Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/143

Rh strong" within him. If his answer were deemed satisfactory, he would be told off as one of the Tekau-ma-rua, the sanctified advance-guard.

Again and again this strange method of divination was repeated, the balanced weapon indicating—to the perfect satisfaction of the superstitious Hauhaus—the men whom the Maori war-god desired as the instruments of vengeance on the whites. Name after name the priest and chief pronounced, as his taiaha pointed along the squatting ranks, until the tale of bare-legged warriors was complete.

Then, when the taua, or war-party, had filled their cartridge-belts and seen to their weapons, there was a ceremony of a livelier sort. The women and girls of the pa attired themselves in their waist piupiu of coloured flax, decked their hair with feathers, dabbed ochre-paint on their cheeks, and lined up on the marae for the poi-dance, to send the warriors off "in good heart," as the Maori has it. Hakas, too, were danced by the men and boys of the village, and the merry poi-songs and the loudly yelled war-chants put a brisker jig into the feet of the brown soldiers as they marched out of the settlement and struck into the forest, hunting for pakehas.

As the men of the Tekau-ma-rua left the stockade, Titokowaru himself would loudly farewell them, shouting in his terrible gruff voice the ferocious injunction: