Well, as I said before, good luck to him. If he is half as good in the pulpit as he was in the pigskin, the Church gained what the Legion lost, by his exchange of regiments.
CHAPTER XIV
A GRUESOME FLUTE
(Told by the old Kai Tongata)
There was nothing of a picnic about the wars in New Zealand.
The cold-blooded massacres at Poverty Bay, Mohaka, and scores of other places, as well as the vile tortures practised on any of our men who were unfortunate enough to fall alive into their hands, made us treat the Hau Haus with very scant mercy; and this savagery was not diminished by the brutal hardships, hunger, cold and toil we underwent while in pursuit of Te Kooti and his bands of bloodthirsty and fanatical followers.
Among these was a half-caste, the son of a very prominent white official. As a boy he had been sent to school by his father, and had been highly educated. He had then been entered for the law, but, committing a forgery, had fled to the bush and joined his mother’s tribe, then in rebellion.
To show and prove his Maori blood, on joining them he had murdered, with his own hand, in cold blood, a number of helpless white women and children who had been taken prisoners; and this horrible crime, together with his ferocious courage in action, and further murders, perpetrated whenever he had the chance, caused him to be held in high repute by the Hau Haus and in bitter detestation by us.
To such an evil notoriety had this fiend attained that his father, then high in the Government, sent the unnecessary and quite superfluous order, that if his son were captured he was to receive no mercy. This order I carried myself to the officer commanding one of the flying columns that was then operating against rebels who by that time were getting considerably knocked about.