Two Mates Drowned.

“At the Taramakau ford we came to grief. I lost my two poor mates, the sailor and the packer. We didn't reckon on any danger; the river was low, though very swift, and running in several streams. It was a dirty white, discoloured from the Alpine glacial ice and silt, you couldn't see the bottom in those snow rivers.

“The packer, Scotty, got on the bigger horse of the two, and took the sailor up behind him, and I followed on the pony. They were a few yards ahead of me, when, to my horror, their horse seemed to sit down—he'd slipped on a boulder. The sailor clutched the other man round the neck, and over both of them went and they were whirled away in a moment. I couldn't help them in the slightest.

“I got out of it safely by giving my wise little horse his head and letting him pick his steps through the swift current. Once over the river, I got to Blake's road-contract camp, and got some men, and we searched for our mates. We found their bodies four miles down the river. The curious thing about it was that their horse got out all right—he was quietly feeding on the river bank a little way down.”

Capper mourned deeply that tragic loss of his good mates. That wild bad river the Taramakau was accursed among the West Coasters. Many a swagger had gone to his death in its icy waters. But it was not often that horsemen came to grief. He continued his narrative:

“Well, I went on alone. At Kelly's camp, the next place, there was a little old foreigner, a Sardinian; he'd been an army bugler and fought in the times of Garibaldi—like my old friend Rowley Hill, of Auckland—and now that I think of it, he was very like Rowley—small, nuggetty and tough, and plucky as they make ’em. They called the little Sardinian ‘Tantara-ra-ra’ at the camp, because he still had his bugle and he kept tootling away on it at all hours. We chummed up and we went on together. We camped near where the Otira township is now, and went on up the Gorge. I remember to this day the freezing chill of the Otira River.