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That's rather misleading, though, for it was never a wahi tapu, or native cemetery. This bay was evidently the landing-place or port for Marahemo, and the subordinate kaingas on the ranges yonder. You can see it was naturally that. As such there would be constant traffic through it, even if there were no wharès in the place itself.
Brown, gypsey-like people they appear in the distance, wearing ordinary clothes like Europeans, only dirty and ragged usually. Here and there we pass a cluster of their wharès, low down near the beach brown huts of thatch-like appearance, for they are made of raupo grass. Some of them are very neat, with carved and painted doors and fronts.
Shakspeer rote good plase, but he wouldn't hav succeeded as a Washington correspondent of a New York daily paper. He lackt the rekesit fancy and imagginashun. That's so! Old George Washington's Fort was not to hev eny public man of the present day resemble him to eny alarmin extent. Whare bowts can George's ekal be found? I ask, & boldly anser no whares, or eny whare else.
"Horoeka is sure to have returned to the kainga by this time, and, by cunning or by force, I'll get out of that crazy ruffian what he has done with my brother." Reconnoitring the kainga in the light of the risen moon Hugh stealthily approached the palisade surrounding it. From the biggest of those wharés came the sound of men's voices, one at a time, in loud and eager talk.
Here reside Tama and his wife, and one or two others; while just across the river is a larger kainga, where live the remainder of Tama's flock. Round about his wharès is a plentiful clearing, whereon are to be seen pigs and poultry, a few cattle, and a horse or two.
These are not Maori wharès, as we suppose at first, but are the temporary habitations of gum-diggers, a nomadic class who haunt the waste tracts where kauri-gum is to be found buried in the soil. In a few places we pass by solitary homesteads, looking very comfortable in the midst of their more or less cultivated paddocks and clearings.
Then he crept along between the palisade and the backs of the scattered wharés very cautiously, for he dreaded being seen by the group about the fire until at last he stood behind the big wharé-runanga.
They showed him that the marae was completely deserted now, the group about the cooking-place having retired into the wharés for the night. If he only knew which of those silent wharés held Dick, a rescue was possible. To blunder on the wrong wharé would only serve to arouse the kainga. "Oh, if I only knew which! If I only knew which!" Hugh groaned in agony of mind.
There was a dead silence, during which Don sat gazing at a group of the savages half-a-mile away, as they landed from a long canoe, and ran it up the beach in front of one of the native whares or dwellings. "Why, Jem!" Don exclaimed suddenly, "why not now?"
To his unspeakable thankfulness the young man gathered from the chance remarks of one of the speakers that Dick, alive and uninjured, had been brought by Horoeka into the kainga at nightfall, and was now shut up in one of the wharés.
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