X

MATETANEI,

BAY OF PLENTY,

NORTH ISLAND, N.Z.

24th March, 1913.

MY DEAR DICK:

This is a remote spot. It is considered isolated even in the unsettled district of the Bay of Plenty. The town consists of a straggling street with shops on one side and the white beach and the blue waters of the Bay of Plenty on the other. The shops provide the hundred or so pastoral and fishermen settlers with manufactured goods in return for mutton, fish, and grain, and here they pass their lives in dreamy content, the world forgetting, by the world forgot The only variation in their primitive existence is springing out of bed in the middle of the night to avoid earthquake shocks—an occupation at which they have become so expert, owing to the perennial and periodic recurrence of the shocks, that most of the older settlers can easily beat an earthquake up to the hills, at the back of the township, half a mile away—and in talking about a celebrated Maori chief named Ruatapu, who inhabits the quite unexplored back country in the mountains that can be seen from here. From what I can gather, this Ruatapu, called Rua for short, is a Maori witch-doctor, a dusky Dowie, a barbaric Solomon, and prophet and reformer rolled into one. It is said that he rules his numerous followers with a rod of iron in his mountain capital, Maungapohatu, and has built a temple there carved with decorations resembling aces of clubs and diamonds, where he compels the benighted natives to worship him—the ‘joker’ of the pack. He must be a clever fellow, according to all accounts. He came down to Matetanei recently to prove to his sceptical followers his power to work miracles by walking on the water, as he had frequently claimed to be able to do. He advanced to the water’s edge, and then, turning to his open-mouthed followers, who were squatting in a circle on the sand, said: “Do you truly believe I can walk on the water?” “Yes, yes!” they cried, with one voice. “Then there is no need for me to do it!” he replied. The City Fathers here had some idea of presenting the freedom of the town to Rua on the occasion of his visit, but he lost that signal honour through bringing six members of his harem with him—an unfortunate circumstance which, if it added to the piquancy of the flavour, lessened his usefulness in mixed assemblages as a standing dish of conversation. But fancy finding the founder of a freak religion in these primeval mountain solitudes!

Our Mr. Baker greeted us with a queer story on our arrival here—which was by the medium of the little steamer that is the only connecting link between Matetanei and Piatiki and a civilisation in the dim distance. As the steamer cautiously felt its way up the shallow harbour to the little pier, I was very much surprised to see Mr. Baker awaiting us on a tall horse. I had never known our advance agent evince any predeliction for man’s noblest friend, except it were cast in some monstrous mould suitable for showing purposes; then, suddenly, there flashed back to my mind a remembrance of Mr. Baker’s first conversation with me, when he actually boasted of having once plucked a horse in order to exhibit it as a hairless phenomenon. The possibility that he had again called in art to assist nature in another similar creation was suggested when we got close enough to the pier to see the horse he was bestriding, for the animal was distressingly bare of hair in large patches. Nor did Mr. Baker’s first words after we landed reassure me.

“I’ve made a horse,” he proudly announced. “This fine animal now belongs to the Merry Marauders.”

“You’ve almost made him a hairless horse, haven’t you?” I said sharply.

“Bless you, I didn’t do that! That’s the thoroughbred strain in his blood. He’s by Thunderbolt from an unknown dam, and all the Thunderbolt strain are short in the matter of hair.”

“Then how did you come by it?”

“Thereby hangs a tale,” he replied, closing his sound eye. “I’ll tell you all about it after you’ve had something to eat. Now I’ll just canter along to the shanty they call an hotel here and tell them to get ready for you. Gee up, there!”

The animal responded to the tug on the reins with a convulsive jump that nearly precipitated Mr. Baker off its back and itself into the water, and went off at an awkward trot.

When we reached the hotel a fresh surprise awaited us. The same horse (I recognised it by its bareness) was attached to a cumbrous conveyance like none other I had ever seen—a cross in construction between a giant jinrikisha and an old-fashioned gig—and in it sat Mr. Baker, distributing our handbills to a wondering collection of white and brown children. When he saw us he waved a friendly hand, urged his horse into an erratic trot, and went off down the winding street, distributing hand-bills as he went.

As Barney and I walked down to the hall late that afternoon to make ready for the evening performance, we were struck by the magnitude and thoroughness with which our show had been advertised. Our big rainbow posters had been stuck everywhere—even on the water-worn rocks on the sea-shore. When we got to the hall, Mr. Baker’s horse was drawn up outside refreshing himself with a feed in a candle-box. Mr. Baker was standing at the door of the hall refreshing himself with a pipe.

“By Jove, Dan, you have given us a good billing,” remarked Barney.

Mr. Baker smiled enigmatically. “It was all part of the plan,” he said, as we walked inside,

“What plan?”

