Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/243

Rh later could have been seen dancing a furious haka in front of the stockade, his face blackened with charcoal from the charred tree-stumps, the soldier's cap on his head, and the captured carbine in his hand.

Young Tutangé Waionui was in the thick of the skirmishing. "My weapons that day," he says, "were a tupara (double-barrelled gun) and a revolver. The gun was a muzzle-loader; I preferred it to the breech-loaders used by the pakeha, because something was always going wrong with them. I could load (puru-pu) very quickly; but a quicker man was old Te Waka-tapa-ruru—he who was killed; there was no one so expert as he at loading a muzzle-loader."

What scenes of horror followed that battle in the bush!

The Hauhaus were in a delirium of triumphant savagery. Like frenzied things they came dancing and yelling back to the pa. They had blackened their ferocious faces with charcoal from the burnt tree-stumps in front of the pa. Singing war-songs, shouting Pai-mariré cries, dancing their weapons in the air, projecting their long snaky tongues and rolling their eyes till only the whites were visible, set in a petrifying glare—the grimace of the pukana—it was a sight that brought fear to the heart of the lone white man, accustomed though he was by this time to spectacles of barbaric ferocity.