CHAPTER V.

Some time before the outbreak, Riel, in company with a
half-breed, had gone in the autumn shooting chicken along
the prairies. The hunting-ground was many miles distant
from Riel's home, so that the intention of the sportsmen
was to trust themselves to the hospitality of some
farm-house in the neighbourhood. The settlers were all,
with two or three exceptions, Metis; and the door of the
half-breed is never shut against traveller or stranger.
One late afternoon, as the two men were passing along
the prairie footpath towards a little settlement, they
heard at some distance over the plain, a girl singing.
The song was exquisitely worded and touching, and the
singer's voice was sweet and limpid as the notes of a
bobolink. M. Riel, like Mohammed, El Mahdi, and other
great patrons of race and religion, is strong of will;
but he is weaker than a shorn Samson when a lovely woman
chooses to essay a conquest. So he marvelled much to his
companion as to who the singer might be, and proposed
that both should leave the path and join the unknown fair
one. A few minutes walk brought the two beyond a small
poplar grove, and there, upon a fallen tree-bole, in the
delicious cool of the autumn evening, they saw the
songstress sitting. She was a maiden of about eighteen
years, and her soft, silky-fine, dark hair was over her
shoulders. In girlish fancy she had woven for herself a
crown of flowers out of marigolds and daisies, and put
it upon her head. She did not hear the footsteps of the