"By Jove, Jerry, it looks so to me, too! He has got the fear of death on these chappies.Look at his face.He looks like the very devil."It was true.Cameron's face was gray, with purple blotches, and distorted with passion, his eyes were blazing with fury, his manner one of reckless savage abandon.There was but little delay.The rumors of vengeance stored up for the raiders, the paralyzing effect of the failure of the raid, the condemnation of a guilty conscience, but above all else the overmastering rage of Cameron, made anything like resistance simply impossible.In a very few minutes Cameron had his prisoners in line and was riding to the Fort, where he handed them over to the Superintendent for justice.
That business done, he found his patrol-work pressing upon him with a greater insistence than ever, for the runners from the half-breeds and the Northern Indians were daily arriving at the reserves bearing reports of rebel victories of startling magnitude.But even without any exaggeration tales grave enough were being carried from lip to lip throughout the Indian tribes.Small wonder that the irresponsible young Chiefs, chafing under the rule of the white man and thirsting for the mad rapture of fight, were straining almost to the breaking point the authority of the cooler older heads, so that even that subtle redskin statesman, Crowfoot, began to fear for his own position in the Blackfeet confederacy.
As the days went on the Superintendent at Macleod, whose duty it was to hold in statu quo that difficult country running up into the mountains and down to the American boundary-line, found his task one that would have broken a less cool-headed and stout-hearted officer.
The situation in which he found himself seemed almost to invite destruction.On the eighteenth of March he had sent the best of his men, some twenty-five of them, with his Inspector, to join the Alberta Field Force at Calgary, whence they made that famous march to Edmonton of over two hundred miles in four and a half marching days.From Calgary, too, had gone a picked body of Police with Superintendent Strong and his scouts as part of the Alberta Field Force under General Strange.Thus it came that by the end of April the Superintendent at Fort Macleod had under his command only a handful of his trained Police, supported by two or three companies of Militia--who, with all their ardor, were unskilled in plain-craft, strange to the country, new to war, ignorant of the habits and customs and temper of the Indians with whom they were supposed to deal--to hold the vast extent of territory under his charge, with its little scattered hamlets of settlers, safe in the presence of the largest and most warlike of the Indian tribes in Western Canada.
Every day the strain became more intense.A crisis appeared to be reached when the news came that on the twenty-fourth of April General Middleton had met a check at Fish Creek, which, though not specially serious in itself, revealed the possibilities of the rebel strategy and gave heart to the enemy immediately engaged.
And, though Fish Creek was no great fight, the rumor of it ran through the Western reserves like red fire through prairie-grass, blowing almost into flame the war-spirit of the young braves of the Bloods, Piegans and Sarcees and even of the more stable Blackfeet.
Three days after that check, the news of it was humming through every tepee in the West, and for a week or more it took all the cool courage and steady nerve characteristic of the Mounted Police to enable them to ride without flurry or hurry their daily patrols through the reserves.
At this crisis it was that the Superintendent at Macleod gathered together such of his officers and non-commissioned officers as he could in council at Fort Calgary, to discuss the situation and to plan for all possible emergencies.The full details of the Fish Creek affair had just come in.They were disquieting enough, although the Superintendent made light of them.On the wall of the barrack-room where the council was gathered there hung a large map of the Territories.The Superintendent, a man of small oratorical powers, undertook to set forth the disposition of the various forces now operating in the West.
"Here you observe the main line running west from Regina to the mountains, some five hundred and fifty miles," he said."And here, roughly, two hundred and fifty miles north, is the northern boundary line of our settlements, Prince Albert at the east, Battleford at the center, Edmonton at the west, each of these points the center of a country ravaged by half-breeds and bands of Indians.To each of these points relief-expeditions have been sent.
"This line represents the march of Commissioner Irvine from Regina to Prince Albert--a most remarkable march that was too, gentlemen, nearly three hundred miles over snow-bound country in about seven days.That march will be remembered, I venture to say.The Commissioner still holds Prince Albert, and we may rely upon it will continue to hold it safe against any odds.Meantime he is scouting the country round about, preventing Indians from reinforcing the enemy in any large numbers.
