When they entered the house, Lizzie was there, smiling cheerily enough on Hector, whom she knew well by this time—Lizzie, in a new striped skirt, sharing her man's prosperity.
"It couldn't be," Hector decided. Thereupon he placed what he had heard aside, in one of those innumerable pigeonholes of memory, where facts and incidents are unconsciously stowed away till wanted.
In the morning Welland gave him surprise No. 2.
"Hec', you're interested in the suppression of the liquor traffic," he asserted. "I don't know if you've come across this arrangement, though. It's one of the neatest things devised yet."
He handed him that common relic of the prairie, a buffalo skull.
"The horns, as you know, are hollow. The tips have been cleverly cut off and made into caps, to act as corks. You pour in the whiskey and put the caps on. Perfectly tight—perfectly safe! Load a cart up with buffalo skulls, same as all the Indians are doing now, mix a few of these among 'em and you can get your stuff into any reserve in the country without being caught. Who'd suspect a wagonload of buffalo skulls?"
Hector examined it, brain busy.
"Where did you get it?"
"One of those In'juns you arrested about two weeks ago gave it to me. I did him a good turn once. Want it?"
"I might get it when I come back. Here's how!"