Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/175

Rh people to be a message from the gods, of whom Titokowaru was the living medium. That night was a night of preparation for battle. Armed men slipped out along the trail in front of the stockade, and lay in wait for the expected enemy.

Long the grim old chief sat on his sacred mat that night in the wharé-kura, his enchanted tongue-pointed taiaha lying in front of him. Karakia after karakia he recited in a low monotone, incantations and charms, ancient pagan and latter-day Hauhau karakia, for success in the conflict that he felt was to envelop his pa on the morrow in a ring of smoke and blood.

In his own little thatched wharé that day sat Kimble Bent, the pakeha-Maori. He, too, was busy, squatting there on an old flax whariki mat. By his side were a keg of gunpowder and a bag of bullets, and in front of him a pile of old pakeha newspapers and leaves torn from looted books. He was making cartridges for the Hauhaus. Round a wooden cartridge-filler he deftly rolled a scrap of paper, forming a cylinder, which he tied securely with thread or with fine strips of flax; then, withdrawing the filler, he poured in the gunpowder. The cartridges loaded, he slipped them into the cartouche-boxes and holders, a number of which had been brought to the wharé by the men of the Tekau-ma-rua; when the boxes were full, the remainder of the ammunition he stored carefully in a large flax