“Pipi—I gave him Murray’s red necktie. He wanted to makutu him. I—I couldn’t help it.”
“If you’re drunk at this hour,” said Ormond, “I’ll take you down and souse you in our new paddock. If you think you’re speaking truth———”
Murray put him aside, grasping the boy’s arm in hot fingers.
“Don’t be scared, Roddy. I won’t hurt you. Now tell me.”
By patient questioning the two wrenched from Roddy all that he knew. Then Ormond looked at Murray standing blank-eyed in the sun of the hill-top, and the sweat of unformed dread sprang on him.
When a tohunga has hate for one of his kind that man presently withers and dies as a blown leaf on a tree. But this arrangement is between Maori and Maori, when kindred blood, and ignorance, and minds soaked in generations of superstitions and in knowledge of things that the white man does not know of must come into account. By all the laws of Heaven and Earth a white man has no right to submit his soul to a brown man’s curse. By all the understanding that thirty-five years of life had given Ormond knew that Murray had done this thing, albeit unwittingly. He spoke quickly.
“Murray! Don’t look like that, man! It’s
