Part 3

A splash of oars among the rushes, and the shock of a boat against the stairs, recalled him to the house. Edwin ran joyfully down the steps, and gave a hand to Mr. Bowen.

"We are not all here now," the old gentleman said. "Your father stuck by the coach, and he would have his daughters with him, afraid of an open boat on a night like this."

Then Edwin felt a hand in the dark, which he knew was Cuthbert's; and heard Mr. Hirpington's cheery voice exclaiming, "Which is home first--boat or coach?"

"Hard to say," answered Dunter, as the coach drove down the road at a rapid pace, followed by a party of roadmen with pickaxe on shoulder, coming on with hasty strides and a resolute air about them, very unusual in men returning from a hard day's labour.

The coach drew up, and Mr. Lee was the first to alight. He looked sharply round, evidently counting heads.

"All here, all right," answered Mr. Hirpington. "Safe, safe at home, as I hope you will all feel it," he added, in his heartiest tones.

There was no exact reply. His men gathered round him, exclaiming, "We heard the war-cry from the Rota Pah. There's mischief in the wind to-night. So we turned our steps the other way and waited for the coach, and all came on together."

"It is a row among the Maoris themselves," put in Dunter, "as that lad can tell you."

The man looked sceptical. A new chum, as fresh arrivals from the mother country are always termed, and a youngster to boot, what could he know?

Mr. Hirpington stepped out from the midst of the group and laid his hand on Mr. Lee's shoulder, who was bending down to ask Edwin what all this meant, and drew him aside.

"I trust, old friend," he said, "I have not blundered on your behalf, but all the heavy luggage you sent on by packet arrived last week, and I, not knowing how to take care of it, telegraphed to headquarters for permission to put it in the old school-house until you could build your own. I thought to do you a service; but if our dusky neighbours have taken offence, that is the cause, I fear."

Mr. Lee made a sign to his children to go in-doors. Edwin led his sisters up the terrace-steps, and came back to his father. The coach was drawn inside the gate, and the bar was replaced. The driver was attending to his horses; but all the others were holding earnest council under the acacia tree, where the lantern was still swinging.

"But I do not understand about this old schoolhouse," Mr. Lee was saying; "where is it?"

"Over the river," answered several voices. "The government built it for the Maoris before the last disturbance, when the Hau-Hau [pronounced _How How_] tribe turned against us, and went back to their old superstitions, and banded together to sell us no more land. It was then the school was shut up, but the house was left; and now we are growing friendly again," added Mr. Hirpington, "I thought all was right."

"So it is," interposed Mr. Bowen, confidently. "My sheep-run comes up very near to the King country, as they like to call their district, and I want no better neighbours than the Maoris."

Then Edwin spoke out. "Father, I can tell you something about it. Do listen."

They did listen, one and all, with troubled, anxious faces. "This tana," they said, "may not disperse without doing more mischief. Carry on their work of confiscation at the old school-house, perhaps."

"No, no; no fear of that," argued Mr. Bowen and the coachman, who knew the Maoris best.

"I'll run no risk of losing all my ploughs and spades," persisted Mr. Lee. "How far off is the place?"

"Not five miles across country," returned his friend. "I have left it in the care of a gang of rabbiters, who have set up their tents just outside the garden wall--safe enough, as it seemed, when I left."

"Lend me a horse and a guide," said Mr. Lee, "and I'll push on to-night."

The children, of course, were to be left at the ford; but Edwin wanted to go with his father. Dunter and another man were getting ready to accompany him.

"Father," whispered Edwin, "there is the black horse; you can take him. Come and have a look at him."

He raised the heavy wooden latch of the stable-door, and glanced round for Whero. There was the hole in the straw where he had been sleeping, but the boy was gone.

"He must have stolen out as we drove in," remarked the coachman, who was filling the manger with corn for his horses.

The man had far more sympathy with Nga-Hepe in his trouble than any of the others. He leaned against the side of the manger, talking to Edwin about him. When Mr. Lee looked in he stooped down to examine the horse, feeling its legs, and the height of its shoulder. On such a congenial subject the coachman could not help giving an opinion. Edwin heard, with considerable satisfaction, that the horse was a beauty.

