She had been up all night, poor girl, and was thoroughly worn out.

Somehow the teacher didn't feel uncomfortable about it.
He went down to the whare. August had not touched a dishcloth or broom.

She had slept, as she always did, like a pig, all night,
while her sister lay and tossed in agony; in the morning

she ate everything there was to eat in the house (which, it seemed,
was the Maori way of showing sympathy in sickness and trouble),

after which she brooded by the fire till the children, running out of school,
announced the teacher's lunch hour.

August braced up again for a little while. The master thought of the trouble
they had with Ayacanora in "Westward Ho", and was comforted,

and tackled his romance again. Then the schoolmistress fell sick
and things went wrong. The groceries went down faster than ever,

and the house got very dirty, and began to have a native smell about it.
August grew fat, and lazy, and dirty, and less reliable on washing-days,

or when there was anything special to do in the house.
"The savage blood is strong," thought the teacher, "and she is beginning

to long for her own people and free unconventional life."
One morning -- on a washing-day, too, as it happened -- she called out,

before the teacher and his wife were up, that the Maoris
who supplied them with milk were away, and she had promised

to go up and milk the cow and bring the milk down. The teacher
gave her permission. One of the scholars usually brought the milk early.

Lunch time came and no August, no milk -- strangest of all,
only half the school children. The teacher put on his hat,

and went up to the pa once more. He found August squatted
in the midst of a circle of relations. She was entertaining them

with one of a series of idealistic sketches of the teacher's domestic life,
in which she showed a very vivid imagination, and exhibited

an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals of absence
had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding slanders

she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life
came back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards,

and her character sketches of previous teachers, and her own relations
-- for she spared nobody -- would have earned a white woman

a long and well-merited term of imprisonment for criminal libel.
She had cunningly, by straightforward and unscrupulous lying,

prejudiced the principal mother and boss woman of the pa
against the teacher and his wife; as a natural result of which

the old lady, who, like the rest, was very ignorant and ungrateful,
"turned nasty" and kept the children from school. The teacher

lost his temper, so the children were rounded up and hurried
down to school immediately; with them came August and her aunt,

with alleged explanations and excuses, and a shell-fish.
The aunt and sisters said they'd have nothing to do with August.

They didn't want her and wouldn't have her. The teacher said that,
under those circumstances, she'd better go and drown herself;

so she went home with them.
The whole business had been a plot by her nearest relations.

They got rid of the trouble and expense of keeping her,
and the bother of borrowing in person, whenever in need of trifles

in the grocery line. Borrowing recommenced with her dismissal;
but the teacher put a full stop to it, as far as he was concerned.

Then August, egged on by her aunt, sent a blackguardly letter
to the teacher's wife; the sick sister, by the way, who had been

nursed and supplied with food by her all along, was in it, and said
she was glad August sent the letter, and it served the schoolmistress right.

The teacher went up to the pa once more; an hour later, August in person,
accompanied, as usual, by a relation or two, delivered at the cottage

an abjectapology in writing, the composition of which would have discouraged
the most enthusiasticadvocate of higher education for the lower classes.

Then various petty annoyances were tried. The teacher is firmly convinced
that certain animal-like sounds round the house at night were due

to August's trying to find out whether his wife was as likely to be haunted
as the Maoris were. He didn't dream of such a thing at the time,

for he did not believe that one of them had the pluck to venture out
after dark. But savagesuperstition must give way to savage hate.

The girl's last "try-on" was to come down to the school fence,
and ostentatiously sharpen a table-knife on the wires,

while she scowled murderously in the direction of the schoolmistress,
who was hanging out her washing. August looked, in her dark, bushy,

Maori hair, a thoroughly wild savage. Her father had murdered her mother
under particularly brutal circumstances, and the daughter

took after her father.
The teacher called her and said: "Now, look here, my lady,

the best thing you can do is to drop that nonsense at once"
(she had dropped the knife in the ferns behind her),

"for we're the wrong sort of people to try it on with.
Now you get out of this and tell your aunt -- she's sneaking there

in the flax -- what I tell you, and that she'd better clear out of this quick,
or I'll have a policeman out and take the whole gang into town in an hour.

Now be off, and shut that gate behind you, carefully, and fasten it."
She did, and went.

The worst of it was that the August romance copy was useless. Her lies
were even less reliable and picturesque than the common Jones Alley hag lie.

Then the teacher thought of the soft fool he'd been, and that made him wild.
He looked like a fool, and was one to a great extent,

but it wasn't good policy to take him for one.
Strange to say, he and others had reason to believe that August respected him,

and liked him rather than otherwise; but she hated his wife,
who had been kind to her, as only a savage can hate. The younger pupils

told the teacher, cheerfully and confidently, that August said
she'd cut Mrs. Lorrens' throat the first chance she got. Next week

the aunt sent down to ask if the teacher could sell her a bar of soap,
and sent the same old shilling; he was tired of seeing it stuck out

in front of him, so he took it, put it in his pocket, and sent the soap.
This must have discouraged them, for the borrowing industry petered out.

He saw the aunt later on, and she told him, cheerfully, that August was going
to live with a half-caste in a certain house in town.

Poor August! For she was only a tool after all. Her "romance"
was briefly as follows: -- She went, per off-hand Maori arrangement,

as `housekeeper' in the hut of a labourer at a neighbouring saw-mill.
She stayed three months, for a wonder; at the expiration of which time

she put on her hat and explained that she was tired of stopping there,
and was going home. He said, `All right, Sarah, wait a while

and I'll take you home.' At the door of her aunt's house he said,
`Well, good-bye, Sarah,' and she said, in her brooding way, `Good-bye, Jim.'

And that was all.
As the last apparent result of August's mischief-making,

her brother or someone one evening rode up to the cottage,
drunk and inclined to bluster. He was accompanied by a friend, also drunk,

who came to see the fun, and was ready to use his influence
on the winning side. The teacher went inside, brought out his gun,

and slipped two cartridges in. "I've had enough of this," he said.
"Now then, be off, you insolent blackguards, or I'll shoot you like rabbits.

Go!" and he snapped his jaw and the breech of his gun together.
As they rode off, the old local hawk happened to soar close over a dead lamb

in the fern at the corner of the garden, and the teacher,
who had been "laying" for him a long time, let fly both barrels at him,

without thinking. When he turned, there was only a cloud of dust
down the track.

. . . . .
The teacher taught that school for three years thereafter, without a hitch.

But he went no more on Universal Brotherhood lines. And, for years
after he had gone, his name was spoken of with great respect by the Maoris.

New Year's Night
It was dark enough for anything in Dead Man's Gap -- a round, warm,

close darkness, in which retreating sounds seemed to be cut off suddenly
at a distance of a hundred yards or so, instead of growing

faint and fainter, and dying away, to strike the ear once or twice again
-- and after minutes, it might seem -- with startling distinctness,

before being finally lost in the distance, as it is on clear, frosty nights.
So with the sounds of horses' hoofs, stumbling on the rough bridle-track

through the "saddle", the clatter of hoof-clipped stones and scrape of gravel