"We have not seen your man Hiroki," said Hakopa. "He may have swum the river and passed through here by night. Who knows? If he has passed this way he has no doubt gone to Te Ngaere, which is a very difficult place to reach and a good refuge-place for men like Hiroki." "We do not know the trail to Te Ngaere," said the half-caste. "Will any of you guide us there?" Bent offered to go as guide, saying he knew the track to Ngaere very well and had frequently been there in the war-days. "But," he asked, "will you guarantee my safety if I trust myself with you? How do I know that you will not cut my head off when you get me out alone in the bush, and take it out to get the Government reward?" The half-caste laughed. "You're quite safe, _pakeha_. Not a man of us will touch you. I tell you we only want Hiroki." A young man named Pakanga, of the Ngati-Maniapoto tribe from the King Country, happened to be in the village on a visit to the forest-dwellers. He was sitting alongside Bent. "Friend," he said quietly, "I will go with you, and see that they don't attack you treacherously." So Bent agreed to go as guide, and, after a meal of pork and potatoes, set before them by the women of the _kainga_, the armed party of man-hunters set out along the bush-track leading in the direction of the swamp-defended Ngaere, the place where Colonel Whitmore and his force of Colonial soldiers just failed in surprising and capturing Titokowaru in the last days of the war in 1869. Bent leading, the party filed along the narrow overgrown trail until they were close to the banks of a small stream, the Mangamingi. A little distance back from the creek the white man asked his companions to halt, saying that he and Pakanga would go on to reconnoitre. The half-caste and his five men sat down and lit their pipes, and Bent and the King Country Maori went off cautiously, saying one of them would come back at once if they caught sight of the fugitive. The white man and his friend had gone only a short distance when they came upon a fire burning just alongside the track, in an old camping-place beneath the shade of a giant _totara_-tree, whose great branches overhung the little dark river that flowed close by. A few roasted potatoes, still warm, lay alongside the fire. Evidently it had been deserted only a few minutes. "Now," said Bent to his companion, "let us settle quickly how we shall act. Hiroki--for it can be no one else--must be close by; he must have only just left this spot. Shall we betray him to the Government, or shall we let him escape? He had a just grievance against the man whom he shot. We have heard all about it, and we know that he was a peaceable man, who was provoked into a fit of passion. He is a lonely and a hunted man, and for me my sympathies are with him, for is he not a fugitive like myself?" "_E tika ana_," said the young King Country Maori. "That's right. We won't give him up to the Government head-hunters."