"But I do not like this business at all, and if I had had any idea Mr. Hirpington's messenger was a native, you should never have gone with him, Edwin," Mr. Lee began, in a very decided tone. "However," he added, "I'll buy this horse, I don't mind doing that; but as to taking presents from the natives, it is out of the question. I will not begin it."

"But, father," put in Edwin, "there is nobody here to buy the horse of; there is nobody to take the money."

"I'll take the money for Nga-Hepe," said the coachman. "I will make that all right. You saw how it was as we came along. The farmers and the natives are on the watch for my coming, and they load me with all sorts of commissions. You would laugh at the things these Maoris get me to bring them from the towns I pass through. I don't mind the bother of it, because they will take no end of trouble in return, and help me at every pinch. I ought to carry Nga-Hepe ten pounds."

Mr. Lee thought that cheap for so good a horse, and turned to the half light at the open door to count out the money.

"But I shall not take him away with me to-night. I will not be seen riding a Maori's horse if Hirpington can lend me another," persisted Mr. Lee.

Then Mr. Bowen limped up to the stable-door, and Edwin slipped out, looking for Whero behind the farm buildings and round by the back of the house. But the Maori boy was nowhere to be seen. The coachman was right after all. Mr. Hirpington went indoors and called to Edwin to join him. He had the satisfaction of making the boy go over the ground again. But there was nothing more to tell, and Edwin was dismissed to his supper with an exhortation to be careful, like a good brother, not to frighten his sisters.

He crossed over and leaned against the back of Audrey's chair, simply observing, "Father is going on to-night."

"Well?" she returned eagerly.

"It won't be either well or fountain here," he retorted, "but a boiling geyser. I've seen one in the distance already."

"Isn't he doing it nicely?" whispered Effie, nodding. "They told him to turn a dark lantern on us. We heard--Audrey and I."

"Oh yes," smiled her sister; "every word can be heard in these New Zealand houses, and no one ever seems to remember that. I give you fair warning."

"It is a rare field for the little long-eared pitchers people are so fond of talking about--present representatives, self and Cuthbert. We of course must expect to fill our curiosity a drop at a time; but you must have been snapped up in a crab-shell if you mean to keep Audrey in the dark," retorted Effie.

"Cuthbert! Cuthbert!" called Edwin, "here is a buzzing bee about to sting me. Come and catch it, if you can."

Cuthbert ran round and began to tickle his sister in spite of Audrey's horrified "My dear!"

The other men came in, and a look from Mr. Lee recalled the young ones to order. But the grave faces, the low words so briefly interchanged among them, the business-like air with which the supper was got through, in the shortest possible time, kept Audrey in a flutter of alarm, which she did her best to conceal. But Mr. Bowen detected the nervous tremor in her hand as she passed his cup of coffee, and tried to reassure her with the welcome intelligence that he had just discovered they were going to be neighbours. What were five-and-twenty miles in the colonies?

"A very long way off," thought the despondent Audrey.

At a sign from Mr. Lee, Mrs. Hirpington conducted the girls to one of the tiny bedrooms which ran along the back of the house, where the "coach habitually slept." As the door closed behind her motherly good-night, Effie seized upon her sister, exclaiming,--

"What are we in for now?"

"Sleep and silence," returned Audrey; "for we might as well disclose our secret feelings in the market-place as within these iron walls."

"I always thought you were cousin-german to the discreet princess; but if you reduce us to dummies, you will make us into eaves-droppers as well, and we used to think that was something baddish," retorted Effie.

"You need not let it trouble your conscience to-night, for we cannot help hearing as long as we are awake; therefore I vote for sleep," replied her sister.

But sleep was effectually banished, for every sound on the other side of the thin sheet of corrugated iron which divided them from their neighbours seemed increased by its resonance.

