quite clear, but the incident is given just as Bent narrates it. He and his companions on the marae heard the dialogue, and Bent says the old fear struck to his heart when he heard Titokowaru menacing the white officer with the oven. The Taranakis seem to have been particularly addicted to the "ordeal by fire."
"The oven is gaping open for you!" was their customary threat. Their tribal history abounds, too, in tales of how some obnoxious neighbours or others, Ngati-so-and-so, had been effectively disposed of by the simple process of surrounding their huts while they slept, fastening the doors, and then setting fire to the wharés. The only objection from the Maori point of view to this summary method of obtaining utu was that it "spoiled the meat!"
Colonel McDonnell was so conversant with Maori tikanga—customs, rules of life, and ways of thought—that he was by way of being a tohunga-Maori himself, and his dramatic twitting of Titokowaru with the fact that the reputed source of his fighting mana was within his (McDonnell's) knowledge was a circumstance that hugely annoyed the old war-chief.
It was just as if so much of his mana-tapu had passed to his white foeman—to the rival maker of strong "war-medicine."
Occasional skirmishes with the white cavalry patrol-parties enlivened the three months' sojourn
