But the warrior's braggadocio received a sharp check from Titokowaru. The war-chief disapproved of this sort of thing on the part of irresponsible young free-lances. "No man must bring white man's flesh into this _pa_," he said, "unless he is one of the _Tekau-ma-rua_, the war-party sent out by me. Take that _pakeha_ leg back again at once and place it alongside the body." And soon thereafter the disgusted scout, his ardour for "long-pig" so unexpectedly damped by Titoko's code of cannibal etiquette, was to be seen trudging back along the track to the _pakeha_ farm, with sulky visage and reluctant gait, and a white foot and leg--raw--protruding from a flax basket strapped to his shoulders. By day the scouting parties of the Hauhau "Twelve Apostles" scoured the country; by night the people gathered round the fires on the _marae_ or in the big sleeping _wharés_, and talked and sang and danced the _hakas_ of which they never wearied. Wild night-scenes those on the stockaded _marae_, with the crowds of blanketed or flax-cloaked men and women, their wild faces illumined by the leaping flames, squatting in great circles round the camp fires, while more than half nude figures leaped and stamped and slapped their limbs and chests with resounding slaps, and expelled the air from their lungs in wolfish "Ooh's!" and "Hau's!" as they trod the assembly ground in all the fury of the war-dance. A warrior orator would rise, weapon in hand, and throwing off his blanket for freedom of action, go bounding along the _marae_ in front of the assemblage, shouting short, sharp sentences as he _taki_'d to and fro, his athletic figure untrammelled except for a waist-shawl or short dangling mat, fire in his movements, and ferocity in every gesture and in every cry--the embodiment of belligerent Maoridom in its savage prime. Like defiant replying shouts from some hidden foe in the blackness of the forest that rose in a solid wall above the rear stockade came the clear echoes of the roaring _haka_ choruses. And so the wild night passed, until the camp fires died down, and the tribespeople sought sleep in their packed _wharepunis_ and their rush-strewn burrows; and the melancholy "_Kou-kou_!" of the "hundred-eyed" _ruru_, the bush-owl, was heard, as the bird-sentry of the night hours cried his watchword from the forest or a perch on some tall palisade-post. Yet not all eyes were closed in the _pa_, for the Hauhaus, grown wise by much hard experience, did not neglect the posting of sentries, and a sentinel watched from the platform in the angle-tower. At intervals he cried his watch-cry, or raised his voice in a night-song that rose and fell in measured cadences like a _tangi_ wail.