ted a bullet the friend of the conjurer, with a
great pretence of awe, asked to see it, and holding it in his hand said,
"This is the bullet that the familiar spirit will turn aside."

Mr Ross let him look at it, and saw him handling it with much apparent
reverence, but he also saw him quickly and deftly change it for another
bullet.

"That's your game, is it?" said Mr Ross but not out loud. After a
little more humbuggery the bullet was handed back to be dropped into the
muzzle of the gun.

If Mr Ross's thoughts could have been heard they would have been
something like this:

"I have seen through that little trick, and will show you that two can
play at that game."

And so without exciting the suspicion of the Indian, whose trick he had
detected, he changed the bullet for another, and dropped it into the
gun. When the wadding was driven in and placed upon it, the confederate
of the conjurer asked for the privilege of being allowed also to help
ram it down. Mr Ross saw his meaning and cheerfully granted it. The
weapon was now loaded and ready for use. All this time the drumming and
the conjuring had continued with all their accompaniments of howls and
shrieks.

In a short time a shrill, low whistle, like the call of some bird, was
heard, and Mr Ross observed that it was from the lips of the old Indian
who had pretended to examine the bullet with such awe, but who had in
reality exchanged it for a perfectly harmless one. He and the conjurer
were associates in their trickery. The bullet had been made in this
way: A pair of bullet moulds had been heated quite hot, and then some
bear's fat, which is like lard, had been put inside of them. Holding
the moulds shut, and placing them in very cold water, they kept turning
them around until the melted fat had hardened into a thin shell exactly
the size of a bullet. Then a small puncture was made through this thin
casing of fat, and the interior carefully filled up with fine sand. It
was not difficult then to stop up the orifice with a little fat. It was
then carefully coloured like a bullet, and at a distance could hardly be
distinguished from one. When put in a gun and well pounded with a
ramrod, of course, it would break all to pieces, and when fired at
anything like an ordinary distance for ball firing would be perfectly
harmless.

But Mr Ross's cleverness had been too much for the rogues, and so he
had changed the bogus affair for a genuine bullet of lead.