The saturnine Hauhau spoke little to the white man during that journey to the rebel camp. He stalked silently on in front, his rifle over his shoulder, turning quickly now and again to assure himself that the soldier was still following him. Presently they forded another stream, which Bent afterwards came to know as the Ingahape, and passed through a deserted settlement, with its tumble-down dwellings of _raupo_ reeds, and its old potato-gardens. A few minutes later they came in sight of their destination, the Ohangai _pa_. A high stockade of tree-trunks sunk in the ground, some of the upper ends hewn into sharp points, others with round knobby tops that suggested impaled human heads, surrounded a populous village of thatched huts. Just beyond it was the bush, stretching away as far as the eye could carry. It was a secluded, pretty scene, that village with its neat enclosure, its rows of snug _wharés_ which could be seen through the gateway and the openings in the palisade, and its squares of maize and potato cultivations, sheltered by the friendly belt of dark green forest. Some little, nearly naked children were playing about on the open space in front of the palisades. When they suddenly beheld a white man riding along towards them, with a Maori walking by his stirrup, they stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and then rushed helter-skelter into the _pa_, calling out at the top of their voices, "_He pakeha, he pakeha!_" What a commotion that cry of "_Pakeha_" aroused in the slumbering _pa_! Men leaped from the flax _whariki_ (mats), where they had been drowsing away the afternoon awaiting the opening of the steam ovens, and poured out of the narrow gateway armed with their guns and tomahawks. When they saw that the European was a harmless, unarmed individual, and that he was apparently the prisoner of one of their own people, the clamour died away, and they escorted the soldier and his captor into the _pa_. Bent quickly perceived that his companion was a man of some importance, from the peremptory orders he issued and the alacrity with which they were obeyed. The scout was, in fact, the chief Tito te Hanataua, a _rangatira_ of high standing in the Ngati-Ruanui tribe, and one of the Hauhaus' best fighting-leaders. It was a wild scene that met the young soldier's gaze when he entered the stockade, and his heart sank before the savagely hostile gaze of a crowd of armed, half-stripped warriors, the black-bearded and shaggy-headed men of the bush, and their scarcely less savage-looking women. A strange ceremony began.