“When I got here the landlord of the hotel, whom I have known for years, expressed surprise that a man of my experience should pick a date that clashed with another show,” he said. “I asked him what he meant, and he told me that there was another advance agent staying in the hotel making ready for a picture-show.”

“A picture-show!” exclaimed Barney. “Why, how did they get through Piatiki and up here without us knowing anything about it?”

“Simply by not playing Piatiki and hurrying their advance man up here to get ahead of us for all the northern towns—which they would have done if it hadn’t been for me,” continued Mr. Baker. “Now, if there is one thing in this world that I detest, despise, and contemn, it is a picture-show. They have nearly ruined legitimate art: in New Zealand, and have reduced the drama to the level of exaggerated clowning in pictorial representations. This particular picture-show was of the unthinkably low level that perambulates the country showing in a tent to avoid hall rents, with a couple of so-called silvery soprano girls to sing illustrated songs. So much I gathered from the landlord, to whom the advance agent had spoken pretty freely. I knew their opposition was all the more to be dreaded on that account, for the small expenses of such a show enable them to go through and make money where an expensive company like ours would starve. I have had sufficient experience of the New Zealand ‘smalls’ to know that the degraded theatrical appetite of many country people actually prefers the preposterous caperings of tenth-rate French actors on the films, at sixpence and threepence admission, to the robust and healthy acting of flesh and blood at three, two, and one. Further, there is a sufficient marginal difference between the two tariffs to enable the men of the place to kill two birds with one stone—to gain a cheap reputation for generosity by taking their womenkind to the picture show and reserve enough money to soak their vulgar souls in whiskey afterwards. Thinking these things over, I came to the conclusion that quick billing and plenty of it was the only thing to give us a fair chance. Unfortunately my bills were not due to arrive till the evening’s steamer. But as against that, the picture-show man had not yet got out his bills. I took a long stroll round the town before dark to look, and there was not a sign of one anywhere.

“My bills came to hand by the steamer all right—plenty of them. I had a tremendous bucket of stiff paste made, and carried it and the bills into the commercial sample room at the hotel, in readiness for a bright and early start in the morning. It was late the same night before I came in contact with the other advance agent. I was in the bar talking to the landlord, who was recruiting a system exhausted by the day’s work of drinking indifferent beer at the cost of careful customers who wished to be considered generous, by taking a little fine old malt whiskey at his own expense, when he came in. The landlord introduced him to me as Mr. Thimm. He was a tall young man with a rather simple face, a shock of red hair, and a long nose terminating in the same colour as his hair—a new man at the game, for I had never seen him before. My professional dislike of him did not blind me to the sacred call of hospitality, and I courteously asked him if he had a mouth on him. We had a drink together, and after he had returned my invitation he expressed his regret that we should both be in the same town together at the same time—‘crueling each other’s pitch’—as he rather vulgarly put it.

“‘Still,’ he continued, ‘though we are rival advance agents let us not reflect managerial throat-cutting tactics in our own selves. Why should we do anything dirty or derogatory to our noble profession. Let it be a fair field and no favour, if you like, but an honourable rivalry on each side.’

“I was so much struck at finding such sentiments emanating from such an unexpected source that I gave him my hand. Yes; Dan Baker gave his hand to a mere picture-show representative—but I didn’t know then that the viper owned the picture-show lock, stock and barrel, and had himself hatched out the dastardly plot to get ahead of the Merry Marauders. He grasped my proferred hand warmly.

“I reciprocate your generosity,” I said, “and admire you for it. Let us by all means play the game fair. It is what I have always done during my forty years on the roads, and it is what I shall always do till the final curtain falls on me.”

“We had another drink to ratify our understanding—this time at the expense of the landlord, who said he had never seen human dignity more worthily upheld. ‘Here’s my respects to you both—you are gentlemen in every sense of the word,’ said the honest fellow, feelingly, as he drained his glass.

“I told him that I had been brought up from my earliest youth to do the right thing between man and man, and when I couldn’t make my living that way I should make my final bow and exit. Thimm expressed similar senti ments in different words, and we drank to the Golden Rule. Then Thimm frankly confided to me that he hadn’t got a single bill out yet.

“Neither have I,” I said, not to be outdone in frankness by a picture-show man.

“‘The man who gets his bills up first will have a big advantage of the other,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘When do you propose to get yours out?’

“Some time to-morrow,” I replied. “My bills only came to hand by to-night’s boat.”

“‘Then let us get our bills out together, side by side, so that neither will get ahead of the other, and both shows will start on level terms,’ he said. ‘That will be playing the game!’

“Right up to the handle,” I assented.

