"My home! my home!" was the passionate response, as Whero flung himself across the ridge and hugged the wooden face as if it were a living thing.
Edwin was thinking of all Mr. Bowen's men had said: how the doors and windows of the ford-house had been blocked by the mud with such rapidity there was not time for Mr. Hirpington and his people to get away. He recalled all he had ever heard or read of the frightful colliery accidents when the miners had been entombed for days, and of cottages buried beneath an avalanche of snow. A bitter and overwhelming feeling of self-reproach rose in his heart. "Oh, why did we linger by the way and follow the bird? We ought to have hurried here at once. O Whero, I did not realize, I did not half understand. Help me," Edwin went on, for Whero had begun to raise his howling dirge—"help me to make a hole through the roof, for fear there should be anybody left inside."
"Have I come to the hot stone of my fathers to find it a place of graves?" groaned Whero, pausing in his wail.
"Mr. Hirpington got away in his boat; your father may have taken to his canoe," urged Edwin, clinging to hope to cheer his companion.
A bound, and Whero was up among the leafless boughs of the grand old trees which had sheltered his home.
Were the canoes gone? His eye roved along the reedy swamp for each familiar mooring-place, but all was changed. Mud-banks and shoals surrounded the murky pool, and his landmarks were gone. Yet more than one canoe was embedded in the new-made morass, and he cried out in despair.
Meanwhile Edwin was tugging at the bulrush thatch with all his might. As the hole increased with his efforts, he caught the echo of a feeble sigh. He shouted to Whero, and tore away at the rushes with frantic desperation. A knock made answer. The wintry day was darkening to its close, and Edwin felt that the task was beyond him. He could not unroof the well-built whare, with no fork to help him and single-handed.
"We must get across the bush somehow, and fetch the men we saw at work on the other side of the hill."
But nothing which Edwin could urge could induce Whero to leave the spot. He sat on the ridge of the roof with the fidelity of a dog, howling and wailing, only pausing to bury his head in the thatch to listen to the faint and feeble sounds within. Edwin watched him breathlessly for a moment or two. They had let in the air through the hole he had made; but the brief New Zealand twilight would soon be over, and what more could they do in the darkness of night? He sprang to his feet. "I'm off, Whero," he shouted. "Trust me, I'll never rest until I get you better help than mine."
He ran across the mud. It was growing harder and harder in the keen frosty air. He knew the wind was blowing from the lake, so that if he were careful to turn his back to the breeze, he could not lose his way.