They killed him there that night.
Bent was lying half-asleep in a wharé in the settlement when the seven Maoris, who had brought "Kingi" in, entered, in an intensely excited state, sat down, and asked him if he had heard of the judgment on his fellow-white. Then one of them said, "Kingi is dead."
Another man, leaning forward until his passionate face almost touched Bent's, exclaimed:
"Ringi, had you done as Kingi has done, we would not have killed you in the ordinary way. Your fate would have been burning alive in the oven on the marae!"
Then the seven, after a conversation between themselves in a strange language the white man could not understand, listen as he would—the Maoris sometimes improvise a secret tongue, by eliding certain syllables in words and adding new ones—the executioners rose and left the wharé.
It was not until next day that "Ringiringi" learned the details of the deserter's end.
"Kingi," after being given a meal, was left alone in his hut, but was watched through crevices in the wall until he sank to sleep, fatigued with his enforced tramp. He lay with a blanket partly drawn over his head. One of the Hauhaus, a man named Patumutu ("The Finishing Stroke"), stole quietly into the wharé, and attempted to deal him a fatal blow with a sharp bill-hook. The blow, however, only gashed his nose, and he leaped up and grappled with his assailant.
The Maoris outside, hearing the noise of the scuffle, rushed in. An old man—Uru-anini of the Puketapu—seized the white man by the leg, brought him down, and dealt him a terrible blow with an axe as he lay on the floor.
The other Hauhaus completed the work with their tomahawks, and the dead body of the renegade Irishman, cut almost to pieces, was dragged out and thrown into a disused potato-pit on the outskirts of the village.