The morning list of prisoners at Minneconjou was something over which Stone was nearly breaking his heart. Every night now, in numbers, the men were sneaking off across the stream, lured by the dance music, the sound of clinking glass and soldier chorus and siren laughter. However well the colonel might know his own profession, he was powerless under the law to deal with this question. Here "Skid" had him and the garrison by the throat. With the knowledge that his men were drinking, dicing, and going generally to the devil within those ramshackle walls across the stream, he could neither remove the victims nor dislodge their tempters. Patrols he could send to search the roads, the open prairie, the river bottom, but Skidmore had declared that no armed party could legally cross his threshold, and the courts had backed him. Soldiers roistering in the roadway in front of the dive would dart within doors at sight of the patrol, and the officer, sergeant, or private that entered there left hope behind of fair treatment in the civil courts. Stone tried sending a big sergeant and six stalwart men unarmed, and they came back eventually without coats, collars, or character, none of them without bruises, some of them not without aid. Stone marveled that so many of his men turned up in town drunk, helpless, and in the hands of the local police, with fines imposed by the local magistrates, but that, too, was presently explained. Skid kept a big, twelve-seated "bus" that on busy nights, as the soldiers got well fuddled and completely strapped, he would load up with the drugged and drowsy victims and, instead of driving them over to the fort, would trundle them to town, dump them in front of some saloon, there to be run in by a ready police, and locked up until sober and abject. Then would come their arraignment and the invariable "Five dollars or thirty days." Then their officers would be notified. The fines at first were paid, until it dawned upon Stone that Skid and Silver Hill, both, were in the swindling combination, that after Skidmore had got the last cent of the men there was still a way of squeezing more from the officers. As soon as the fort realized the fact the town ceased to realize the funds, and Skidmore was told to send no more castaways to Silver Hill, so he simply turned them out to take their medicine where once they took their comfort--at the post.