d the corner of his prison-house. With a yell of
rage and surprise he gave chase, his colleagues running and shouting at
his heels.

Hugh Jervois, hearing them coming, abandoned hope for one instant. The
next, he took heart again, for there beside him was the hole in the
palisade through which he had crept into the _kainga_ an hour before. In
a twinkling he had pushed Dick through and followed himself. And as they
crouched unseen outside, they heard the pursuit go wildly rushing past
inside, heedless of the low gap in the stockade which had been the
brothers' salvation.

"They'll be out upon us in a moment," cried Hugh. "Run, Dick! Run!"

Hand in hand they raced down the slope and plunged into the cover of the
bush. Only just in time, however, for the next instant the moonlit slope
beneath the _kainga_ was alive with Maoris--men, women, and
children--shouting and rushing about in a state of tremendous
excitement. It was for Dick alone they hunted, not knowing he had a
companion, and they were evidently mystified by the boy's swift
disappearance.

Presently the brothers, lying low in a dense tangle of ferns and
creepers, saw a number of the younger men, headed by Horoeka, streaming
down the track leading to the lake. But after a little time they
returned, somewhat sobered and crestfallen, and rejoined the others,
who had meanwhile gone inside the _kainga_.

Then, feeling sure that the coast was clear, the brothers ventured to
steal cautiously out of earshot of the enemy and make their way down
through the bush to the shores of the lake. There they were greeted with
the welcome sound of oars, and, shooting swiftly towards them through
the moonlit waters, they saw the surveyors' boat, with Fred Elliot and
half a dozen others in her.

* * * * *

"You see they are trying to carry off the thing just in the way I told
you they'd do," said the head surveyor to Hugh Jervois after their
denunciatory visit to the _kainga_ in the early morning. "Horoeka, the
arch-offender, has disappeared into remoter wilds, and the others lay
the blame of it all on Horoeka."

"Yes," responded Hugh, "and even then the beggars have the impudence to
swear, in the teeth of their talk last night in their _whare-runanga_,
that Horoeka only meant to give the _pakeha_ boy a good fright because
he had done a mischief to the very _tapu_-tree in which lives the spirit
of the tribe's great ancestor."

"Well," said th