What the body of the people had feared in the tightening of the legal restrictions by the new laws and new officials, did actually take place. The French half-breeds were, as we have seen, chiefly given to hunting. In theory, the Hudson's Bay Company possessed _all hunting rights under their charter_. A French-Canadian, Larant, and another half-breed also, had the furs, which they had hunted for, forcibly taken from them by legal authority, while in a third case an offender against the game laws had been actually deported to York Factory. Alarm was now general among the French half-breeds. Hitherto the English half-breeds had been loyal to the Company. Alexander Ross gives an incident worth repeating as to how even the English half-breeds became rebellious. He says: "One of the Company's officers, residing at a distance, had placed two of his daughters at the boarding-school in the Settlement. An English half-breed, a comely well-behaved young man, of respectable connections, was paying his addresses to one of these young ladies, and had asked her in marriage. The young lady had another suitor in the person of a Scotch lad, but her affections were in favor of the former, while her guardian, the chief officer in Red River, preferred the latter. In his zeal to succeed in the choice he had made for the young lady, this gentleman sent for the half-breed and reprimanded him for aspiring to the hand of a lady, accustomed, as he expressed it, to the first society. The young man, without saying a word, put on his hat and walked out of the room; but being the leading man among his countrymen, the whole community took fire at the insult. 'This is the way,' said they, 'that we half-breeds are despised and treated.' From that time they clubbed together in high dudgeon and joined the French Malcontents against their rulers. The French half-breeds made a flag for use on the plains called 'The Papineau Standard.' It is plain that rightly or wrongly, Recorder Thom has a thorny path to tread." CHAPTER XIX. A HALF-BREED PATRIOT.