They knew when Mr. Lee drove off. They knew that a party of men were keeping watch all night by the kitchen fire. But when the wind rose, and a cold, pelting rain swept across the river, and thundered on the metal roof with a noise which could only be out-rivalled by the iron hail of a bombardment, every other sound was drowned, and they did not hear what the coachman was saying to Edwin as they parted for the night. So it was possible even in that house of corrugated iron not always to let the left hand know what the right was doing. Only a few words passed between them.

"You are a kind-hearted lad. Will you come across to the stables and help me in the morning? I must be up before the dawn."

There was an earnestness in the coachman's request which Edwin could not refuse.

With the first faint peep of gray, before the morning stars had faded, the coachman was at Edwin's door. The boy answered the low-breathed summons without waking his little brother, and the two were soon standing on the terraced path outside the house in the fresh, clear, bracing air of a New Zealand morning, to which a touch of frost had been superadded. They saw it sparkling on the leaves of the stately heliotropes, which shaded the path and waved their clustering flowers above the coachman's head as they swayed in the rising breeze. He opened the gate in the hedge of scarlet geraniums, which divided the garden from the stable-yard, and went out with Edwin, carrying the sweet perfume of the heliotropes with them. Even the horses were all asleep.

"Yes, it is early," remarked Edwin's companion. "The coach does not start until six. I have got old time by the forelock, and I've a mind to go over to the Rota Pah, if you can show me the way."

"I think I can find it," returned Edwin, with a confidence that was yet on the lee side of certainty.

"Ay, then we'll take the black horse. If we give him the rein, he will lead us to his old master's door. It is easy work getting lost in the bush, but I never yet turned my back on a chum in trouble. Once a chum always a chum with us. Many's the time Nga-Hepe's stood my friend among these wild hills, and I want to see him after last night's rough handling. That is levelling down with a vengeance."

The coachman paused, well aware his companions would blame him for interfering in such a business, and very probably his employers also, if it ever reached their ears. So he led the horse out quietly, and saddled him on the road. The ground was white with frost. The moon and stars were gradually paling and fading slowly out of sight. The forest was still enwrapped in stately gloom, but the distant hills were already catching the first faint tinge of rosy light.

Edwin got up behind the coachman, as he had behind Nga-Hepe. They gave the horse its head, and rode briskly on, trusting to its sagacity to guide them safely across the bush with all its dangers--dangers such as Edwin never even imagined. But the coachman knew that one unwary step might mean death to all three. For the great white leaves of the deadly puka-puka shone here and there, conspicuous in the general blue-green hue of the varying foliage; a poison quickly fatal to the horse, but a poison which he loves. The difficulty of getting out of the thicket, where it was growing so freely, without suffering the horse to crop a single leaf kept them from talking.

"If I had known that beastly white-leaved thing was growing here, I would not have dared to have brought him, unless I had tied up his head in a net," grumbled the coachman, making another desperate effort to leave the puka-puka behind by changing his course. They struggled out of the thicket, only to get themselves tied up in a detestable supple-jack--a creeper possessing the power to cling which we faintly perceive in scratch-grass, but in the supple-jack this power is intensified and multiplied until it ties together everything which comes within its reach, making it the traveller's plague and another terrible foe to a horse, a riderless horse especially, who soon gets so tied up and fettered that he cannot extricate himself, and dies. By mutual help they broke away from the supple-jack, and stumbled upon a mud-hole. But here the good horse started back of his own accord, and saved them all from a morning header in its awful depths. For the mud was seething, hissing, boiling like some witch's caldron--a horrid, bluish mud, leaving a yellow crust round the edge of the hole, and sending up a sulphurous smell, which set Edwin coughing. The coachman alighted, and led the horse cautiously away. Then he turned back to break off a piece of the yellow crust and examine it.

Edwin remembered his last night's ride with the Maori, how he shot fearlessly forward, avoiding all these insidious dangers as if by instinct, "So that I did not even know they existed," exclaimed the boy, with renewed admiration for the fallen chief.

"'The rank puts on the guinea stamp, But the man's the gold for a' that,'"

he cried, with growing enthusiasm.

