CHAPTER XI.

THE SEARCH FOR ‘THE LITTLE MAIDEN.’

On the following morning I parted with Kahikatea, who was going back to his hut among the mountains, and thence to the nearest civilised part to procure such things as he required for his exploration. Tiki and I continued our way south towards the cottage on the bank of the stream where his band had left the child in Grey’s care fifteen years before; not that we expected to find Crystal Grey still there, but for all that it was the right point at which to begin our search. I may say here that I no longer had any doubts as to whether the child left there by the Maoris was Miriam Grey’s daughter, and, as we journeyed along towards the gap between two lines of snow mountains, I talked with Tiki about her.

“What clothes had she on when you took her south?” I asked.

“A _kaitaka_ of kiwi feathers,” he replied, with a readiness that assured me he could recall it perfectly. “She also had _huia_ feathers in her hair, sandals on her feet, and a small _heitiki_[19] hung round her neck.”

I pictured the little mite as a kind of “pakeha Maori” chieftainess travelling south in the arms of a band of cannibals, but as safe as, perhaps even safer than, a well-guarded child in a Christian family, for was she not under the word of protection of the _ariki_ Te Makawawa? Under such conditions she might have journeyed through the Uriwera, entering it in childhood and emerging at womanhood, without so much as a hair of her head being harmed.

“What was she like to look at?” I asked again.

Tiki made an expressive gesture of admiration with his hands.

“_He Pakeha!_ She was like a rising star. The young wild swan was not more beautiful. When it was my turn to carry the little maiden I had strange feelings, and when she looked at me with her dark eyes a _waiariki_[20] sprang up in my heart--ah! she had the eyes of a witch, _pakeha_, but her words were like the sweet hymns of our ancestress Paré. My heart flies out of my breast, like a bird into the south, to search for the little white maiden beyond the snowy peaks there in the distance.”

“But she is not a little maiden now,” I said. “If she is alive she is grown up--almost a woman. And quite possibly she may have left this land to cross the Ocean of Kiwa.”

“Ah! wherever she is she will be like the graceful nikau palm among the trees of the valley, and her laugh will be like running water. I remember her laugh, _pakeha_! and her lips! they were as red as the _titoki_ berry in its sheath, but they will be blue with the tatoo now, if she is almost a woman!”

“I should hope not,” I said, laughing. “They will still be as red as the cherry, or as the _titoki_ berry in its sheath, if you like that better.”

“But her black hair will fall upon her shoulders, and she will wear a _kaitaka_ like our maidens,” he persisted.

I did not wish to damp his ardour in the search for ‘the little maiden,’ so I said, “Perhaps--we shall see!”

Day after day, as we journeyed on, we talked of the object of our quest, and I saw from the Maori’s words that he worshipped the memory of this little maiden as that of a divine thing. What had he seen in her eyes to produce this lasting impression upon him? I conjured before my mind the fresh, fair young face of a girl of seventeen or eighteen, with laughing lips and coal-black eyes, harbouring, perhaps, a look of the sorceress in them--a look made more emphatic by enshrouding masses of raven hair. This face glanced down at me between the fleecy clouds of the far south, but I recall the vision now only to dismiss it, for it possessed not the dawnlike flush of radiant beauty that heaven had cast on Crystal Grey.

On the evening of the fourth day we came to the river along the right bank of which Tiki remembered taking the child. He led the way and I followed, marvelling at his memory of cliffs and dark pools, and outstanding trees which he had not seen for fifteen years.

Twilight fell over the bush and the roaring river. I suggested camping and continuing the journey next morning. But Tiki said we were now not far from the hut, so we held on for another half mile. Tiki was right, as he always was in matters of locality, for there, between some trees a little withdrawn from the bank, we saw a small cottage; but no smoke came from the chimney, nor was there a light in the window.

“Is it the place?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, looking about him; “it is the place. There is the _totara_ beneath which we waited while our chief carried the little maiden up to the hut.”

As we advanced towards the cottage we soon saw that it was deserted. The little bridge that spanned a stream was lying with one end in the water, the gate opening on the garden path was leaning sideways from one hinge; and, as we passed on up to the door, the overgrown path, the wilderness of tangles in the garden, and, finally, the broken windows of the hut itself showed that it had long since been deserted.

