After such a beginning, the end was inevitable, should Mr. Broughton persist in delivering himself into the power of the Hauhau. And this, deaf to advice and persuasion, he did. Three Hauhau came out from the _pa_ to meet him when he arrived on the 30th of September, and even then he was offered a last chance of escape; for one of the three had formerly been in his service, and now implored his old master not to trust himself within the _pa_. Mr. Broughton persisted, and was received in sullen silence. Striving to seem unconcerned, he took no notice of the incivility, and moved towards a fire which was burning in the _marae_. As he reached it, a Hauhau shot him in the back, and the poor man fell dying into the blaze, where he lay until some of his murderers pulled him out and flung him, still alive, over the cliff into the Patea. The hatred of the Hauhau for the Pakeha was intense, and their attitude to the whites differed completely from that of the Maori in previous wars. They seemed to be obsessed with evil spirits, whose mission was to promote in their victims a lust for blood and a disposition for cruelty of the most appalling kind. They were as men who had swallowed a drug having power to kill goodness and purity and generosity, and to fill the soul in their stead with malice, hatred and vices too degrading to be named. It was fortunate for New Zealand that the evil seed which Te Ua sowed fell only here and there on soil whence it sprang rank and poisonous as the deadly upas tree; for, had it taken root universally, there is no saying at what bitter cost the colonists must have weeded it out. But, though almost every tribe in the north sent its recruits to the fanatics, there yet remained in most of them a remnant who refused "to bow the knee to Baal," and who, if they did not fight for the Pakeha, at least gave no aid to the Hauhau. CHAPTER XXVI ALARMS! EXCURSIONS! Though the war occupied her supreme attention, it must not be supposed that New Zealand stood still. The plucky little daughter of Great Britain kept her eyes open and, though her hands were reasonably full of swords and guns, found other work for them to do. June, 1866, saw the commencement of a mail service to Panama, which vastly accelerated communication with the northern hemisphere; and, before August was out, the Government had laid a submarine cable across Cook Strait, bringing the extreme north of the North Island and the extreme south of the Middle Island within a few minutes of one another.