Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/134

106 But no man dared, by way of retaliation, to try the potato-basket trick on Titokowaru.

"Ringiringi" had now been nearly three years with the Maoris, and spoke their language well. "I lived exactly like a Maori," he says; "worked like a nigger, and always went about bare-footed. They would not give me a gun, nor did they make me fight—for Titokowaru made me tapu, and would not permit me to go out on the war-path—but I had to make cartridges for them. They managed to get plenty of gunpowder; I have often seen it brought in in casks and in 25 lb. weights. They got a good deal of it from the neutral and so-called 'friendly' tribes, who procured it from the pakehas. The Puketapu tribe, and some of the Whanganuis, helped us in this way. I know there was a white man, Moffatt, living on the Upper Wanganui River, who made a coarse powder for the Hauhaus there, but I don't think any of it came our way. I had a wooden cartridge-filler, and we always had plenty of old newspapers to make the cartridge-cases. Bullets were plentiful, too, as a rule; but sometimes in the bush, when the Hauhaus ran short, they would use old iron, stones, and even pieces of hard wood. I have sometimes loaded my cartridges with bits of supplejack, cut to size, when I had no lead bullets."

In those bush-whacking days the Hauhaus made use of some remarkable devices against their enemies. One of these Maori engines of war was called a