Opening the door on its creaking hinges, we went inside. The place was quite bare, except for a bed of fern in one corner, where some traveller had camped. There was no evidence of its having been regularly occupied for, I thought, at least ten years. However, I resolved to sleep there that night, and in the morning push on to the nearest sheep run, accommodation house, or digging township, as the case might be, and make inquiries. Accordingly we swept the floor, brought in more fern, boiled our billy on the hearth, and slept in more comfortable quarters than those to which we were accustomed.

A strange thing happened in the night--a thing which was the first in an extended series of inexplicable occurrences, in the progress of which I almost began to imagine I was being haunted. I awoke suddenly, and saw the bright moonlight flooding in through one of the empty casements, and there, looking in, was what I accepted as a mean trick of my imagination. It was a face--the most vile and wizard-looking face I have ever seen. The features were those of a negro, wizened, withered, evil-looking to a degree. I started up into a sitting posture, and rubbed my eyes, but when I stared at the open square of moonlight again the face was gone. I sprang to my feet, went over to the casement and looked out, but saw nothing. Yet what I heard chilled my blood. From very far away in the bush came a wild, hideous laugh, like that of a triumphant devil. Bah! was the place haunted, or was I ridden by some nightmare which had grown out of my fearful experiences in the mountain cavern? I could make nothing of it, so I went back to bed, and when I awoke in the morning I laughed it away as a grotesque nightmare.

When day came I had a good look round the place to see if I could find anything that would give me some sort of clue to the whereabouts of Grey, but nothing that I saw afforded me anything to the purpose. There was an overgrown and almost obliterated bullock-dray road, however, which I knew must lead to some run or settlement, and this I proposed to follow, as it led away to the south-west, and would in all probability bring us to the West Coast Goldfields, or, at all events, to the sea; so that, at least, we could find our way to Hokitika.

A last look round the interior of the hut before setting out afforded a peculiar piece of evidence to the effect that some child, six or seven years old, had left that hut in, or shortly after, the year 18--. I arrived at this conclusion in the following way. While I was making a careful survey of ceiling, floor, and walls, my eye fell upon some horizontal scratches on the bare wall near the fireplace. At first glance they appeared like markings made by a carpenter, but a closer scrutiny showed me in a flash what they really were--measurements of the growth of some child. There were eight or nine. The first, dated June, 18--, was about three feet six inches from the floor. The next stood an inch above, and so they ran up, some with dates and others without, to the height of four feet and a little over. There at a certain date the measurements stopped, from which I concluded that the child, whose growth had been registered in this way, may have left at that time. There were no markings anywhere else to give the idea that any other children had lived in the hut, so the only conclusion I could draw was that these referred to the child who had been left there with Grey some fifteen years since.

But a sudden thought arrested my mind. I was getting along a little too hastily. There might be another explanation of the sudden termination of this systematic scale of measurements at the height of four feet something. That last measurement might have had a black edge to it, in which case it occurred to me with a shade of sadness that its date might be found again burnt into some little wooden slab at the head of a grave four feet something in length, in a sheltered spot in the garden about the hut.

To exhaust this alternative I explained my discovery to Tiki, and together we went out and made a thorough search all over the tangled wilderness of a garden, but, to my great relief, found no such grave or wooden slab. It was more probable, I thought, judging from the deserted state of the place, and the growth of the quick-hedges since they had last been cut, that Grey and the child had left the hut somewhere about the year specified in the last measurement, nine years before the time of which I am writing.

“The little maiden is not dead,” said Tiki anxiously, when we had concluded our search; “no, she is not dead. We should have counted another star in the sky, if the little maiden had passed over Wai Ora Tane.”

“She is not buried here at all events,” I replied with dry logic, which I fear compared but poorly with the poetical thought of the Maori. Then we found the bullock-dray road and set out on our tramp.

Overgrown, bestrewn with _débris_ from the thick bush, and in parts almost impassable, it led straight down into the south-west, and when we had followed it for two or three miles it opened out into another dray road which was in good repair. Here we found fresh bullock tracks, with the ruts of dray wheels, and after travelling some five miles in our right direction with the rising sun behind us, we heard a sound of ‘language’ ahead. It was the bullock-puncher talking in his most persuasive tone to his long-suffering team.

