Riel, who had at first turned round with an angry exclamation on his lips, seemed somewhat startled when he saw the weird figures before him, for he, too, like the breeds and Indians, was not without a species of superstitious dread of the manikin and his strange attendant.  The executioner glared at the intruder angrily.

“Wait, you just wait one bit—­coquin, rascal, fool!” gasped Pepin, pulling up within a few yards of him, and shaking his stick.  “You will not kill that man, I say you will not!  I know you, Leon Heinault; it is because this man will stop you from doing as your vile cousin did that you want to shoot him.”  He turned to Riel.  “Tell him to put down that gun!”

But Riel had the dignity of his position to maintain before the crowd, and although he would not meet the black, bead-like eyes of the dwarf, with no little bluster, he said—­

“This man is a spy, and he must die.  He is of the hated English, and it is the will of the Lord that His people, the metis, inherit the land.”

“And I say, Louis Riel, that it is the will of the Lord that this man shall not die!” reiterated the dwarf, emphasising his words with a flourish of his stick.

Then an uncanny thing happened that to this day the metis speak about with bated breath, and the Indians are afraid to mention at all.  Heinault, who during the wrangle had concluded that his quarry was about to slip through his hands, took the opportunity of raising his gun to the shoulder.  But ere he could pull the trigger there was the whistle of a bullet, and he fell dead in the snow.  Then, somewhere from the wooded bluffs—­for the echoes deceived one—­there came the distant ring of a rifle.

The perspiration was standing in beads on Pasmore’s forehead, for he would have been more than human had not the strain of the terrible ordeal told upon him.  From a dogged abandonment to his fate, a ray of hope lit up the darkness that seemed to have closed over him.  It filtered through his being, but he feared to let it grow, knowing the bitterness of hope’s extinction.  But the blue through the pines seemed more beautiful, and the snow on the crest of the ridge scintillated more cheerily.

As the would-be executioner fell, something like a moan of consternation ran through the crowd.  The dwarf was the only one who seemed to take the tragedy as a matter of course.  He was quick to seize the opportunity.

“It is as the Lord has willed,” he said simply, pointing to the body.

But Riel, visibly taken aback by this sudden contretemps, knew only too well that his cause and influence would be imperilled if he allowed this manikin, of whom his people stood so much in awe, to get the better of him; and he was too quick-witted not to know exactly what to do.  He turned to his officers, and immediately a number of breeds started out to scour the bluffs.  Then he called upon five breeds and Indians by name