“‘Then here’s my hand on it!’ exclaimed Thimm. ‘Mr. Baker, I’ve often heard of you, and I’m proud to say that you are what your host of friends represent you to be—a perfect man. ‘And here’s a hand, my trusty fiere, And gie’s a hand of thine, And we’ll tak’ a right guid williewaught, For auld lang syne.’

“The landlord completed the circle, and, after we had finished that immortal song, we separated for our respective chambers, Thimm and I agreeing to meet at the breakfast table in the morning and make arrangements about the billing.

“I was awakened from a troubled doze half-an-hour later by a reproachful conscience, that had taken advantage of my uneasy slumber to print a dreadful vision on my mental retina. The vision was a repetition of an incident that had deeply affected me at the time, but which I had totally forgotten—heaven forgive me—when I should have remembered it most. A few years ago, when picture-shows first came to New Zealand, a family with whom I was on terms of close intimacy were much worried by the illness of their mother—a gentle, fragile old lady whose health, never robust, had completely broken down under an accumulation of domestic and financial worry. Nervous trouble was the chief cause of anxiety, and the family doctor had ordered her plenty of light amusement—theatrical entertainments, concerts, anything to keep that poor clouded brain from feeding on itself. A picture-show came to the town, and the old lady’s daughters—simple unworldly girls who knew nothing of these things—thought it would be the very thing to amuse mother. They took her. The first film shown was the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which was thrown on the screen with all the harrowing details dear to kinematograph film fakers. The old lady took it all in with staring eyes, right up to the last dread scene where the grim headsman swung the axe to sever the hapless Mary’s neck, when she was heard to murmur, ‘Well, if this is Dr. Thompson’s idea of light amusement, put me in my bed again.’ Her daughters got her out of the hall in time to prevent her seeing the murder of Nancy, by Bill Sykes, but the one shock had wrecked that sensitive organism, and she never rose from her bed again. As a matter of fact, she is there now. The only thing that has power to rouse her is the mention of a picture-show, and then it takes the whole family to hold her down.

“It was by a vision of this incident that my conscience aroused me, and directed me to go instantly forth to post the Merry Marauders bills, in order to avert the possibility of a similar calamity here. Probably there were several weak-minded old ladies in Matetanei who would insist on going to the picture-show if they saw its bills first—old ladies are so obstinate!—and there was no doubt whatever that the picture-show carried the usual collection of slaughter-yard films to harrow the feelings of the groundlings. It was true that I was under an implied agreement with Thimm to wait till the morning—though I had not pledged my word, as he did his—but that partial promise had been entirely absolved, so far as I was concerned, by the inward monitor—that impeccable guide which sits in every man’s breast and directs him along the narrow path. What was my poor spoken word against the decision of that awful inward tribunal? Who was I to dispute its august order? I bowed my head to its emphatic dictation, and rose from my bed.

“Here occurred another strange thing. When I got up I found myself fully dressed—armed cap-a-pie, as you might say, for the fight of righteousness—although I had a distinct recollection of having undressed as usual before seeking repose. But I left the Society of Psychical Research to unravel the possibility, or otherwise, of my conscience being able to dress me while I slept, and hurried noiselessly downstairs. I let myself out of the back door, got my bills and bucket of paste from the sample room, and set out on my mission.

“That was a good bill-posting! The Merry Marauders have never had a better, nor are they likely to get as good a one again. I tramped miles and miles by the feeble light of a watery late moon, just sufficient for my purpose, making a complete circuit of the district, pasting bills everywhere as I went. My conscience cheered the lonely way by pointing out to me that each bill I put up might be the finger-post to guide some weak-minded old lady to the delightful entertainment of the Merry Marauders, thus saving her from insanity—or even death. I completed my encircling course of the town in the main street, finally finishing up at the hoarding alongside the store next to the hotel. I was very tired, but happy, for a now commending conscience allowed me to whistle cheerily as I slapped the last few bills on the hoarding. As I did so, the sound of a slapping that did not come from my brush smote my ears. I looked along the hoarding. Alas for the duplicity and treachery of poor human nature! There, so completely absorbed in his occupation that he had not seen me, was that faithless scoundrel of the picture-show—Thimm—slapping up the bills of his own show!

“It boots not what I said to the perjurous liar who had forfeited the esteem of all honest men by his shameless violation of a sacred pledge, but I hope—nay, I believe—that I did justice to the occasion. He had not been impelled to three hours hard work by an accusing conscience, and was entirely without excuse. Let us draw a veil on this part of my story.

“We walked slowly back to the hotel together. On the way I gathered that he also had encircled the town with his bills, only he had started out in a southerly direction while I had gone northwards—both covering the same ground, unknown to each other, till we met at the final hoarding.

“As we turned into the back way of the hotel Thimm suddenly suggested that I should accompany him to his room to talk things over, in order to see if we couldn’t come to some arrangement which would prevent both shows being spoiled.

