The answer came back and there was an exultant ring in the voice: "The brandy is quite safe." "D--- the brandy! Are you much hurt?" A mournful reply came back: "Poor Darkie [his horse] is dead." "But yourself?" "Oh, I've only broken my leg," was the answer, given in a tone of the most utter indifference; "I'm all right." "Is your head well above water, and can you hang on till I get help from the fort?" "Oh yes; I'm all right." So I told him to open one of the bottles and have a nip when he felt he required it, then led my horse to the firm ground, mounted and rode back to Tarawera at a gallop. On my return with a party of troopers, ropes and torches, it took us a long time to extricate the poor fellow from his dangerous position, and he must have suffered great agony in being hauled up the steep bank of shifting shale; but at last we managed it, and got him back to the fort, where he soon become convalescent, his only regret, which was very deep--viz. the loss of his horse--being tempered by the fact that he had saved the brandy which had been entrusted to him. As for his own severe and painful injury, he cared nothing: it was certainly a nuisance; but it came in the day's march, and, as there was no fighting going on at the time, was not to be grumbled at. Well, as I said before, good luck to him. If he is half as good in the pulpit as he was in the pigskin, the Church gained what the Legion lost, by his exchange of regiments. CHAPTER XIV A GRUESOME FLUTE (_Told by the old Kai Tongata_) There was nothing of a picnic about the wars in New Zealand. The cold-blooded massacres at Poverty Bay, Mohaka, and scores of other places, as well as the vile tortures practised on any of our men who were unfortunate enough to fall alive into their hands, made us treat the Hau Haus with very scant mercy; and this savagery was not diminished by the brutal hardships, hunger, cold and toil we underwent while in pursuit of Te Kooti and his bands of bloodthirsty and fanatical followers. Among these was a half-caste, the son of a very prominent white official. As a boy he had been sent to school by his father, and had been highly educated. He had then been entered for the law, but, committing a forgery, had fled to the bush and joined his mother's tribe, then in rebellion. To show and prove his Maori blood, on joining them he had murdered, with his own hand, in cold blood, a number of helpless white women and children who had been taken prisoners; and this horrible crime, together with his ferocious courage in action, and further murders, perpetrated whenever he had the chance, caused him to be held in high repute by the Hau Haus and in bitter detestation by us.