But that was not all, for, as the last garment was stripped off, Ngati said some words to his people, and before he could realise what was going to be done, Don felt himself seized by four men, each taking a wrist or ankle, and holding him suspended before Ngati, who went behind him and supported his head.
“Hah!” ejaculated Ngati, with a peculiar grunt. His men all acted with military precision, and, to Don’s astonishment, he found himself plunged into a rocky basin of hot water.
His first idea was to struggle, but there was no need. He had been lowered in rapidly but gently, and he felt Ngati place the back of his head softly against a smooth pleasantly-warm hollowed-out stone, while the sensation, after all he had gone through, was so delicious that he uttered a sigh of satisfaction.
For now he realised the hospitality of the people who had brought him there, and the fact that to recover him from the chill of being half drowned, they had brought him to one of their hot springs, used by them as baths.
Don uttered another sigh of satisfaction, and as he lay back covered to his chin in the hot volcanic water, he began to laugh so heartily that the tears came into his eyes.
For the same process was going on in the darkness with Jem, who was a less tractable patient, especially as he had taken it into his thick head that it was not for his benefit that he was to be plunged into a hot water pool, but to make soup for the New Zealanders around.
“Mas’ Don!” he cried out of the darkness, “where are you? I want to get out of this. Here, be quiet, will yer? What yer doing of? I say. Don’t. Here, what are you going to do?”
Don wanted to say a word to calm Jem’s alarms, but after the agony he had gone through, it seemed to him as if his nerves were relaxed beyond control, and his companion’s perplexity presented itself to him in so comical a light, that he could do nothing but lie back there in his delicious bath, and laugh hysterically; and all the while he could hear the New Zealanders gobbling angrily in reply to Jem’s objections, as a fierce struggle went on.
“That’s your game, is it? I wouldn’t ha’ thought it of a set who calls theirselves men. Shove me into that hot pot, and boil me, would you? Not if I knows it, you don’t. Hi! Mas’ Don! Look out! Run, my lad. They’re trying to cook me alive, the brutes. Oh, if I only had a cutlash, or an iron bar.”
Don tried to speak again, but the words were suffocated by the gurgle of laughter.