“Why, you ingrate,” I said in amazement; “you made an agreement with me and broke it. Why didn’t you keep it?”

“‘Oh, solder down the can,’ laughed the coarse wretch. ‘We were each a bit too cute for the other there, so we’ll let it go at that. But we’re up against a problem here that we’d better try to solve. If they muster every unit of the population here there’s only enough for one audience, and a small one at that. If we both show we’ll both lose money—I might clear expenses, but you certainly won’t with your large company to keep. The chances are that we’ll both be out of pocket over the wretched little place if we keep on. In the circumstances, one of us had better clear out and leave the field to the other.’

“The Merry Marauders will never clear out, as you put it,” I haughtily replied.

“‘Stop a minute, and hear what I propose. Let us stake our season on the hazard of the die! I mean, I’ve got a pack of cards in my room, and we’ll play a small game to decide which of us is to take down his bills and clear out of the town.’

“Strange how deeply the gambling spirit—the desire to get something for nothing—is imbued in every human breast. Here was I, the son of a Presbyterian father who discountenanced every form of gambling except that known as Predestination, and a Methodist mother who refused to allow me as a child to play ‘alleys’ for ‘keeps’ because she considered it a pernicious form of gambling too dearly paid for by the sacrifice of my infant soul—here was I, I say, who had had a horror of gambling driven into my soul in my boyhood and rivetted there with threats of hell, eagerly welcoming the suggestion to decide our difficulty by a carnal game of chance. But I had more excuse than the wretched picture-show man—firstly, in an active conscience that urged me to take retribution for Thimm’s violation of his pledge, and secondly, by the knowledge that in my early youth my paternal grandfather, a sadly degenerate old man, I am afraid, had secretly set my parents’ counsels at naught by teaching me all the strategy of cards which he had acquired during his godless sea career.

“Need I announce the result? I see you have already guessed it. Thimm quickly lost the stake he had proposed in one round of a vulgar seafaring game, called ‘Strip Jack Naked,’ which the unhappy young man proposed under the mistaken assumption that I would not know anything about it, whereas it was the only one of all the card games my grandfather taught me that I could play sufficiently well to beat the old gentleman, who was a past master.

“How many theatrical managers are held fast in the grip of the gambling octopus! In my experience I have known many a good man go under through cards, dice, or horse-racing. You thought, Valentine, you were hardly used by Hivson, but the Merry Marauders were not the first company he stranded—not by a long way. Once started, these unfortunate men cannot leave off. It was like that with Thimm. After scribbling off an assignment of the town of Matetanei to the Merry Marauders for show purposes, he hurriedly shuffled the cards afresh and exclaimed:

“‘I’ll play you a game of two-handed euchre for half-a-quid!’

“In less than half an hour his little stock, fifteen golden sovereigns, the profits of an arduous season of the ‘smalls’ (for he admitted to me that the picture-show was his own property) lay at my right hand. I will say for him that he was a good sport. The loss of the money did not appear to worry him a bit, but he demanded his revenge. Of course, as a man of honour myself, I was bound to accede to his request. He borrowed five pounds of his money back, giving his horse outside as security for the loan, and went on playing. We changed the game, but the luck was still mine. In another hour the horse, vehicle, harness, and a saddle used by Thimm for riding the animal, were all mine! Then he grew reckless, and exclaimed:

“‘Look here, I’ll play you for the picture-show—machine, apparatus, and ten thousand feet of films. And if you don’t think it’s worth putting what you’ve already won against that, I’ll throw in the two silvery sopranos!’

“I agreed, and like two knights of old we battled for a stake infinitely more precious than silver, or gold, or picture-shows. I won.

“‘Well,’ he said, as he rose from the table at the conclusion of this disastrous main, ‘You’ve torn me to bits and left me absolutely ragged. You’d better pay my small account here and give me my fare back to Piatiki rather than have me here on your hands.’

“It was the moment of my triumph. I rose to my feet and remarked with that natural, if inherited, dignity that forty years battling in the New Zealand ‘smalls’ has not entirely taken away:

“Young man, I did not play to win your money, or your show either, but to teach you a much needed lesson. Take your money and your property back again, and remember for the future that Dan Baker always plays the game fair. Your debt of honour is cancelled. The only thing I shall keep is this written promise of yours to vacate this town this morning. So saying, I pushed his sovereigns towards him and walked out of the room.

