XXX
A Last Flicker, 1889

For the savagest raid
Excuse may be made,
   And you e'en can be pardoned by law;
But good feeling you lack
If you try to come back
   And feast, where you murdered before.

"No end of a row in town," said a returning brother as with saddle on one arm he slipped off the bridle with the other hand, and let his horse loose at the gate. "They say Te Kooti is coming through the Motu Bush, and that he's got to be stopped. Seems a real tip-top rumpus. Sorry I had to come away."

Let us here go back a little.

Towards the end of the native troubles, there was on our side a fine upstanding wellbred Maori, Te Kooti by name, who by some official folly was, as I have always understood, quite unjustly accused of treachery, and banished with other chiefs to the Chatham Islands. (Plate XXVII.) Now your high-class Maori is not the man to take this sort of thing lying down, and our friend being page 219very able and a natural leader, was probably about as hard to do with as were some of our best men in the German prisons, and it was not very long before he, with a small party, had contrived to seize a schooner and had compelled the white skipper to take them back to New Zealand.

Once landed, they had no trouble in disappearing into the complete safety of the "King Country," an extensive area of trackless and precipitous bush, well inland, where still lived, in old-time native fashion, the more recalcitrant remnant of the subdued Maoris. These people had managed to manufacture for themselves, mainly from the missionary-taught Old Testament, an extraordinary compost of religious rites and ceremonies, among which the use of loud chants, punctuated with double shouts or groans, had given them the name by which they were commonly known: "The Hau Haus." Here Te Kooti soon got together a formidable war party, and in the year 1868, he suddenly descended on the scattered outlying settlements of Poverty Bay. He kept exactly, so I have been informed, to the accepted rules of gentlemanly Maori warfare; he tortured no one, he violated no women, but just killed all the white people he came across, of whatever age or page 220sex, and burnt their places. He then retired into the impenetrable fastnesses of the bush with the pain of his wounded honour at last assuaged.

All the Government could do was to declare him an outlaw, and he lived in retirement as such for many years. The centre of the King Country was then, and may still be, as suitable a place for complete retirement as can well be imagined. Cluny's forest eyrie in the Highlands could only have been but as Fleet Street to it.

Then having been pardoned he returned to a more comfortable life among his well-to-do adherents in the Bay of Plenty.

That brings me to the date of my tale.

The row in the district increased. People whose relatives had been massacred, swore they would shoot this murderer on sight and were most horribly discommoded by the fear that they might indeed have to make good their word. Jack Desplin, a most respectable young settler, the happily mislaid baby of a family otherwise completely wiped out in'68, went round raving pretty well off his head. And even the more sober and unconcerned agreed that such a visit the circumstances being what they were, it would be more than indecent to allow And then the beginnings of actual fear page break

Plate XXVII
Te Kooti[From a painting 220]

page 221began to be in evidence. What about our local Hau Haus? Could we tell in what force they really were, and how they would behave? Were we not all likely to be massacred in our beds? And the panic grew and grew and grew.

Finally the Prime Minister had to come up post haste from Wellington. He took charge with a cool head. Jack Desplin claimed the right of first hearing. To the Premier's amicable reply was added, sotto voce: "Have that man put under temporary restraint at once somehow."

But whatever the Dictator really thought, something evidently had to be done, and his attention was directed by everybody to the East Coast Huzzars. This was a very small troop of mounted volunteers, gorgeously arrayed in purple and gold, whose one military exploit so far had been the accidentally marking for life, with blue spots, the face of one of its members, our excellent town tailor. This was done at close quarters, with blank cartridge, in a very festive after-dinner "camp surprise." A small body I say, but ready, aye, ready to the last man!

This little troop then was ordered to enrol a few more members and prepare for active service.

Now nothing could have kept my impetuous page 222elder brother out of a job like this. He had no suitable horse, but he borrowed mine. Having no rifle he took my treasured sporting Martini, and being a fine figure of a man, he was taken on at once. The rest of us thought it best "to abide by the stuff" and the women-kind, and keeping our remaining guns by our bunks, and many dogs loose, we did not feel in much danger.

The rendezvous was at Te Karaka, thirty miles up country. Signs of a certain nervousness in one or two of the more showy huzzars did not escape the notice of the harder cases, who held up the horrible danger of the expedition so unrelentingly before them, that many heart-breaking scenes took place at their partings with wives and sweethearts. Nor was whisky entirely absent. Wills, too, were freely made, on any old scrap of paper. I have one by me yet, subsequently proved perfectly good, having been made on active service, the only unsatisfactory thing about it being that there were no assets.