Presently, turning a slight bend in the road, we came up with him--a raw Irishman of the lankiest, boniest type imaginable, with fiery hair and a nose that had been blunted in Heke’s war in the ’forties. His trousers were not what they used to be; his boots were eighteen by four; his shirt should have been at the binder’s in several places, except where it was fashionably fastened at the collar with a tie of undressed flax clean that day from Nature’s laundry; his socks, which one looked for in vain between the bottoms of his trousers and the tops of his boots, were at the wash; and his clay pipe, stuck like a dagger in his belt of raw bullock’s hide, looked as if it wanted renewing; but--his language was divine, I mean profane, and his whip, as it curled in air and dusted last year’s hair from the leader’s flank, was eloquent with the sublimity of perfect punctuation.

I was drawing out this bullock-puncher, when the off leader stopped, and, turning his lowered head to the right, gave a violent snort that scattered the dust and dry leaves from the ground. In a trice the great whip was unfolding itself in the air, and, as it came down on the startled bullock’s flank, the well of Irish much defiled overflowed its banks; but, in the confusion, I heard distinctly from far away the same wild, mocking laugh of my nightmare. Again I asked myself if I was haunted, and if so what earthly or unearthly thing had scared the bullock at that moment. Again I could make nothing of it, and dismissed the matter from my mind.

We walked by the side of this son of Erin for a mile, and I learned in the course of conversation that there was a small digging township ten miles further on. Seeing that he could not talk to his bullocks properly with anyone else constantly interrupting the thread of his argument, and that he neither knew anything about Grey nor could tell me who had last lived in the hut on the river bank, we soon left him behind, coming along slowly to the tune of “Woo comother byke--Skipper! byke--Skipper!! ye (crack) byke! Skipper!!!” which tune had no “grand Amen” in it, but went on and on until, as we drew ahead, it died away further and further in the distance.

Towards evening we reached the digging township--a quaint, mushroom growth of tents and rough wooden buildings. Here I began my inquiries, but no one could give me any information. The floating population of the gold diggings was not an easy field in which to find traces of a man who had probably left the district ten years before. The Hindu saying, “A piece of wood and a piece of wood may meet in the ocean, and having touched, float away again--like this is the meeting of mortals,” is especially true in a gold-seeking world, where men come from everywhere, and drift about between California, Bendigo, and New Zealand. But late that night chance favoured me. I dropped into the tap-room of an accommodation house a little way out of the township, and put my inquiries to the landlord. He shook his head, then turning to the ten or twelve occupants of the room who were playing euchre at a large table, he addressed them collectively.

“Say, do any of you chaps know anything of a man named Grey, who lived in these parts about ten years ago?”

The diggers paused in their play and looked up. One honest-looking ruffian--a Scot, with sandy whiskers and quick grey eyes, paused with his arm upraised in the excited attitude a man assumes when he is about to plank down the right bower. I saw his eyes pass over me in a quick scrutiny; then, when the others had answered the landlord’s question with negatives of various kinds, he spun the winning card on to the table instead of banging it down with a noisy thud in the usual way among diggers, and, pushing his chair back, asked another man to take his place, and sauntered out of the room.

I did not think this had any bearing on the matter in hand until afterwards, when, on leaving the place and proceeding along the road that led back to the township, I was surprised to see this rough Scot step out of the shadows by the roadside and come towards me.

“I heard ye askin’ for Grey up yonder,” he said, “and I thocht maybe it’s Dreamer Grey ye want.”

“Dreamer Grey?” I repeated, laying stress upon the strange Christian name as I rolled it over in my mind. “I don’t know him by that name--in fact, all I know about him is that he disappeared from Hokitika seventeen years ago, and lived for some time in a small hut on the bank of the river about twenty-five miles down. He was a tall, soldierly man, with curly black hair, brown eyes, and a short moustache----”

“Ay, that’s Dreamer Grey,” he interrupted; “but tell me noo, what are ye wantin’ him for?”

“Are you mistaking me for a detective on his track?” I asked laughing.

