When, accordingly, Johnny Kitsap did the Elliott National the honor of preferring its employment to that of the government, the president did not laugh, but, with all due formality, laid his application before the board, and suggested that a bank which loaned money to Indians might in time find it convenient to have a clerk who could interpret not only the language of the Siwash customers, but the more subtle emotions of the Indian heart. And so Johnny came by his job, and the bank had as little cause to regret it as the first loan to old Peter Coultee, which was the original cause of it.
To the young Indian, the bank became a magic house. The brass-barred windows before the tellers; the wire cages; the tiled floors; the great doors of the vault, with the tick-tick-tick of the time locks; all seemed to him to be parts of a powerful chieftain's house. The vault itself, with its store of gold and currency, and its cabinet of mysterious treaties, which the tyee made with the busy white men, filled him with awe. This was the white man's magic treasure-chest, wherein money bred money. No one bought or sold, so far as he could see, yet this treasure-chest paid salaries, distributed profits, and always continued full. With his imagination thus enlisted in firing his work with the zest of play, it is no wonder that he proved an apt pupil and in a rapidly flying trio of years had filled various positions and had earned high appreciation.
With his entrance upon the duties of collection clerk, Kitsap became the credit man on all "red paper." Every bit of Indian business received the approval of the Chief before the discount committee would act upon it. Thus the young Indian became surely, even if indirectly, a power on the reservation, where the tribal leaders regarded him as being at heart a white man and continued to address him quizzingly as Italapas (The Coyote That Wanders). Kitsap maintained a modest room in Seattle, enjoyed the privileges of an athletic club, owned a one-twentieth interest in a yacht, and, out on the reservation, kept a cayuse in father Kitsap's corral and a suit of Indian finery in father Kitsap's house. Thus he zigzagged across the borderland of civilization and led a most picturesque, but strictly honorable, double life.
Kitsap had been four years in the bank when three hop-buyers from St. Louis attempted to raid the White River hop fields in advance of picking and to buy the entire crop of the valley at fourteen cents a pound. The raid had progressed far towards success when Kitsap accidentally heard of it.
The Indian hop-growers of the reservation had made their fall estimates, Kitsap had inspected their fields and approved their items, and some ten thousand dollars in "red paper" was entered on the books of the Elliott Bay National Bank, the loans to be secured by the warehouse receipts on hops. Kitsap had spent the first Sunday of the picking on the reservation, greeting friends who had come on their annual pilgrimage to the hop fields from other reservations; and early on Monday morning he was on the way to take a train for Seattle, when Peter Coultee's cayuse overtook him, bearing Peter Coultee's oldest son.
"Good morning, Italapas. Is your bank short of money?" called the young Indian, with enough dire suggestion in his tone to start a Wall Street panic.
Kitsap faced his questioner. "It has more gold than the son of Coultee can count," he retorted sharply.
"Then why is Lamson, who owns the largest fields of all the white men in the valley, saying that the bank will not loan him enough to pay the pickers?"
Lamson, who was wealthy, as ranchers go, was a heavy client of the Elliott Bay National, but, since he was a white man, his accounts were unknown to Kitsap. The bank clerk was thus taken at a disadvantage and could not give a direct answer. But, desiring to learn what he could, he bantered the younger Indian to talk on, and listened carefully, that his words might be carried to the cashier.
"Lamson is paying two picking tickets out of every three in cash; for the third ticket he gives an order on the stores in the village. When the pickers complain, he laughs and says that the bank has loaned the Indians so much that it cannot lend him the little he needs. Peter Coultee sends word to you: Let Italapas run to the bank and count the gold." Then the younger Indian smiled suggestively, whirled his cayuse, and rode away.