“Their arrival was a signal for a fresh outburst on the part of the Indians. In their nomadic life the members of this band had not yet, to put it literally, run up against the law as personified by the North-West Mounted Police. They knew them by reputation to be firm, hard-dealing men whose hand was heavy upon the wrong-doer, but they had no practical experience from which to learn caution. So they surrounded the two guardians of law and order, jeering at them, backing their ponies into the police horses, and otherwise trying to discompose them. The sergeant and the constable, in their scarlet tunics, with the smart-looking pill-box forage caps set at an angle on their heads, meanwhile sat still, the former reading his order, which was that Pie-a-Pot must break camp and take the northward trail. “To this command the chief insolently refused to listen. The sergeant pulled out his watch. ‘I will give you fifteen minutes,’ he said calmly. ‘If by the end of that time you haven’t begun to comply with the order, we shall make you.’ The quarter of an hour passed without any sign of a move being made. Pie-a-Pot sat in front of his tent and smoked. Round him and the policemen had gathered all the rest of the tribe, ‘bucks,’ squaws and children, most of them yelling abuse and urging on the bolder spirits among them to still further exhibitions of defiance. The firing of rifles almost in the faces of the red-coats was one form of sport indulged in, but it was of no avail. “ ‘Time’s up!’ said the sergeant, replacing his watch in his pocket. Then that amazing man dismounted, threw the reins of his horse to his companion, and walked over to Pie-a-Pot’s tepee. One kick of his foot at the key-pole and the painted buffalo-skin covering collapsed. Ignoring the shrieks of the discomfited squaws thereunder, and the threats of the men, the sergeant proceeded through the camp, kicking out key-pole after key-pole until all the tents had been overthrown. ‘Now git!’ was what he said—or might have said, in the absence of any exact record of his utterances. And it is some tribute to his sagacity that Pie-a-Pot did so.” There was not, it will be noted, any real fight left in the Indians; but this could not be said of the allied race, the Half-Breeds. They were at that time on the eve of their rebellion; and it is interesting to note that the C.P.R. was completed in time to be of service in that affair. On May 18, 1885, the last rail was laid in the line skirting Lake Superior, and the very next day the Montreal artillery militia passed over that line on their way to assist in suppressing the Riel rising.