A shawl-clad figure with a gun rose from a squatting position just outside the _pa_ gate as the two travellers walked out from the shade of the forest and began the ascent of the mound. A loud cry of astonishment and warning brought out the villagers, one after the other, bobbing their heads as they ran through the gateway. Then the shout was raised, as they recognised Bent's companion: "_Aue!_ Here comes Tito with a _pakeha_! A _pakeha_!" Waving shawls and blankets and weapons, the people cried their greetings to the chief, and the white man and his protector walked in between two lines of wondering men and women and children, who pressed in close behind the new-comers as they passed into the palisaded _pa_. A long, low-eaved, thatched house stood near the middle of the _pa_, somewhat apart from the smaller _wharés_. Into this building Tito and Bent were taken, and finely woven flax mats, patterned in black and white, were spread out for them. Tito rose and addressed the crowd. He explained, with a good deal of pride, as Bent imagined, how he had become possessed of a live white man--a somewhat unusual acquisition amongst the Maoris in that unrestful period, for the impatient Hauhau was, as a rule, too fond of trying his new tomahawk on a _pakeha_ skull to keep a prisoner long. The _korero_ over, food was brought in in freshly plaited baskets of green flax--boiled pork, dried shark (a present from a seaside tribe), boiled _taro_ and _kumara_--quite a bountiful meal for a war-time bush camp. Up to this time the deserter's adventures had been, if not exactly tragic, at least of a severely unpleasant turn. Now, however, they took a humorous twist--humorous from an onlooker's view, though to the white man himself it seemed rather the final pannikinful in the bucket of his misfortunes. A woman was brought into the _wharé_. She walked over and seated herself on the flax _whariki_ by Bent's side. The white man turned and looked at her in some surprise. Her vision still haunts the memory of the old adventurer as that of a particularly ugly woman. She was not old, probably not above twenty-five, but she was blind in one eye, her lips were of negroid thickness--such "blubber" lips as seen here and there among Maori tribes tell their tale of an ancient Melanesian strain in the blood of the Polynesian immigrants. She was tattooed on the chin, and there was a deeply chiselled blue line on the inner cuticle of her lower lip. Her hair hung round her face in a tangled mop. "Well," said Bent to himself, "she is no beauty." The woman spoke some words of greeting to Bent, but he steadily gazed on the floor and said nothing. Then a Maori sitting near by, who could speak a little English, said, "This woman wants to marry you!" "Oh, Lord!" exclaimed Bent. "What for? I don't want to get married."