To the eastward of the southern point of Rangi-haute, and five miles distant, lies the islet of Ranga-tira, consisting of a single mount of moderate elevation, from two to three miles across at the base, behind which Koche took shelter in his captured boat. The same favoring breeze that brought down his enemies in the morning, enabled him in a short run to double the “tira,” and land upon her little beach of forty yards, quite out of sight and reach.
Had the fugitive been content to take up his permanent habitation here, all might doubtless have gone well; but the islet was too small to offer a place of concealment, and he feared an unsuccessful search on the larger island would be followed by one on the smaller, in which event escape would be impossible. For this and other reasons, in which the question of food entered, but a cat-like attachment to his old haunts ruled, he returned in the night after an absence of a month, and, reconnoitring, found the coast clear. He had resumed his old habits, adding to them a bright lookout to the northwest, when one morning at daybreak, some months later, he discovered three canoes close in to shore. He instantly struck into a deep ravine, and hoped by doubling to gain time to reach and launch his boat. But he had hardly got fairly off before his trail was taken up, and after a hot chase, in ascending a dark defile, the dogs brought him to bay, and, turning, he took up a rock and dashed out the brains of the foremost, and was in deadly conflict with the pack, bleeding and faint, when a Zealander came up with a club and felled him to the ground. When he recovered his senses they were dragging him down the mountain by a rope tied about the waist, torn with stones and briers, and bathed in blood; but even then, until they reached the white beach, soon stained red, he caught at every root, and projecting stone, and bush, and log, and held on with such tenacity that they were compelled to beat his hands to force them to relax. He lay on the sand bound hand and foot all night, with parched mouth and throat, so bitten by the black sand-fly that by noon on the following day he was swollen out of the semblance of man.
When taken back to Ware-kauri he was confined and watched closely, taunted with the title of “King of Pitt Island,” fed and watered, but not bodily ill-used. When sufficiently recovered and ordered to work, he stood mute under two days’ lashing, seeking death; but his master, who felt his honor enlisted in the contest, had resolved to break, not kill him; and no provocation could wring from him the death-stroke. Perceiving this on the third morning, Koche set to work when ordered, and from thence performed the labor of two men; apparently completely subjugated. From the fight with the dogs in the defile he had not uttered a word; now he became cheerful and talkative.
In the fourth year of his renewed captivity, all watch upon him having been removed, he was one evening among the slaves, employed in paddling out canoe-loads of provisions to a whale-ship that was lifting her anchor to sail. He boarded, and hid away in the hold unnoticed; and the ship was clearing the harbor, when Mate-oro came out and instituted search. He was found and dragged on deck, but broke from his captors and sprang overboard. The ship’s boat gave chase, overhauled him, and, as Mate-oro rose up in the bow to lay hands on him, he dived, and, coming up behind, unshipped their rudder, and in the gathering dark reached the headland and disappeared. He made his way by forest paths to the eastern coast, where, finding an abandoned and broken canoe, he stuffed her with kelp, and put to sea; by daylight he had sunk her below the eastern horizon, and at nightfall ran her on the beach of Rangi-haute.
Koche was himself again. He breathed anew the air of freedom, and his soul exulted. Taught in his little school of adversity, he knew that vigilance would be the price of his liberty, and determined to exercise it, and carried out his resolution as well, perhaps, as any man since the sun first shed on Eden his delightful beams—that sun which shone upon him in his frail canoe that day for the last time for two dark years; and on which, of his own free will, he never would have looked again.
After picking up what food he could find upon the beach, and breaking up and burying his canoe in a sand dune, he crossed the mountain, and, plunging into an obscure thicket, almost impenetrable, crawled into a crevice surrounded by jagged fragments of volcanic rock. The spot was almost absolutely inaccessible, and the danger of approach would have appalled a spirit less dauntless than his—not bent on liberty or death. He had breasted his way to it in the glare of day when perambulating his dominion; he now entered it with speed and safety a fugitive at midnight.
In his retreat, he made and used no instrument whatever—no spear, or snare, or knife, or line, or net. He never once approached the shore, or left the circle of his crags and dense surrounding thicket. At dusk he peered from his sepulchre, and watched the birds take up their roosts upon the overtopping trees and bushes, and climbed up and caught them in the night, and ate them raw. Hunger at first assailed him; but his eye, becoming adjusted to the dark, marked down his prey with unerring certainty, and he was soon able to drive and keep the wolf from his den; and a water-drip in the rock quenched his thirst. At dawn he sank into the earth, leaving behind no trace, no print of foot, no trail; and when the sun uprose,
“The mists were curl’d
Back from a solitary world.”
The annals of his dark reign are soon told. Sleeping one day down in the impenetrable darkness, he was startled by the deep bay of a bloodhound; and his prophetic soul told him that the day of his second dethronement had dawned, and his night of freedom passed. Mate-oro had searched the isle in vain, and given up the hunt, when Gobiah, a New Zealand son of Belial, brought over a slave-hunter whose deep hate penetrated the impenetrable, and ran the fugitive to earth.
Expectation in Ware-kauri was on tiptoe during the absence of the hunting-party; and on its return with the captive king a curious crowd assembled on the beach to greet them. As the boat came through the surf with Mate-oro on the prow and Koche bound at his feet, a shout went up in honor of the chief, followed by derisive howling for the “King of Pitt.” The march across the island was triumphal. Crowds flocked to gaze upon the principal figures. The New Zealanders praised their persevering chief, and called upon the “king” to burst his bonds. The Tuïti, apart, with sullen and downcast looks, felt their faint hearts beat quick as they caught a glance of their indomitable countryman, stimulated by the sunlight, erect and proud, by whom the taunts of the malignant masters were passing as the idle wind.