“Poor fellow, he had some decent instincts in him after all. When I got down to the breakfast table in the morning there was a letter from him propped up on my plate. The letter said I had taught him a lesson that would last through life. He had obliterated his bills and left the town by the early boat, he added, but he hoped I would accept, as a little memento, his horse and vehicle, which he had left behind him in the stable for me. I went out to the stable, and there, sure enough, was the horse busily munching a manger-full of mouldy straw, which the landlord of this hotel palms off on his trusting customers as the best horse feed, as I have since found out to my cost. From his—the horse’s—neck hung a small placard, on which had been written, ‘BE KIND TO ME, I AM YOURS,’ and from the glance of welcome that beamed from the intelligent animal’s lustrous brown eye as he looked at me, I am convinced that the transfer of masters met with his equine approval.”

Such was Mr. Baker’s strange story. I cannot say I entirely believed it, for, though I acquit him of any attempt to ascertain whether my legs are made of india-rubber, I have from time to time observed a certain elasticity in his own temperament from which hard facts occasionally rebound into the region of romance. I was soon, however, to receive striking proof that at least one part of his narration was true.

The next morning, as we sat at breakfast, Miss Laurie announced her intention of walking out three miles to a Maori village, which offered a rare attraction in the shape of a Maori woman reputed to be 145 years of age. This well-preserved relic of a hardy race appeared to be quite a famous and praiseworthy character, judging from the particulars which Miss Laurie read to us from a guidebook she had found in her bedroom, which proved conclusively that the Maoris were the lineal descendants of one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. The venerable old lady, whose name, it seems, was ‘Kotuku Rerengatahi’ (which means, as near as the delightful imagery of the Maori tongue can be translated into prosaic English, ‘The Rare Old Bird of Momentous Appearance’) had anticipated the Maori-English entente-cordiale fifty years before the Maori war by sending His Majesty King George IV. a copy of the Scriptures, translated into the Maori tongue, with her assurance that the book was the secret of Maori greatness, accompanied by a snow-white feather of the sacred kotuku bird, from which she derived her name, and a much-prized conversation lolly taken from a captured missionary in 1700, which bore the legend, ‘I lyke solitude, but oh, ye girls!’ Miss Laurie, who said she had also been reading up the history of the Maori people in a book called, ‘The Pagan’s Progress, or From Cannibalism to Christianity,’ expressed the view that the Maoris were a wonderful race, and that their Christianity put white religion to shame.

“They certainly have a mortal aversion to Jews, notwithstanding their physical resemblance to that fine people,” said Mr. Baker. “In the old days, when they caught a Jew trader trying to peddle off sham jewellery on their wahinës—their women—they used to eat him boiled with pickled pork, and added to the horror of the Jew’s last moments on earth by stewing him alive in the same water in which the unclean animal was bubbling. I do not know how they discovered that the pig was accursed in Hebraic eyes, but anything is possible with such an intelligent race as the Maoris. If you are going out to the Maori village, Miss Laurie, why not avail yourself of our recently-acquired chariot and steed? The horse, which I have named ‘The Good Gift,’ is in the stable eating his head off, and his fleetness is at your command.”

Miss Laurie thanked Mr. Baker for his offer, but murmured something about not being able to drive.

“I would drive you myself with pleasure,” said Mr. Baker, “but when Beauty is on board Youth must be at the helm—I forget the exact quotation, but never mind. Our estimable manager here, who has guided the ‘Merry Marauders’ ‘craft so dexterously along the track of the ‘smalls,’ which have caused many a theatrical company to leave their whitening bones by the wayside, has proved his fitness to steer such a priceless freight as yourself. He’ll be your charioteer—your Phœbus! Won’t you, Valentine? I am anxious that you should try the paces of our new steed, and, lo! here arises a most pleasurable opportunity.”

The moistness of Mr. Baker’s eye and the odour of malt that seemed to environ him had previously suggested to me that he had been again practising his food reform theory that beer was the proper substitute for the morning meal, and the extravagance of his language removed all doubt on the point. Of course, I assented to his proposal, if only to save Miss Laurie from the unpleasantness of a public refusal before the other members of the company, and she, poor girl, accepted my offer to drive her to the Maori village, with a blushing confusion which no doubt arose from the awkwardness of the situation. It is my intention to take an early opportunity of putting an end to Mr. Baker’s intolerable assumption that there is a secret understanding between Miss Laurie and myself. His belief has no better foundation than having seen me press Miss Laurie’s hand as the merest token of acknowledgment of her kindness in voluntarily taking the part of leading lady that night at Ngati when Miss Bendalind fell suddenly ill, yet, on that slight groundwork, he has built a romance between us, and is prodigal of his nods, significant smiles, and arch glances whenever the girl and I happen to be near one another, to our mutual embarrassment and the alert attention of the other lady members of the company, That was not the time or place, however, to administer a rebuke to our advance agent for his doubtless well-meant intentions, so I sat chafing in silence while he hurried out to get the horse and trap ready for the journey, wishing with all my heart that Miss Bendalind would keep her most supercilious stage stare for the theatre. Miss Laurie escaped under pretext of getting together a few little gifts she had prepared for Kotuku Rerengatahi.