"Gold or stamp," retorted the coachman; "well, I can't lay claim to either. I'm a blockhead, and yet not altogether one of nature's making, for I could have done better. When I was your age, lad, who would have thought of seeing me, Dilworth Ottley, driving a four-in-hand over such a breakneck path as we crossed yesterday? Yet I've done it, until I thought all sense of danger was deadened and gone. But that horrid hole brings back the shudder."

"What is it?" asked Edwin.

"One of the many vents through which the volcanic matter escapes. In my Cantab days--you stare; but I was a Cantab, and got ploughed, and rusticated--I was crack whip among the freshmen. The horses lost me the 'exam;' and I went on losing, until it seemed that all was gone. Then I picked up my whip once more; and here you find me driving the cross-country mail for so much a week. But it makes a fellow feel when he sees another down in his luck like this Maori, so that one cannot turn away with an easy conscience when it is in one's power to help him, or I'd go back this very moment."

"No, don't," said Edwin earnestly; "we are almost there."

The exceeding stillness of the dawn was broken by the wailing cry of the women. The horse pricked up his ears, and cantered forward through the basket willows and acacias which bordered the sleeping lake. Along its margin in every little creek and curve canoes were moored, but from the tiny bay-like indentation by the lonely whare the canoe had vanished.

The sudden jets of steam uprising in the very midst of the Maori pah looked weird and ghostlike in the gray of the dawn. Only one wild-cat crept stealthily across their path. Far in the background rose the dim outline of the sacred hills where the Maori chiefs lie buried.

Edwin looked upward to their cloud-capped summits awestruck, as the wild traditionary tales he had heard from Hepe's lips only last night rushed back upon his recollection.

There before him was the place of graves; but where was the still more sacred Te Tara, the mysterious lake of beauty, with its terraced banks, where fairy-like arcades of exquisite tracery rise tier above tier, shading baths fed by a stream of liquid sun in which it is happiness to bathe?

Edwin had listened to the Maori's description as if it had been a page from some fairy tale; but Ottley, in his matter-of-fact way, confirmed it all.

"This Maori's paradise," he said, "may well be called the last-discovered wonder of the world. I bring a lot of fellows up here to see it every year; that is what old Bowen is after now. 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' This magic geyser has built a bathing-house of fair white coral and enamel lace, with basins of shell and fringes of pearl. What is it like? there is nothing it is like but a Staffa, with its stalactites in the daylight and the sunshine. If Nature forms the baths, she fills them, too, with boiling water, which she cools to suit every fancy as she pours it in pearly cascades from terrace to terrace, except in a north-east wind, which dries them up. All these Maoris care for is to spend their days like the ducks, swimming in these pools of delight. It is a jealously-guarded treasure. But they are wide awake. The pay of the sightseer fills their pockets without working, and they all disdain work."

They were talking so earnestly they did not perceive a patch of hot, crumbling ground until the horse's fore feet went down to the fetlocks as if it were a quicksand, shooting Ottley and Edwin over his head among the reeds by the lake. Ottley picked himself up in no time, and flew to extricate the horse, warning Edwin off.

"Whatever you may say of the lake, there are a lot of ugly places outside it," grumbled Edwin, provoked at being told to keep his distance when he really felt alight with curiosity and wonder as to what strange thing would happen next. Having got eyes, as he said, he was not content to gape and stare; he wanted to investigate a bit.

Once more the wail of the women was borne across the lake, rising to a fearsome howl, and then it suddenly ceased. The two pressed forward, and tying the horse to a tree, hastened to intercept the agonized wife venturing homewards with the peep of light, only to discover how thoroughly the tana had done its work.

But the poor women fled shrieking into the bush once more when they perceived the figure of a man advancing toward them.

"A friend! a friend!" shouted Ottley, hoping that the sound of an Englishman's voice would reassure them.

There was a crashing in the bushes, and something leaped out of the wild tangle.

"It is Whero!" exclaimed Edwin, running to meet him. They grasped hands in a very hearty fashion, as Edwin whispered almost breathlessly, "How have they left your father?"

