Bursting from the trees, the brown, nearly naked savages came yelling at the rear-guard. Hastily slipping fresh cartridges into their carbines, the gigantic volunteer and his comrades sent a volley at the enemy. It was taking _utu_ for the corporal in anticipation. Then they sorrowfully turned and went on into the dusky forest, leaving their comrade stretched there on the mossy ground, gazing stern-mouthed, unflinchingly down the way of death. Out from the ferns and supplejack leaped the foremost of the Hauhaus, a tattooed, blanket-girded man, with wild eyes rolling in blood-madness. His double-barrelled gun he had shifted from his right hand to his left, and he drew his shining tomahawk from his flax belt. With an ear-ripping cry and the bound of a tiger he came on, hatchet in air. The corporal stiffened his back, levelled his revolver, and fired. The Maori fell, and lay with his face touching the soldier's boot. A yell of "_Patua! Patua!_" came from the trees, and more bare figures with crossed cartridge-belts came rushing on, war-axe in hand. Gripping his revolver hard, his trigger-finger steady, the corporal fired again, and another of his foes fell. Now they stood off and shot the brave corporal dead, and so, after all, he died like a soldier and not under the frightful tomahawk. * * * * * McDonnell's column, the stronger one, was in the meantime fighting its way out through the forest to the Wai-ngongoro, hard beset by the Hauhaus, who had by this time been reinforced by others from the nearest villages. The Maoris followed closely in the rear and kept up a heavy fire, to which McDonnell and his officers and men could only return occasionally; their ammunition was getting very short. With McDonnell marched a French Roman Catholic priest, Father Jean Baptiste Rolland, the _padre_ of the forces, who had been described only a few weeks before, in a letter written by von Tempsky, as "a man without fear." Whenever a soldier fell, whether he was Catholic or Protestant, the kind-faced father was by his side in a moment, tending his wounds, and, if dying, soothing his last moments with a prayer. He took his turn, too, at carrying the wounded. Three holes, drilled by Hauhau bullets, ornamented the _padre's_ old wide-brimmed soft felt hat when he reached the Waihi camp that night. It was just dark when the snoring Wai-ngongoro was reached, and the bridgeless river, running high and swiftly, was forded with some difficulty under fire. At ten o'clock at night the redoubt was reached, and here it was found that a mixed party of fugitives from the battle-field, numbering about eighty Europeans besides the _Kupapas_, had already arrived, and had reported all the officers, McDonnell included, killed or wounded and left on the field. * * * * * And how fared Captain Roberts' little rear-guard of sixty men?