“Oh! but I’d packed them so carefully,” Dorothea answered with a knowing smile. “Come, let’s have a look—but you’ll be careful, won’t you?”
All three set to work but they had not gone far when Dorothea had to repeat her warning.
“Look out for that. Cousin April,” she said, as the older girl took a tightly rolled silk parasol out of the trunk.
“It’s mighty pretty,” April remarked, looking at it curiously, “but not very perishable. I don’t see why I need be ’specially careful of it.”
“Open it over the bed,” Dorothea advised, and, when her suggestion was followed, a shower of pills fell out.
“Oh!” cried April and Harriot in one breath. “You hid contraband in it. What are these, Dorothea?”
“Opium pills!” was the answer. “I read in the papers that the poor Southern soldiers had little to stop the pain of their wounds, so I brought as much as I could. It isn’t very easy to get in Washington, though I sent to a lot of chemists’ shops so I wouldn’t be suspected.”
“That’s fine!” exclaimed April. “We’ve had an awful time about opium. Last year it rained just at the wrong time and our rows of poppies had very few flowers on them. We have been very short of it since.”
“And it’s a dreadfully sticky task to get the opium,” Harriot explained, twisting up her face. “We have to pick the poppy heads when they’re ripe and pierce them with a coarse needle. Then we have to catch the gum in a cup and let it dry. We’re hoping to get a lot this summer.”
Meanwhile, as they talked, the unpacking went on, and presently April held up a beautiful French doll of huge proportions.