"The oven is gaping open for you!" was their customary threat. Their tribal history abounds, too, in tales of how some obnoxious neighbours or others, Ngati-so-and-so, had been effectively disposed of by the simple process of surrounding their huts while they slept, fastening the doors, and then setting fire to the _wharés_. The only objection from the Maori point of view to this summary method of obtaining _utu_ was that it "spoiled the meat!" Colonel McDonnell was so conversant with Maori _tikanga_--customs, rules of life, and ways of thought--that he was by way of being a _tohunga_-Maori himself, and his dramatic twitting of Titokowaru with the fact that the reputed source of his fighting _mana_ was within his (McDonnell's) knowledge was a circumstance that hugely annoyed the old war-chief. It was just as if so much of his _mana-tapu_ had passed to his white foeman--to the rival maker of strong "war-medicine." Occasional skirmishes with the white cavalry patrol-parties enlivened the three months' sojourn in Tauranga-ika. In one of these rencontres a young Wanganui trooper--now a resident of Wellington--won his New Zealand Cross. This was William Lingard, a member of Captain John Bryce's troop of Kai-iwi Cavalry. [Illustration: A HAUHAU SCOUT, TUTANGÉ WAIONUI, OF PATEA.] Out scouting one day, Bryce took a party of his men boldly up to the front of the stockade on a reconnaissance. The place was unusually quiet, and a white flag was flying on the flagstaff in front of the _pa_. One of the cavalrymen, Sergeant Maxwell, leaping a ditch and hedge that intervened between the farm lands and the _pa_, raced right up close to the stockade, and fired at it. Trooper Lingard, also leaping the obstacles, with the rest of the detachment, rode up past the _pa_. Lingard, though he could see nothing of the Maoris, raised his carbine and fired a shot. The next instant the whole palisade front--just above the ground, where the interstices were left for musketry--was a blaze of fire, and a storm of lead sang over the little troop. The Hauhaus, hidden in their trenches, and preserving complete silence, had waited till the patrol was within murderously close range. Maxwell was mortally wounded; but he sat his horse till it carried him out of range. Several horses were shot, and fell. One trooper, H. Wright, was pinned to the ground by his horse falling on his leg, and was unable to extricate himself, but, nevertheless, drew his revolver, and kept popping away at the palisades.