Of Harrison’s barn, with its muster Of flags festooned over the wall, Of the candles that shed their soft lustre And tallow on headdress and shawl; Of the steps that we took to one fiddle, Of the dress of my queer vis-à-vis, And how I once went down the middle With the man who shot Sandy McGee. Bret Harte: “Her Letter” Among employees of the Desert Indian Service, the Marylander is a rarity. Back in Maryland the Indian Service is unknown, all readers of the Sun-paper believing that Indians were originally designed by Buffalo Bill. So when a lad seated himself on my porch one night, and announced: “Why, Ah’m from Maheland too; yes, indeed!” it rather struck me where I ought to have lived. I was eating at the mess then. 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’?” 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.