Out from the ferns and supplejack leaped the foremost of the Hauhaus, a tattooed, blanket-girded man, with wild eyes rolling in blood-madness. His double-barrelled gun he had shifted from his right hand to his left, and he drew his shining tomahawk from his flax belt.
With an ear-ripping cry and the bound of a tiger he came on, hatchet in air.
The corporal stiffened his back, levelled his revolver, and fired.
The Maori fell, and lay with his face touching the soldier's boot.
A yell of "Patua! Patua!" came from the trees, and more bare figures with crossed cartridge-belts came rushing on, war-axe in hand.
Gripping his revolver hard, his trigger-finger steady, the corporal fired again, and another of his foes fell.
Now they stood off and shot the brave corporal dead, and so, after all, he died like a soldier and not under the frightful tomahawk.
McDonnell's column, the stronger one, was in the meantime fighting its way out through the forest to the Wai-ngongoro, hard beset by the Hauhaus, who had by this time been reinforced by others from the nearest villages. The Maoris followed closely in the rear and kept up a heavy fire, to which McDonnell and his officers and men could only return occasionally; their ammunition was getting very short. With McDonnell marched a French Roman Catholic priest, Father Jean Baptiste Rolland, the padre of the forces, who had been described only a few weeks before, in a letter written by von Tempsky, as "a man without fear." Whenever a soldier fell, whether he was Catholic or Protestant, the kind-faced father was by his side in a moment, tending his wounds, and, if dying, soothing his last moments with a prayer. He took his turn, too, at carrying the wounded.
Three holes, drilled by Hauhau bullets, ornamented the padre's old wide-brimmed soft felt hat when he reached the Waihi camp that night.