After the soldier had sat and smoked a while he rose, and making his way to a slight elevation on the banks where he could see over the top of the coarse rarauhe fern, in some places ten feet high, he looked around him. Directly across the river the bush began, the seemingly impenetrable forest solemn and dark, pregnant with danger and mystery. Turning in the other direction, and facing the north-west, he could just discern in the distance the tops of a number of bell-tents—the camp he had left behind him. And as he looked his last on the tents of his comrades and his tyrants, he heard the sweet notes of a bugle sounding a call. The midwinter air was very clear and still. It was the midday mess call—"Come-to-the-cookhouse-door."
"No more cookhouse-door now, that's a moral," said the soldier aloud. "Pork and potatoes for you, me boy—or else a crack on the head with a tomahawk."
Beyond the tents, another tent-shaped object took the soldier's eye. It was a lofty snowy mountain, glittering in the midday sun. It was far away in the nor'-west, so far that its base was hidden by the intervening bush, and only the white symmetrical upper part of the vast cone, a wedge of white culminating in as perfect an apex as any bell-tent, was visible to the eye from this part of the great plains. It was the peak of Taranaki mountain, which the white man calls Mount Egmont.
Satisfying himself that there was no one in sight and that he was not followed, the soldier squatted down again and smoked his pipe meditatively.
Suddenly he started up and listened intently. He heard something, and any noise meant danger. The sound was the trotting of a horse.
Scrambling through the fern a little space back from the bank, he found that a narrow track wound through the tangle of tall brown bracken. Peering out from his shelter place he saw—first, the glitter of the muzzle of a long rifle above the fern; then, next moment round a turn in the path came a mounted man, a Maori. He was a tall, black-bearded fellow, wearing a European shirt and trousers, but bare as to feet. Each stirrup-iron was thrust between the big toe and the next one, as was the universal Maori mode when riding bare-footed. In his right hand he held an Enfield rifle, of the pattern used by the white troops in those days; the butt rested on his thigh, cavalryman fashion. Round his shoulders hung a leather cartouche-box; there was another buckled round his waist, from which there hung also a revolver in its case. A Hauhau scout, evidently, venturing rather daringly close to the British camp.
The white man hesitated only a moment. Then he boldly stepped out on to the track, directly in front of the startled Maori, who pulled his shaggy pony up sharp, and instantly presented his gun at the white man.
Seeing the next moment, however, that the white man was unarmed and alone, the Maori brought his rifle-butt down on his leg again, and stared with wonder at the forlorn-looking white soldier before him.
"Here, you pakeha!" he cried, in mixed English and Maori; "go back, quick! Haere atu, haere atu! Go 'way back to t'e soldiers. I shoot you suppose you no go! Hoki atu!"