“Come, sit down then, and get out your pipe and tell me how the outside world’s getting on.” I had refused his offer of supper, as I had already supped on cold duck and biscuits in the bush.
In a few moments, when he had turned a log on the fire, we sat one on each side of the hearth as if we had been old friends.
“The outside world,” I said, lighting my pipe with a glowing ember, “has lost a woman, and I am looking for her.”
“A woman?” he laughed. “Rather a strange place in which to search for a woman, isn’t it?”
I returned his laugh. “Yes,” I admitted; “but the whole story, or such of it as I have gleaned, is strange enough for anything.”
“Oh! a romantic story, is it?” His eyes fell from mine to the bowl of my pipe, from which rings of smoke curled and wreathed irresistibly. “Wait a minute,” he added after a pause. He rose from his chair and reached up among the rafters overhead, searching for something. At last he found it, and, returning to his seat, showed me what had once been a well-coloured meerschaum which, by the dust and cobwebs on the case, had evidently lain undisturbed among the rafters for years.
“If you will oblige me with a little tobacco,” he said, “I will keep you company, though I haven’t smoked for many a long day.”
Presently, when the necessary conditions of storytelling were established, he turned to me and said: “Now for your romantic story, if I may be permitted to hear it.”
“The story is a long one,” I replied; “but I am merely in possession of detached points of it. These I am only too anxious to lay before anyone I meet, on the chance of their being able to strengthen some point or add another from their own experience in this neighbourhood. My own part in the affair is uninteresting. I am merely Dick Warnock, or, as the Maoris call me, Wanaki, employed by a firm of solicitors at home to find a more important person named Miriam Grey, or to glean evidence of her death.”
“Now that you have given me your name,” put in my host, “I must give you mine. The Maoris, with whom I get on very well, call me Kahikatea—that is more my real name than any other.”