When Kerei had interpreted the white man's reply, the old man with the tomahawk leaned over and said, very earnestly, tapping the blade of the weapon with his left hand as he spoke: "_Whakarongo mai!_ Listen, _pakeha_! You see this _patiti_ in my hand? Yes. If you had not at once replied that you would never return to the white soldiers I would have killed you. I would have sunk this into your skull!" After this brief speech, delivered with a fierceness of mien and glitter of eye that made the refugee tremble in spite of his efforts to appear calm, the old barbarian shook hands with him. Then Tito te Hanataua--the man who had brought the soldier to the _pa_--rose and said: "O my tribe, listen to me! Take good care of the _pakeha_, and harm him not, because our prophet has told us that if any white men come to us as this man has done, and leave their own tribe for ours, we must not injure them, but must keep them with us and protect them." Tito's word assured Bent's safety, and the tone of the people changed to one of friendliness; many of them shook hands with the lonely white man. The women cooked some pork and potatoes for him in an earth-oven, and he was given to eat, and received into the tribe. Henceforth he was as a Maori. Now began for the runaway an even harder life than that which he had endured in the army. He found that he was virtually a slave amongst the Maoris. He had had fond imaginings of the easy time he would enjoy in the heart of Maoridom, but to quote from his own lips, "they made me work like a blessed dog." Soon after his arrival in the _pa_ a party of men was sent off to Taiporohenui--a celebrated old village and meeting-place near the present town of Hawera--and he was ordered to go with them, and was set to work felling bush, clearing and digging, gathering firewood, and hauling water for the camp. Tito was his master--not only his master, but in hard fact his owner, with power of life and death over him. Bent divined the Maori nature too well to refuse "fatigue duty," as he had done in the Manawapou camp. There would have been no court-martial in Taiporohenui--just a crack on the head with a tomahawk. So he bent his back to the burdens with what cheerfulness he might, and was thankful for the good things Tito provided, though they took no more elaborate form than a blanket and a flax mat for a bed, and two square meals a day of pork and potatoes. Tito was, says Bent, a man of about forty-five years of age, a stern, but not unkindly owner, with a pretty young wife of seventeen or eighteen, whose big, dark eyes were often turned with an expression of pity on the unfortunate renegade _pakeha_.