Accordingly on Kepa’s arrival Topia sent out the fiery cross, and in two wags of a cat’s tail had collected a _posse comitatus_ of six hundred first-class up-to-date fighting men, whom he placed under Kepa’s command as war chief, but he accompanied them himself so as to make sure that no monkey tricks would be played or that any of his men should suddenly fancy themselves to be prophets and start dreaming dreams, he, Topia, not believing in such necromancing when the serious business of war was on foot. He likewise warned all hands he would interpret any dreams with his tomahawk, stated that Te Kooti’s head was fit to be boiled (an awful cuss word for a Maori chief to use), and that he meant to have utu for the blood of his relative he had never seen. So with Topia, Kepa and six hundred fresh men on their track the Hau Haus did not draw dividends for their brutal murder of a poor old non-combatant whom they had deemed to be a mere nobody, and as such a fit object for their wanton cruelty. Te Kooti however quickly tumbled to the fact that his game was up in the Waikato, as by one of his lightning marches he turned our right flank, and although he ran great danger in being caught between Topia’s men and our column, when he would have been crushed like a nut in a pair of nut-crackers, yet thanks to a dense fog he scraped through between us and got clean away to our rear without our being aware of the fact, and it was only through my cutting his spoor the same evening that we knew of his desperate movement, and that he had made his way to Patatere in the country of the Ngaiterangi, a large portion of which tribe at once joined him. Now this was one of the most extraordinary facts about this very extraordinary bounder. Here was a man possessed of no blue blood, yet Maoris regard high descent to be an essential in their leaders. Again Maoris have no faith in an unsuccessful general, and it was impossible to argue that he had been successful. True, he had succeeded in three or four raids, in which he had ruthlessly tortured and murdered women and children, yet whenever he had stood up to us in a fair fight, even although he had chosen the battlefield himself, he had been beaten and driven off the ground with a great loss of men. Moreover, he had set himself up as a prophet, and granted a lucky prophet had immense influence over the superstitious natives, yet on the other hand an unlucky prophet met with scant ceremony; in fact on more than one occasion Hau Haus relentlessly killed prophets who had misled them.