I was heartily glad when Mr. Baker’s cheery call announced that the horse and vehicle were outside, and Miss Laurie came tripping downstairs with quite a large parcel. The members of the company came to the door to see us depart. Mr. Baker held the horse’s head till I had helped Miss Laurie into the jinrikisha and climbed up myself, with considerable difficulty, to the seat, which was so immensely high that the horse I was to drive seemed as far away as the bow of a battle-ship is from its conning-tower, and then he handed the reins up to me with some wretched allusion to Gretna Green that caused Miss Laurie to blush brightly and the members of the company to laugh loudly.

It was a beautiful morning. The Good Gift, to give Mr. Baker’s gaunt, hairless steed the preposterous name with which he had endowed it, showed quite an aptitude for gentle ambling speed. He appeared easy to handle and amenable to voice and rein. The air was fresh and scented, the roadside scenery was better than the guidebook’s description of it. I had a truly charming girl as companion, so I settled down to enjoy a delightful morning. I turned with a smile to Miss Laurie; she smiled back. The horse had reached the foot of a long hill, and, taking my permission for granted, slackened his pace to a slow walk. I allowed the reins to droop on his back, and asked my companion what she was taking to the venerable Maori woman.

She prettily displayed the little gifts which her warm girlish heart and unerring feminine instinct had suggested as suitable for an old woman who had to totter along the edge of the grave in this vale of tears seventy or eighty years after most people were comfortably inside it—the grave, that is. They consisted of a warm woollen shawl, a tin of meat extract, a bag of chocolate creams, a packet of picture postcards of places where the Merry Marauders had played, and three books entitled, ‘Sister Suffragettes in Arms and Out of Arms,’ ‘The Memoirs of a Christian Family,’ and ‘What a Woman of Forty-five Ought to Know.’ I ventured to suggest that if Maori legend about the old lady’s age was correct, the gift of the last-named work was made just a hundred years too late.

“How horrid of you to say that!” exclaimed Miss Laurie, reproachfully. “If she didn’t know then how to settle down for old age, which is what the book tells her, how much more necessary for her to know now!”

I had not looked at the matter in this exceedingly sensible light, and I said so. Miss Laurie has a sweet disposition, for she was instantly mollified.

“But why give this book to a Maori woman?” I asked, opening ‘Sister Suffragettes in Arms and Out ot Arms’ at a picture of a hard-faced female, who flowingly signed herself as ‘The Author.’ “Surely you are not a solitary suffragette in a land where all the women have votes?”

“No, indeed,” she replied. Then she impulsively added: “To tell you the real truth, that book was given me as a present, and I wanted to do something useful with it instead of throwing it away. It occurred to me that as it is full of pictures of women fighting with policemen, and breaking windows, and stabbing men with hatpins, the old Maori woman might like to have it, because the Maoris are such a warlike race, you know.”

I was about to ask her if she had contemplated the possibility of the book sowing dissension among the Maori women and bringing about a brown suffragette movement, but Mr. Baker’s horse unexpectedly interrupted the conversation by darting off the road on to a small way-side clearing, where he quietly started to graze.

I dismounted from the lofty seat, and begging Miss Laurie not to be alarmed, jerked the Good Gift’s head up to lead him back to the road he had just left. This was not so easily accomplished as it is to write, for the brute hung back most doggedly till he saw I was more determined than he, and then he pretended to be frightened to recross the watercourse at the side of the road which he had just previously cleared at a bound. But I got him back to the road at last, and climbed back to my seat.

“I wonder what made him do that?” I remarked, as the animal, as though to atone for his misconduct, broke into a run which was a sort of convulsive compromise between a trot and a canter. “He must have shied at something.”

“Perhaps a fly or some insect stung his poor dear ear,” suggested Miss Laurie. “I noticed several buzzing about him.”

This seemed probable, so I looked keenly for these mischievous insects, but while I was carefully scanning his bare hide, the beast dashed off the road on to another clearing with such impetuosity that I was precipitated into my companion’s lap.

I blushingly recovered myself, apologised, and descended to the horse’s head again. It was some moments before I was able to persuade him to return to the road, and I was strongly tempted to accelerate his sluggish progress by a blow in his gaunt ribs, but I knew how sensitive girls are about the treatment of dumb animals, so I coaxed him instead. He nearly dragged my arm out of its socket before he would budge, but I was successful at last, and got back to my seat.

