In the crowded wharepuni that night, when the Waikato warriors made their errand known, one of them caught sight of the white man, sitting silently in his corner, and asked who he was. When Tito explained, the visitor asked,
"Why don't you kill him?"
"He is my pakeha," said Tito, "and I will protect him, because our prophet Te Ua has tapu'd him, and ordered us not to harm him."
"That is indeed a soft and foolish way to deal with pakehas" exclaimed a fierce-looking young warrior, one of the Waikato trio. "We don't take any white prisoners in our country. You ought to have his head stuck on the fence of your pa."
Tito laughed. "Ringiringi is going to be useful to us," he said. "Besides, he is a Maori now."
Next morning Tito despatched the white man and an old Maori named Te Waka-tapa-ruru through the forest to Te Putahi, a stockaded village some ten miles away, on the banks of the Whenuakura River, with a message to the people of that pa requesting them to return the colours for which the king had sent. This mission accomplished, Bent stayed a while in Te Putahi, where he was treated with much kindness, because of his association with Tito.
On the morning after his arrival a man came to his sleeping-hut and, without saying a word, placed on the mat before him a couple of blankets and a watch.
The history of the watch was afterwards explained to him by Te Waka-tapa-ruru. This warrior was a typical old bush-fighter. He had a very big head; he was tattooed on the cheeks; he was wiry and wonderfully quick on his legs. He told Bent, with a devilish grin on his corrugated face, that the watch had belonged to a white man, called Paratene, whom he—Te Waka—had shot the previous year at Otoia, on the Patea River. This pakeha was Mr. C. Broughton, a native interpreter who had been sent on a special Government mission to the Hauhaus, and was barbarously murdered while in the act of lighting his pipe in the village marae.
Broughton's slayer, despite his repulsive antecedents, became a friend of Bent's, and they were close comrades until 1869, when the old man was killed in the act of charging furiously on the Armed Constabulary at the attack on the Papa-tihakehake stockade.