The women were as wild and savage-looking as the men--their dark eyes blazing with excitement, their faces black-painted like the warriors, their loosened hair flying behind them, many of them nude from the waist up--waving shawls, mats, tomahawks, in welcome to the returning heroes, shouting, singing, screaming. * * * * * Outside the front fence of the _pa_, just us they fell, among the logs and stumps and on the blood-stained ground, lay the dead men whom the retreating A.C.'s had been compelled to leave on the battle-field. There were seven of them. Upon these fallen soldiers rushed the Hauhaus. They stripped them of their uniforms. They tied flax-leaf ropes round the necks of the dead _pakehas_, and hauled them away to the gateway of the _pa_. As they dragged the corpses off, leaping from side to side as they hauled in a fury of blood-madness, they shouted out such sentences as these: "_Taku kai! Taku kai! E hara ka kite noho koe taku kai, taku tika, taku he! Nau te kino, naku whakahoki ton kino. Taea hokitia--te mahi o te atua a Titokowaru!_" ("My food! My food! Behold my food; behold the right and the wrong of it all. 'Twas you"--addressing the slain--"that wrought the evil work. And I have returned your evil. Behold the work of the god of Titokowaru!") A young Hauhau, huge-limbed and naked but for a very brief waist-mat of dangling flax, leaps to the side of one of the white men's bodies, just as it is harnessed in so revolting a fashion to be dragged into the _pa_. His tomahawk flashes in the air above him as he steps over the fallen soldier--once, twice, thrice! He thrusts in a hand into a huge gaping wound in the dead man's breast; he is searching for something. He rises with some object, all bloody, in his horrible red hand. He sticks his tomahawk back into his girdle, he comes bounding from the corpse, waving his dripping trophy in his hand, swinging it round his head. His fiendish yells ring echoing over the forest clearing. What is it he flourishes so exultingly? It is the white man's heart! This is the young warrior Tihirua, the priest of the burnt sacrifice. He has torn out the _manawa_ of the soldier, as a _mawé_--an offering to the God of War! At his waist, buckled to his flax girdle, is a leather pouch, such as was generally used for carrying percussion-caps. Out of this he takes matches--_pakeha_ matches! Striking match after match, he holds them underneath the bleeding heart until it is singed, and dark smoke goes up from it--incense to Uenuku, the war-god, who appears to his savage worshippers in the arch of the rainbow. The heathen rite--the ceremony of the _Whangai-hau_--performed, Tihirua flings down his terrible trophy, and then directs the hauling of the bodies into the palisaded inferno. * * * * *