tered and reckoned up their losses. There were about three hundred and fifty of them now in camp—men, women and children. With wonderful celerity the forest-men cut a little clearing, and built wharau, or rough huts, of saplings, thatched with the long fronds of the nikau palm and the mamaku tree-fern. Here the wounded men were attended to as well as the primitive methods of the bush allowed. Women were sent out to search the river-banks for flax-plants; the flax-roots were dug up, boiled, and the resultant mucilaginous juice poured over the gunshot and bayonet wounds. This was the Maoris' most favoured method of treating injuries of this character, and it generally bore good results.
"Ringiringi" himself took a hand in the bush-surgery, for he had watched army surgeons at their work, and the Hauhau wounded, though most of them preferred their own people's doctoring, were grateful to the white man for his efforts to ease their sufferings.
A picked band of the fugitives scouted back through the forest and cautiously reconnoitred their captured fort, which had been set on fire by the troops, and was now a heap of blackened ruins. The Government force had by this time passed on to the attack of other pas, and the scouts re-entered their destroyed fortress and searched for their dead.