"You have come to tangi with us!" cried Whero, in gratified surprise; and to show his warm appreciation of the unexpected sympathy, he gravely rubbed his nose against Edwin's.

"Oh, don't," interposed the English boy, feeling strangely foolish.

Ottley laughed, as he saw him wipe his face with considerable energy to recover from his embarrassment.

"Oh, bother!" he exclaimed. "I shall be up to it soon, but I did not know what you meant by it. Never mind."

"Let us have a look round," said the coachman, turning to Whero, "before your mother gets here."

"I have been watching in the long grass all night," sobbed the boy; "and when the tramp of the last footsteps died away, I crept out and groped my way in the darkness. I got to the door, and called to my father, but there was no answer. Then I turned again to the bush to find my mother, until I heard our own horse neigh, and I thought he had followed me."

Ottley soothed the poor boy as best he could as they surveyed the scene of desolation. The fences were all pulled up and flung into the lake, and the gates thrown down. The garden had been thoroughly ploughed, and every shrub and tree uprooted. The patch of cultivated ground at the back of the whare had shared the same fate.

It was so late in the autumn Ottley hoped the harvest had been gathered in. It mattered little. The empty storehouse echoed to their footsteps. All, all was gone. They could not tell whether the great drove of pigs had been scared away into the bush or driven off to the pah. Whero was leading the way to the door of the principal whare, where he had last seen his father. In the path lay a huge, flat stone smashed to pieces. The hard, cold, sullen manner which Whero had assumed gave way at the sight, and he sobbed aloud.

Edwin was close behind them; he took up a splinter from the stone and threw it into the circle of bubbling mud from which it had been hurled. Down it went with a splash--down, down; but he never heard it reach the bottom.

"Did that make anything rise?" asked Ottley anxiously, as he looked into the awful hole with a shudder.

"They could not fill this up," retorted Whero exultantly. "Throw in what you will, it swallows it all."

To him the hot stone made by covering the dangerous jet was the embodiment of all home comfort. It was sacred in his eyes--a fire which had been lighted for the race of Hepe by the powers of heaven and earth; a fire which nothing could extinguish. He pitied the Ingarangi boy by his side, who had never known so priceless a possession.

"Watch it," said Ottley earnestly. "If anything has been thrown in, it will rise to the surface after a while incrusted with sulphur; but now--" He pushed before the boys and entered the whare.

There lay Nga-Hepe, a senseless heap, covered with blood and bruises. A stream of light from the open door fell full on the prostrate warrior. The rest of the whare was in shadow.

Whero sprang forward, and kneeling down beside his father, patted him fondly on his cheek and arm, as he renewed his sobbing.

After the tana had feasted to their heart's content. after they had carried off everything movable, Nga-Hepe had been called upon to defend himself against their clubs. Careful to regulate their ruthless proceedings by ancient custom, his assailants came upon him one at a time, until his powerful arm had measured its strength with more than half the invading band. At last he fell, exhausted and bereft of everything but the greenstone club his unconscious hand was grasping still.

"He is not dead," said Ottley, leaning over him; "his chest is heaving."

An exclamation of thankfulness burst from Edwin's lips.

Ottley was looking about in vain for something to hold a little water, for he knew that the day was breaking, and his time was nearly gone. All that he could do must be done quickly. He was leaving the whare to pursue his quest without, when he perceived the unfortunate women stealing through the shadows. He beckoned the gray-haired Maori, who had waited on Marileha from her birth, to join him. A few brief words and many significant gestures were exchanged before old Ronga comprehended that the life yet lingered in the fallen chief. She caught her mistress by the arm and whispered in her native tongue.

The death-wail died away. Marileha gazed into the much-loved face in breathless silence. A murmur of joy broke from her quivering lips, and she looked to Whero.

He went out noiselessly, and Edwin followed. A hissing column of steam was still rising unchecked from a rough cleft in the ground, rendered bare and barren by the scalding spray with which it was continually watered. Old Ronga was already at work, making a little gutter in the soft mud with her hands, to carry the refreshing stream to the bed of a dried-up pond. Edwin watched it slowly filling as she dug on in silence.