With the instinct of a born leader, Ropata had taken in the various points of the situation at a glance, and issued his orders with the promptitude which the crucial moment demanded.
"Release the pakehas. Kill that Hau-Hau dog holding the rope, and hang up the deserter with it; he is not worthy of a soldier's death. Bind that Ngapuhi; he shall answer to his own chief."
These orders, coming from a man who rarely had occasion to speak twice, were obeyed on the instant. The amateur executioner was tomahawked before his surprise permitted him to drop the rope. Cyril Summers was freed, and the deserter was run up to the branch of the willow tree destined for his martyrdom. The cords which bound Erena and her attendants were loosed by willing hands, the men and even the women promptly possessing themselves of weapons from their dead captors.
Ngarara's countenance, when he saw himself at once baulked of his revenge and cheated of his prey, was a study of all the evil passions which degrade the human race to the level of the brute. Such is the phrase, unfair indeed to the animal creation, which, however unsparing in its allotted course of action, is never guilty of the calculated cruelty of la bête humaine. For one moment he stood indifferent to his coming fate as Ropata himself; then, drawing his revolver, fired point-blank at Massinger, who had raised himself to a sitting posture with Erena's assistance, and was watching the conflict with an eagerness which betokened a partial renewal of strength. As he raised the weapon Erena flung herself before her lover, with an instinctive movement of protection. Passing her right arm around his neck, she lowered him to his pillow, with all the heroic tenderness which from time immemorial has characterized the woman as nurse and ministering angel. With a grin of fiendish malice Ngarara parried the tomahawk blow aimed at him by a blood-bespattered Aowera, and, eluding his clutch, dashed into the forest and disappeared.
The fray was over. The Hau-Hau prisoners were securely bound. Sullen and despairing, they stood in a circle on the spot where their war-dance and the Pai Marire rites had been performed. The derision of their captors was openly expressed. The bodies of their comrades and relations lay around in all the hideous abandon of the death-agony. From the tall pole the head of the ill-fated soldier still stared with eyeless sockets and bared teeth on the ghastly scene—it might have been fancied with grim triumph and exultation; while from the willow tree dangled the corpse of the deserter, an unconscious witness, where he had so lately posed as an actor.
As if the dreadful spectacle had a fascination which they could not resist, or that their miraculous deliverance had rendered them incapable of connected thought, the destined victims had remained almost in their positions taken up previous to the arrival of Ropata and his contingent.
Mrs. Summers had sunk down on a sofa which had been dislodged from its position, with her children, wondering and tearful, beside her. The female attendants of Erena were clustered around their mistress. Cyril Summers, over whom the bitterness of death had passed, stood by his wife, gazing with awe-struck eyes into the distance, while his moving lips from time to time gave token that he was returning thanks to that Almighty Being to whom he had appealed in his darkest hour. While Hypatia, wrapped in a world of strange and awful phantasy, still stood by the outer entrance of the porch, looking straight in front of her, at this weird melodrama of human life, in which the reality so often transcends the unrealities of the "fantastic realm."
Erena and Roland Massinger had preserved their position unaltered, except that, from one of support, the girl gradually sank forward, until her head rested on her lover's breast. A cry from one of the Maori girls arrested the attention of all. Hypatia, roused from her trance, rushed over to find two of them raising Erena from her reclining position, with looks of alarm, while the arterial blood which welled up from her bosom told of a mortal wound. Massinger's death-pale countenance, stained with blood, as were the coverings of his couch, seemed to denote that these lovers, thrown together by such fortuitous circumstances in life, were fated to be undivided in death.
Though Massinger was unwounded by the bullet which, aimed with fatal accuracy, had pierced the bosom of Erena, his situation was most critical. For her there was no hope. The lung had been perforated; the laboured breathing showed but too truly that death was imminent. In Massinger's case the appearances were hardly more promising. The rude treatment to which he had been subjected after his capture had caused the partly healed wound to break out afresh. He was rapidly approaching the state of mortal weakness to which Erena was succumbing. Such was only too probable; but Cyril Summers, who had gone through a course of instruction in surgery, was enabled to stop his bleeding, and to afford temporary relief to Erena.