It was of no avail. A little further along another settler had hewed his little clearing out of the bush, as they call the forest in the colonies, and the horse fairly bolted on to it in spite of my efforts to guide him in the straight track. When I had pulled him once more back to the road I was dismayed to observe that more settlers had been at work further along the road clearing spaces in the wilderness for their future homes. These dotted the level track on both sides at intervals, as far as I could see—little green oases in a desert of thick grey manuka scrub. Being now, unfortunately, aware that these bare spots contained some irresistible attraction for Mr. Baker’s horrible horse, I determined to lead the beast past the next one, by way of experiment. We approached it. He made towards it. I endeavoured to hold him back. A horse is stronger than a man, and the end of a brief tug-of-war found me in an undignified attitude on my back in the dust, and the horse quietly grazing on the green as usual.

Miss Laurie was most solicitous about my welfare, and begged me to turn the horse’s head home before I ‘got hurt.’ But my spirit of determination had been aroused by the miserable animal’s contumacy, and I resolved to have another vigorous struggle for supremacy.

As we neared the next clear space I rose to my feet, and, indifferent in my anger to what Miss Laurie thought of my conduct, I flogged the brute till the dust rose in clouds from his flea-bitten hide, and endeavoured to urge him past the danger spot with menacing shouts. These tactics were almost successful, but when we were nearly past he wheeled round so suddenly as almost to overturn us, and rushed on to the green.

The impetus of the rush carried us some yards from the road. Then the horse plunged, floundered, and began to sink through the emerald-bright grass. I looked down, and was quick to realise what had happened. This clearing was one of nature’s own, a pitfall of the thermal zone, a space where warm subterranean springs had turned an apparently firm surface into a bog almost as dangerous as a quicksand. The horse wallowed deeper with a sucking splash. He sank right up to his girth, and looked dolefully around for assistance. Miss Laurie clung to me in alarm, but I assured her we were in no actual danger. It was a rather unpleasant predicament, but all we had to do, I explained, was to leave the horse to a temporary imprisonment he richly deserved while we walked back to the hotel.

I attempted to descend in order to lift her out, but the treacherous surface would not even bear the weight of a man. My leg went through, and the viscous mud clutched it with the holding force of an octopus. Fortunately I had kept one foot on the step in dismounting, and after several frantic efforts I was able to dislodge myself from the glue-like mud. I got back into the vehicle, and using the long whip-handle as a sounding-rod, I sounded all round as far as I could reach for a surface firm enough to walk on. In vain. Everywhere I touched, the whip-handle sank through the grass and water and mud oozed up. The beast of a horse had evidently rushed into the middle of the morass. There was no doubt we were temporarily marooned, cast away, within thirty feet of a public road, as completely as if thousands of miles of ocean rolled between us and assistance.

The position, though embarrassing enough, did not cause me anything more than annoyance at first, for I thought we were sure to be rescued during the morning by some passing settler. Miss Laurie, who sympathetically divined that my annoyance was largely due to self-reproach at having involved her in a ridiculous situation through my obstinacy in not turning back when she asked me, was good enough to pretend to treat our strange captivity as a joke, and was quite girlishly merry at the outset. But as the hours drifted by without the sound of approaching wheels breaking the solemn brooding stillness of the lonely bush, she became silent and I grew anxious. The morning had gone, the sun had passed its meridian, and was already beginning to cast afternoon shadows.

My anxiety was increased by a peculiar incident. Shortly after our misguided horse had settled down up to his middle in the swamp, a large blue-bottle fly with a red head—quite the most corpulent insect of its species that I had ever seen,—came and settled down on him—just above the brute’s Plimsoll mark, as it were. Having nothing else to do, I fell to watching this fly, which was very noticeable on the animal’s vast sunlit expanse of bare hide. The horse, in his early struggles to free himself, had churned up a lot of water from the swamp, and in his now quiescent state he resembled a kind of island, being entirely surrounded by a dirty pool. After I had watched the fly for some time it seemed to me that it was closer to the water than when it first alighted on the horse’s back. As I was quite sure the insect had not moved, I concentrated my closest attention on it. Presently my fears were verified. The distance between the fly and the pool lessened and lessened, till the water reached the blue-bottle’s hind legs, or tentacles. The touch of the water aroused the insect. It shook its red head, crawled an inch higher up the horse, and settled down again. I watched with sickening anxiety to see if the same process would be repeated. It was. In fifteen minutes by my watch the water was lapping at the blue-bottle’s legs again, and again the law of self-preservation aroused the insect to crawl higher up.

