"You will help me, Whero?" entreated Edwin earnestly, as they turned the horse's head towards the small brown tent. It was lying flat, blown down by the wind in their absence. Hal had folded up the canvas, and was pacing up and down in a very dismal fashion.
"Father," said Edwin, springing to the ground, "I can't find Lawford; but this Maori boy was going to a sheltered place high up in the hills. Will you let us carry you there?"
"Anywhere, anywhere, out of this pond," replied Mr. Lee.
"Have at it then!" cried Whero, seizing hold of the board; but Hal called out to them to stay a bit. By his direction they lifted Mr. Lee on his board and laid it along the stout canvas. Hal tied up the ends with the tent ropes, so that they could carry Mr. Lee between them, slung, as it were, in a hammock. Hal supported his head, and the two boys his feet.
It was a slow progression. Whero led them round to another part of the hill, where an ancient fissure in its rugged side offered a more gradual ascent. It was a stairway of nature's making, between two walls of rock. Stones were lying about the foot, looking as if they might have been hurled from above on the head of some reckless invader in the old days of tribal violence.
Edwin had well named it an ogre's castle. It was a mountain fastness in every sense, abandoned and decayed. As they gained the summit, Edwin could see how the hand of man had added to its natural strength. Piles of stones still guarded the stairway from above, narrowing it until two could scarcely walk abreast, and they lay there still, a ready heap of ammunition, piled by the warrior hands sleeping in Tarawera.
Whero sent his kaka on before him. "See," he exclaimed to Edwin, "the bird flies fearless over the blighted ground, and you came back to me unharmed. I will conquer terror by your side, and take possession of my own. Who should live upon the hill of Hepé but his heir! Am I not lord and first-born? Count off the moons quickly when I shall carry the greenstone club, and make the name of Hepé famous among the tribes, as my mother said. This shall be my home, and my kaka shall live in it."
They were trampling through the dry brown fern on the hill-top, and here Whero would willingly have bivouacked. But Hal, who knew nothing of the traditionary horrors which clung to the spot, pushed on to the shelter within the colonnade. No tent was needed here. They laid their helpless burden on the ground and stretched their cramped arms. Whero's tall talk brought an odd twinkle of amusement into the corner of Hal's gray eye as he glanced around him humorously. "It is my lord baron, as we say in England, then," he answered, with a nod to Whero: "but it looks like my barren lord up here." Whero did not understand the old man's little joke, and Edwin busied himself with his father.
Whero descended the hill again and fetched up Beauty, who was as expert a climber as his former owner, and neighed with delight when he found himself once more amid the rustling fern. Dry and withered as Edwin had thought it, to Beauty it was associated with all the joys of early days, when he trotted a graceful foal by his mother's side. Like Whero, he was in his native element.
The proud boy rolled a big stone across the end of the path by which they had climbed up, and then feeling himself secure, began to execute a kind of war-dance.