But in truth, had there been any danger whatever, there would certainly have been a very great deal. Through fifty miles of precipitous bush ranges, winding in and out of steep gullies—graded across long precipitous slopes—wound a single horse page 223track. Properly to have covered an advance along such a track would have entailed a pace of hours to the mile; for except where landslips had left bare precipices, every bit of the surface, even the very steepest slopes, were thick with more or less tangled vegetation. A score of agile Maoris, well led, with shot guns and what food they could carry, could have held up the expedition at any one of a hundred places, and have wiped it out at their leisure.

As it turned out, the only really terrifying thing that happened was the experience of an old New Zealand born friend of mine, whose only possible fear of any fight would have been that of missing it. He was mounted on a well-bred horse that went mad. It could not stand the slow pace of the single column, and for half a mile at a time would caracole on its hind legs on the edge of almost certain death. Nothing would have altered the colour of my friend's stiff black hair, but he admitted having undergone then the most terrible frights of his life.

Well, the expedition being launched, we in the country could do nothing but await the event. But, riding to town next day, I had a pleasure I would not have missed for anything. From 100 miles up the coast came that old warrior Major Ropata, with a page 224following of his faithful Ngatiporous, grizzled old chaps, some of them, who had fought in the Maori war, clothed all anyway with anything, some riding with bare feet in string stirrups, but each with his shot gun, and all tearing hell-for-leather through town, determined not to miss the chance of yet another "scrap" with their hereditary foes.

"Barbarous," you will say. But surely very human, and my heart went out to these old boys. It was good old sporting war, in which those fought who wanted to, and mainly for the fun of it.

In the course of a day or two, the expedition was out in the open country, near Opotiki, and having learned from some much astonished settlers the whereabouts of their mark, the eager force was quietly deployed into a wide surrounding circle, while the Captain, with the Civil Official and a small guard, marched up to the little native hamlet.

There they found their man reclining in the largest hut with a couple of cronies, happily at work on a basket of fine ripe peaches. He was unutterably surprised and puzzled at their coming, and later, when he had got the hang of things, enormously amused.

Never had he had the least Intention of coming to Gisborne. Never had he been page 225even asked to do so. It was a long way, too, and he was old and heavy.

It was a difficult situation for the Civil Official to meet with that dignity which his backing of more or less uniformed troops seemed to demand. All he could do he did. After telling the smiling old savage that in case he should at any time think of coming through to Gisborne, he was to remember that the prime minister would definitely insist that he "really mustn't," he politely left him to the rest of the peaches.

"Then they rode back"—no that's not it—"The Coast Huzzars with full five score of men, dashed through the bush, and then leaked back again."

I was up on the pub veranda to see their return parade. Everyone felt that the situation was most annoying, and the "saving of face" none too easy. So the "Civil Power" was made the scapegoat, and fullheartedly abused to the general satisfaction, on full parade. Captain Summer, the commandant, burly and bearded, on a big horse, distinguished himself by feats of magnificent and brazen-throated oratory. What the military arm, unrestrained, would really have done I could not quite gather—there were pictures on one's mind of Te Kooti brought back in triumph bound to a horse's tail— page 226or more economically, just his head at the Captain's saddlebow. Any way, suppressed steam was blown off in great quantity, and quite harmlessly, and the land had thence-forth peace.

My elder brother having returned me my horse, hopelessly foundered, and my beautifully finished rifle, that the sergeant had told him to clean, ruined with coarse sandpaper, I rode slowly home, cheered by the thought that even poor, poor humble I had had my little share in my country's defence.

They were sadly fooled these good men. But let us remember that they were the fathers of our Anzacs and would doubtless have fought as well as they, had there been occasion. Let me tell you of a real scare in another colony.

An old friend who was usually so extraordinarily taciturn that about a dozen words a day got him through life quite nicely, once in the course of a long ride we had together, opened out to me as to some of his experiences.

He had ridden as one of Shepstone's little guard into the very heart of the magnificent assemblage of the Zulu Impis, in all their glory. He had been at Rorke's Drift soon page 227after the fight there, and had seen the tents and torn wagon sheets flapping loose in the wind above our still unapproachable dead, on the miserable hill of Islandwana. There was not a wasted word; every terse phrase bit in. But among the things he told me, what impressed me most was this. He was living on a sheep farm with relations, up at the back of Natal, all labour, even the housework, being done by Kaffirs. The settlers knew for certain that if the Zulus came down, their own servants must and would slaughter them and their families to save their own skins. Yet nothing could be done. They dared not make the slightest change. They could not move closer together in their rambling houses, they could not move a single gun. from its place in the gun room. They had to appear absolutely fearless before dozens of keen and ever-watchful eyes, and the strain was very great. The men who died at Rorke's Drift saved them.