This relief gave the Company a new lease of life and the work, which had never slackened, even though men had to wait for their pay, was forced ahead by the aggressive Van Horne, while Shaughnessy handled every dollar with such consummate skill that it seemed to do the work of two. But the terrific expenditure in construction on the North Shore and through the mountains, caused the twenty odd millions to melt like snow before the sun. Smashing the rocks and levelling up the chasms on the North Shore and finding a sure foundation in shaking and almost bottomless morasses which sucked down material like an insatiable undertow, all meant enormous unforeseen expenditure. The Company would not allow any careless work and, if necessary, the contractors would stay at one spot for months till the road-bed was absolutely secure. Van Horne was rushing to complete the railway, but he was too thorough a railroader to sacrifice security to speed in construction. Expense was of no consequence. He was going to “get the work done right and send in the bills to Stephen and Shaughnessy.” Just at the juncture when the railway seemed in imminent danger of coming to a sudden halt because its coffers were again bare, and the Government was afraid that the country would not stand for any more assistance to be given to what some thought was a wild commercial venture, an event occurred which threw the Canadian Pacific into the limelight as an undertaking of immense Imperial value. That event was the Riel Rebellion, which Van Horne had foreseen as a possibility and concerning which he had warned the powers at Ottawa when he told them that if it did occur, he would carry troops from the East to the prairies in the space of a few days. Sir John Macdonald and the Government, with a strange pertinacity, born of the mysterious red tapeism of Regina officialdom, refused to think such an event possible. However, it came with sudden and deadly emphasis when at Duck Lake, in March, 1885, on the North Saskatchewan, a small force of civilians and police suffered heavily in a sort of rebel ambuscade. Fifteen years before, this same Riel had, at Fort Garry, run amuck, and then it had taken six months for the soldiers under Col. Wolseley, coming by land and water, to reach the scene. Now, in 1885, with the Lakes frozen and no chance of going through the United States with armed men, the whole middle West might be swept by the carnage of semi-savage rebels on the war path. The time had come for Van Horne to play a winning card, and he played it. The Government made frantic appeal to him because months before he had intimated his willingness to help in such an event. But before their appeal was actually known to the general public, Van Horne had trains ready with steam up at the centres in the East where troops would make their points of departure. He knew that there were gaps on the North Shore and that there would be hardships, but to reduce these