The fly, with its monstrous glossy blue body and vivid scarlet head, obsessed me, as Mr. Henry James would say. Nature had aggravated the screaming outrage in contrasts by fitting it with a pair of bright green wings. Whether the whole dreadful colour scheme set up sufficient tone biliousness in the artistic portion of my temperament to disturb temporarily the balance of my mind, I cannot pretend to say, but before long I was crediting that wretched fly with qualities possessed only by the crown of creation, even believing it to be taking a malicious delight in our misfortune. I imagined it laughing up its sleeve, if I may use the expression, and thought I could detect a cynical twinkle in the horny eyes that seemed to have been affixed as an afterthought to each side of its violently red head, which latter member in its colour and shape, and a tendency to wag from side to side, reminded me of the shaggy red poll of an Irish Home Rule orator I had once heard in Hyde Park denouncing the Tories. I dared not flick away the fly with my whip in order to be freed from its horrible obsession, for its periodical upward crawls were to me what sounding the well is to the captain of a sinking ship; they revealed to me the rate at which the Good Gift was foundering into the unknown depths beneath us. The fly shifted an inch higher every time the water touched it, as nearly as my eye could guage the distance, and in fifteen minutes the water would be wetting its back legs again. It was, therefore, obvious that we were sinking at the rate of four inches an hour. One did not require the brain of a mathematician to deduce that our downward progress, or, rather, retrogression, was at the rate of a foot every three hours, which meant that (allowing our heads to be ten feet above the level of the swamp at that moment) in thirty hours we should be entirely submerged, with the red-headed blue-bottle fly buzzing a mocking requiem over our muddy sepulchre.

Happily, such a catastrophe was not to overtake us, for, when the fly had just made his fourteenth shift, and the sun had commenced to cast long shadows as dark as my thoughts, I heard the welcome sound of wheels in the distance. I removed the arm with which I had been supporting the drooping form of Miss Laurie during the last hour of our trying vigil in order to guard against the contingency of her falling out of the trap, and putting my hands to my mouth, gave a ringing Colonial ‘coo-ee’. Then I listened intently. There was no doubt that the wheels were coming our way. Presently our deliverer appeared to our eager gaze as a distant black speck on the dusty whiteness of the road where it wound up into the hills far ahead, and a long while elapsed before we were able to make out the speck to be a bullock wagon drawn by sixteen plodding bullocks. Indeed, the fly had time to make three more shifts before the caravan drew abreast of us, and the driver stopped amazed at the spectacle which met his eye. He, like the fly, was red-headed, to say nothing of red whiskers, but his was an honest florid colour pleasing to the eye, and not a burning, flaming red like the fly’s. That insect, by the way, easily escaped my effort to destroy him when I saw deliverance was nigh, and buzzed airily off.

When I told the man of our plight he got a rope from underneath his wagon, and flung me an end of it with directions to make it fast to the axle, if possible. I retained sufficient of my school gymnastics to accomplish this difficult feat without falling into the mud beneath, or breaking my neck, and as soon as I had done so the bullock-driver, with fiendish objurgations to the team that sounded like angels’ music in my ears, commanded the bullocks to ‘haulaway.’ Nothing could have resisted the tremendous pull that followed, more sustained and powerful than that of any horse team, and presently we began to move backwards towards terra firma—to the great astonishment of Mr. Baker’s horse, who, I fancy, would have been content to remain in the mire till death overtook him. Soon we were on dry land, grasping our rescuer’s hand.

He was, it appeared, a timber-getter, on his way to Matetanei with a load of kauri for shipment to the timber mills at Auckland. He readily undertook to convey the mud-plastered ‘Good Gift,’ and the ’rikisha, behind his wagon to the town while we walked ahead, for I was determined not to trust my companion, or myself, to the caprices of that malevolent horse again. Before we started on our way I asked the man the depth of the morass from which he had just extricated us.

“Sorra one of them knows,” replied the honest fellow, scratching his whiskers thoughtfully. “Some says two feet, and some says forty-two.”

The first person Miss Laurie and I saw when we got back to the hotel was Mr. Baker, seated underneath the front verandah with a glass of shandy-gaff at his side and a pipe in his mouth, enjoying the cool of the evening before tea. He heard my indignant story with amazement, but when I suggested that he should immediately take steps to have his horse destroyed, he turned his sound eye on me in reproof and reproach.

“What!” he exclaimed. “You ask me to destroy that wonderful animal just after he has given you such a striking proof of his almost human intelligence? May God forgive you for your words!”

“I’m hanged if I see where the intelligence came in,” I retorted angrily, for I thought he was trying to make a joke of our accident.

“That’s because you’re new to the show business,” he replied pityingly. “That horse belonged to a man who earned his living by showing moving pictures in a tent, and the animal has become so accustomed to his late owner’s invariable practice of erecting the tent on vacant pieces of ground that he now pulls on to all the level greens of his own accord, so as to obviate the possibility of his master missing a good pitch. Destroy him? After what you have told me I wouldn’t take a thousand pounds for that horse if it were counted out into my hand at this moment! He’s an ornament to the profession.”

Doubtless he is, but he is too powerful a performer ever to act under my management again,

Yours ever,

VAL.