Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/246

218 The heathen rite—the ceremony of the Whangaihau—performed, Tihirua flings down his terrible trophy, and then directs the hauling of the bodies into the palisaded inferno.

Bent, standing just outside the pa gateway, watched the in-bringing of the bodies of his fellow-whites—prelude, he too well knew, to a cannibal feast.

He turned to enter the village, when an old Maori, tugging away madly at a flax line which he had made fast to the neck of a dead man, caught sight of him, and shouted:

"You, pakeha! Come and give me a hand. Help me to drag in my food!"

"What do you want?" Bent heard a rough