CHAPTER VII.
FIGHT AND FLIGHT.
The year 1815 was a year of world-wide disaster.

Napoleon's Europe-shadowing wings had for years been over that continent and he like a ravenous bird had left marks of his ravages among the most prominent European nations.

The world had a breathing spell for a short time with Napoleon a virtual prisoner in Elba, but now in March of this year he broke from the perch where he had been tethered and all Europe was again in terror.

The nations were thunderstruck; the alarm was deepened by the appearance of Olber's great comet, and in their superstition the ignorant were panic-stricken, while the more religious and informed saw in these terrible events the scenes pictured in the Apocalypse and maintained that the battle of Armageddon was at hand.

The epoch-marking battle of Waterloo in June of this year was sufficiently near the picture of blood painted in the Revelation to satisfy the credulous.
But in a remote corner of Rupert's Land, where the number of the combatants was small and the conditions exceedingly primitive the comet was alarming enough.