Dorothy and her captors entered the small porch of the chapel and passed into the sacred edifice.  For one like Riel, who had been educated for the priesthood in Lower Canada, it was a strange use to put such a place to.  The scene when they entered almost defies description.  It was crowded with breeds and Indians armed to the teeth with all manner of antiquated weapons.  Most of them wore blue copotes and kept on their unplucked beaver caps or long red tuques.  Haranguing them close to the altar was the great Riel himself, the terror of the Saskatchewan.

He did not look the dangerous, religious fanatic that he was in reality.  He was about five feet seven in height, with red hair and beard.  His face was pale and flabby, and his dark grey eyes, set close together, glowed when he spoke and were very restless.  His nose was slightly aquiline, his neck long, and his lips thick.  His voice, though low and gentle in ordinary conversation, was loud and abrupt now that he was excited.

He was so carried away by the exuberance of his own eloquence when Dorothy and her captors entered, that he still kept on in a state of rapt ecstasy.  His semi-mystical oration was a weird jumble of religion and lawlessness, devout exhortation, riot, plunder, prayer, and pillage.  He extolled the virtues of the murderous Poundmaker and Big Bear.  He said that Mistawasis and Chicastafasin, the chiefs, and some others, were feeble of heart and backsliders, for they had left their reserves to escape being drawn into the trouble.  Crowfoot, head chief of the Blackfoot nation, was protesting his loyalty to the Lieutenant-Governor, and his squaws would one day stone him to death as a judgment.  Fort Pitt, Battleford and Prince Albert must shortly capitulate to them, and then the squaws would receive the white women of those places as their private prisoners to do with as their sweet wills suggested.  Already many of the accursed whites had been slaughtered, as at Duck Lake, for instance, but many more had yet to die.  They must be utterly exterminated, so that the elect might possess the land undisturbed.

At this point he caught sight of the newcomers.  At a sign from him they approached.

“Ha!” he said, with an unctuous accent in his voice, and rubbing his hands like a miserable old Fagin, “Truly the Lord is delivering them into our hands.  What are you, woman?”

But beyond her name Dorothy would at first tell him nothing.  Her captors briefly stated the little they knew concerning her presence in the town.  The self-constituted dictator tried bombast, threats and flattery to gain information from her, but they were of no avail.  His authority being thus disputed by a woman, and his absurd self-esteem ruffled, he gave way to a torrent of abuse, but Dorothy was as if she heard it not.  It was only when Riel was about to give instructions to his “General,” Gabriel Dumont, and more of the members of his staff and “government” to instantly cause a search to be made in the camp for those who might have been with the girl, that she said he might do so if he chose, but it would be useless, as her friends must have entered the Fort an hour ago.