Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/150

122 The leader of the taua, old Hauwhenua, must have been nearly seventy, but he was as active and agile and keen-witted as any young man of his fighting band. He was a product of the ferocious old cannibal times when every tribe's hand was against its neighbour's, and when year after year Waikato armies besieged the stockaded holds of Taranaki. In person he was not the ideal of a Maori warrior, for he was short of stature, a stoutly built man, with short grey beard and no tattoo-marks on his face. But he had fought against Maoris and against whites for many years of his life, and no war-captain surpassed him in the many stratagems of bushwarfare, and particularly in the artful laying of ambuscades.

Marching with the savages of the Tekau-ma-rua was the white man—Charles Kane, or King, called by the Maoris "Kingi," the deserter from the 18th Royal Irish. He was armed with a gun, intending to assist his Hauhau friends in the attack on his fellow-whites. Kimble Bent, it was reported afterwards in the pakeha camps, also accompanied the warriors, but he denies this, asserting that he did not stir from the pa all night; this is confirmed by the Maoris. "Kingi," he says, was a fiercely vindictive man, and swore to have a shot at the white men from whom he had cut himself off for ever.

Emerging from the forest, the warriors stole