter, and I perceived that he had reason for timidity.
“They’ll get you,” he declared. “They never fail to land a fellow; and then he has to prance like a fool before five thousand Indians. That’s all right for Roberts, ’cause he’ll wind up a squaw man; but I’m advising you.”