“I’m no so sure,” he said gravely as his keen grey eyes met mine in the starlight. “I’m no so sure, and until I weel ken what ye’re wantin’ him for I canna tell ye.”

“All right,” I replied. “Grey’s wife has been left a large estate at home and a lot of money, and I’m searching for her--if living--or, failing that, for evidence of her death.”

“Grey’s wife? eh, man, but Grey had nae wife. It canna be the same man?”

“Oh, yes it is,” I persisted. “He had a little girl named Crystal with him, had he not?”

“Ay, he had then, a bonny wee lassie.”

“With black hair and black eyes.”

“Ay, I mind the wee lassie weel. Ah! man, but she was bonnie.” His rough voice softened as he said the words.

“That little girl was his own child,” I went on.

“Eh! What’s that? what’s that? his ain child? Weel noo; he telt me that the bairn was left at his hut one night when he was asleep by the fire. Hoo d’ye ken it was his ain bairn? Dreamer Grey wasna the man to tell his mate a dam lee, an’ I’m no the man to stand by and----”

He was getting excited, and I hastened to explain.

“Now, you listen,” I said, “and I’ll tell you how I know what I know; and, at the same time, you’ll see that what Grey told you was perfectly true. I have gleaned from the Maoris that they took Grey and his wife prisoners when they had only been married a few weeks. They kept the woman, but set Grey free, having first inoculated him with some strange poison which clouded his mind, and, as they gave me to understand, entirely dislocated his memory. In due time the little girl, his daughter, was born, and when she was two years old one of the chiefs, not wishing to kill her, but wanting to be rid of her, sent her with a party of Maoris southwards, with orders that she should be left with the first pakeha they encountered. They came across the hut where Grey was living and left her there while he was asleep. Of course, he adopted the child not knowing it was his own.”

“Ay, ay,” said the Scot slowly. “Man, that’s a strange tale ye’re tellin’ me. But I mind weel that Dreamer Grey telt me he had forgotten his past life, and he was sae mysterious aboot it that I thocht he had done something that he didna wish to mind, and that’s why I heid ma tongue when I heard ye speerin’ aboot him up yonder at the hoose.”

“Ah!” I said. “And how did he come by his strange name?”

“I’m comin’ to that. He said that when the wee lassie was left wi’ him she telt him her name was ‘Crystal Grey’ as near as a bairn could say it; and so he ca’d himsel’ Grey, an’ we ca’d him Dreamer, because every now and again he would stop in his work and look straight ahead in an oncanny way, as if he was tryin’ to reca’ somethin’ he had dreamt. Ay, he was a queer body, and what ye say aboot his mem’ry explains many and many a thing that I couldna mak’ oot.”

“Well now,” I said, anxious to come to the point, “the Maori tohunga who doctored him with the poison knows where Grey’s wife is and will reveal her hiding-place to me on one condition--that I find and bring back the child. Whether his conscience is troubling him, or whether some strange superstition is at the bottom of it, I cannot say; but I have reason to trust him, and, if I return with the child, I have no doubt I shall find her mother. So if you know where Grey and the child are and have quite given up the idea that I’m on Grey’s track for something he doesn’t want to remember, perhaps you can give me some information.”

At this the honest Scot opened his heart, and told me how he and Dreamer Grey had worked together on the goldfields; how, some ten years before, Grey had made his pile, and had bought a large tract of land at the head of one of the sounds on the south-west coast, where he settled down with one aim in life, to care for the well-being of the wee bit lassie; and, finally, how, if I were to go there and say that old Jim Crichton directed me, I should be welcomed with open arms.

“And noo ma bonnie lad,” he concluded, when he had told me this much and more, “it’s a dry tale that doesna end in a drink. Come on!”

As he put his arm through mine and drew me away towards the accommodation house, a stone rolled from the top of a bank twelve or fifteen feet high on one side of the road.

“Did that fall of its own accord?” I asked myself, and as if in answer to my question there came again that wild, unearthly laugh from far away back in the bush.

“Did you hear that?” I asked excitedly, catching my friend by the arm.

“Yes; someone laughing in the bush--sounds oncanny.”

“I heard it once before,” I replied, “but thought it was fancy--some mad hatter, I suppose.”

And we continued our way to the house.