On his way back to the hut, after having lunched with Mr. Hughes, Malcolm encountered a sturdy Maori.
"Hallo, Te Paheka!" he exclaimed. "You're just the man I want to see. You want another motor-car? All right, come with me to Christchurch, and you can have my blessed car. That's a bargain."
Te Paheka was a typical specimen of a twentieth-century Maori. He was a tall, heavily-built, muscular man of about forty-five years of age, and lived at a whare about three miles from the camp. In his youth he had been given a thoroughly sound college education, and had gone to England in order to graduate. As a scholar he shone; as a business man he was a failure, owing to the fatal and all too common trait amongst Maoris of the educated class of pleasure in the spending of money, and, oddly enough, to an inherent tendency to relapse, if only temporarily, to an aboriginal existence.
Te Paheka owned a considerable amount of land. Frequently he sold tracts of ground to settlers, displaying much shrewdness in the various transactions. He never went back on his word. To those who dealt fairly and squarely with him he was a stanch friend, but it was his boast that no white man would have the opportunity of letting him down a second time.
With the proceeds of the sales Te Paheka would come into the nearest large town, and have a right royal time while funds lasted. Usually his weakness in that direction was a motor-car. He had been known to go to the largest dealers in Christ-church and purchase the swiftest car procurable, drive it at breakneck speed until he collided with something, and then sell the remains and retire to his pah until he found an opportunity for another exuberance of pecuniary extravagance. But of late Te Paheka had fallen on hard times. The war had hit him badly. With the heavy drain upon New Zealand's man power and the sudden and marked diminution in the stream of immigrants, the opportunities to sell land vanished, and with them the prospects of buying another motor-car.
Malcolm knew this. He also had found the Maori ready to do him a good turn. On one occasion Te Paheka had extricated the lad from a dangerous position during a landslide on the Wairakato Ridge; and now the chance had arrived to repay the courteous native by making him a present of the ancient but still active Juggernaut.
"Would I not?" was Te Paheka's reply to the lad's offer. "Yes, I'll take great care of her for your sake, Mr. Malcolm. What can I knock out of her--a good fifty?"
"Hardly," replied Malcolm, laughing. The idea of juggernaut ambling along at nearly a modest mile a minute was too funny. "Come along. I am starting for home at three o'clock."
"I suppose you'll let me drive?" enquired Te Paheka.
Mental visions of seeing juggernaut toppling over the edge of Horseshoe Bend, and crashing upon the rock four or five hundred feet below, prompted Malcolm to a discreet reply.