14 This name _Rukumoana_ originated thus, according to the Maoris: About the year 1830 a war-party from the Waikato attacked and slaughtered a number of Taranaki people here. One of the Taranakis saved his own life and that of his brother in a remarkable manner. These two men were cousins of Hakopa, the old warrior who befriended Kimble Bent in Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu _pa_ in 1868, and later on the Waitara. One of the men was wounded, and in another moment his head would have been slashed off by a Waikato savage, but his brother seized him in his arms, and leaped over the steep bank of the Patea into the river below. He dived to the bottom, and still holding his brother, crawled along the bottom until he reached a place under the banks where the overhanging shrubs concealed them from view. The pursuers failed to find the brothers, who presently escaped to the forest. The Taranaki people commemorated this heroic deed by naming the spot where Hakopa's cousin took his daring leap "Rukumoana" ("Deep-Sea Diving"). +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. | | | | Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant | | form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. | | | | Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained. | | | | Mid-paragraph illustrations have been moved between paragraphs | | and some illustrations have been moved closer to the text that | | references them. The List of Illustrations paginations were not | | corrected. | | | | Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, _like | | this_. Words in bold characters are surrounded by equal signs, | | =like this=. | | | | Footnotes were moved to the end of the text and numbered in one | | continuous sequence. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ End of Project Gutenberg's The adventures of Kimble Bent, by James Cowan