I moved my head towards Crystal and raised my eyebrows.
“Eh? Eh?” he whispered, drawing me aside; “would have drugged her and carried her off, eh?”
I nodded.
“The deuce,” he said, wringing my hand, while he regarded me with an expression of horror on his gentle face. “Thank God you saw him in time. Warnock, my friend! I’m beginning to look upon you as a special Providence.”
The events of that night had so horrified and perplexed me that I could enter on no explanation of them. I preferred to let things explain themselves as they would—as they had, in fact—yet I knew very well that I had not killed Cazotl with my poor bullet; it was his death from another cause that had unbound the spell from my will, and released my trigger finger from obedience to the controlling voice. There was some mysterious power, more unerring than that, which had struck him like the wrath of Heaven. Remembering a part of Ngaraki’s awful cursing chant in the abyss, I moved aside with some excuse to Grey and muttered to myself:
“Cursed in the light, writhe till the sun goes down;
Cursed in the dark, writhe till the sun comes up.”
* * * * *
Impatient at the delay caused by my long sleep, Te Makawawa insisted on an early start, and after a hurried breakfast we set out for the mountain wall on the other side of the plain. The old chief informed me briefly that Ngaraki had left the mountain the morning before at sunrise, and would probably be away for another day. I tried to draw him out upon the mysterious affair of the makutu, but he stopped all further efforts of mine in that direction by the remark: “The flax that ties the tongue of the ariki is not loosened even by the sun”; by which, taken together with an expression of perplexity I had seen several times upon his face, I gathered that something troubled him.
As we passed along I noticed many rough buildings placed by twos and threes near the streams that crossed the plain and sheltered by the various clumps of stunted bush. I overtook the chief and spoke to him again.
“O Chief, whose hair is the snow of Ruahine, these are not the abodes of the ‘children of the mist’ who come hither to snare the kakariki. What then are these houses that strew the plain?”