here won't start until after the war. The preliminary surveys can still go on. All right, Malcolm! jolly good luck and all that sort of thing, you know. Come and lunch with me before you start."

The morning passed ever so slowly. Contrary to his usual manner, Malcolm found his thoughts wandering from his work. The desire to be up and doing, to push on with his share in the great adventure, gripped his mind to the exclusion of all other topics. In the ranks of the Dominion lads there was one of many gaps waiting specially for him to fill, and he meant to fill it worthily.

On his way back to the hut, after having lunched with Mr. Hughes, Malcolm encountered a sturdy Maori.

"Hallo, Te Paheka!" he exclaimed. "You're just the man I want to see. You want another motor-car? All right, come with me to Christchurch, and you can have my blessed car. That's a bargain."

Te Paheka was a typical specimen of a twentieth-century Maori. He was a tall, heavily-built, muscular man of about forty-five years of age, and lived at a whare about three miles from the camp. In his youth he had been given a thoroughly sound college education, and had gone to England in order to graduate. As a scholar he shone; as a business man he was a failure, owing to the fatal and all too common trait amongst Maoris of the educated class of pleasure in the spending of money, and, oddly enough, to an inherent tendency to relapse, if only temporarily, to an aboriginal existence.

Te Paheka owned a considerable amount of land. Frequently he sold tracts of ground to settlers, displaying much shrewdness in the various transactions. He never went back on his word. To those who dealt fairly and squarely with him he was a stanch friend, but it was his boast that no white man would have the opportunity of letting him down a second time.

With the proceeds of the sales Te Paheka would come into the nearest large town, and have a right royal time while funds lasted. Usually his weakness in that direction was a motor-car. He had been known to go to the largest dealers in Christ-church and purchase the swiftest car procurable, drive it at breakneck speed until he collided with something, and then sell the remains and retire to his pah until he found an opportunity for another exuberance of pecuniary extravagance. But of late Te Paheka had fallen on hard times. The war had hit him badly. With the heavy drain upon New Zealand's man power and the sudden and marked diminution in the stream of immigrants, the opportunities to sell land vanished, and with them the prospects of buying another motor-car.

Malcolm knew this. He also had found the Maori ready to do him a good turn. On one occasion Te Paheka had extricated the lad from a dangerous position during a landslide on the Wairakato Ridge; and now the chance had arrived to repay the courteous native by making him a present of the ancient but still active Juggernaut.

"Would I not?" was Te Paheka's reply to the lad's offer. "Yes, I'll take great care of her for your sake, Mr. Malcolm. What can I knock out of her--a good fifty?"

"Hardly," replied Malcolm, laughing. The idea of juggernaut ambling along at nearly a modest mile a minute was too funny. "Come along. I am starting for home at three o'clock."

"I suppose you'll let me drive?" enquired Te Paheka.

Mental visions of seeing juggernaut toppling over the edge of Horseshoe Bend, and crashing upon the rock four or five hundred feet below, prompted Malcolm to a discreet reply.

"It's my last chance of driving a car for a very long time, Te Paheka," he said diplomatically. "You'll be able to do what you like with her after I get home."

"You lucky bounder!" was Dick Selwyn's greeting when the chums met at the hut. "The Boss is a decent sort. He might very well have put the tin hat on your suggestion. Shall I lend a hand with your gear?"

"Packed already," announced Malcolm. "All except my .303 rifle and the greenheart rod. Thought they might come in useful for you, and I don't suppose I'll need them in a hurry."

With hardly anyone to see him off, excepting a couple of Maori lads who were employed as messengers, Malcolm, accompanied by Te Paheka, set off on the momentous journey that was to end--where? Perhaps in France, perhaps on the high seas. He found himself counting the chances of getting back to New Zealand. Would it be as a wounded, perhaps crippled man, or as a hale and hearty veteran after that still remote day when peace is to be declared, and German militarism crushed once and for all time?

Without incident the lad brought the car to a standstill in the market-place of Christchurch. Te Paheka, torn between the desire to run away with his new gift and to wish his white friend farewell and kia ora in a manner worthy of a dignified and old-standing Maori gentleman, looked like prolonging the leave-taking ceremony indefinitely, until he leave-taking happened to see the tail-end of a Napier racing car disappearing round the corner.

"There's Tom Kaiwarawara with his new motor, Malcolm!" he exclaimed, making a dash for juggernaut's steering-wheel. "Golly, I'll catch him up or bust. Kia ora, Malcolm."

And the last the lad saw of juggernaut was the car cutting round a sharp corner at a good twenty-five miles an hour, whilst pedestrians scattered right and left to avoid being run down.

"I'll see Te Paheka's name in the papers before a week's up," mused juggernaut's late owner. "Either in the police-court intelligence or in the inquest reports."

"I am not at all surprised at your decision, Malcolm," said his father, when the lad had reported the progress of his quick yet carefully considered project. "I can see that you are resolved, and on that account I won't stand in your way. After all's said and done, you are likely to make a far more efficient soldier than some men I know who have had to go. And the old adage 'a volunteer is worth two pressed men' still holds good. Unless a man has his heart in his work he's not likely to shine at his job."

Two hours later Malcolm Carr duly enlisted, and for many a day his official designation was to be No. 99,109, Rifleman Carr, N.Z. Rifle Brigade.

CHAPTER III

The First Trek

"Cheer-oh, Malcolm!"

Carr gave an involuntary gasp of astonishment; then, recovering himself, grasped Dick Selwyn's outstretched hand.

"Bless my soul, Dick, what brings you here?"

"Same job as yours," replied Selwyn. "Do you think I am going to let you have all the fun? You impshied without even asking me to chip in. Enough to make a fellow cut up rough with his joining chum. So I rode down, and now I'm up."

"And Hughes?"

"He's great--absolutely! Never even murmured when he had two fellows chucking their hands in on the same day. Told me he could get along very well without us. I doubt it though. Smithers is an ass with the theodolite, and Hedger's 'trig' is rotten. By the by, on my way down last night I passed Te Paheka."

"Going strong?"

"Very," replied Selwyn, grinning. "He was sitting on a pine-trunk half-way up the Horseshoe. There were a few disintegrated remains of Juggernaut on the track, the bulk of the wreckage was down the valley."

Early in the afternoon a batch of recruits, amongst them Malcolm and Dick, left Christchurch for Port Lyttelton to embark for Wellington, and thence to Featherston Camp.

With a very few exceptions the men, although still in civilian clothes, bore themselves erect, and marched in a way that would have evoked praise from an English drill sergeant. The exceptions were those men who for some reason had not undergone military training while at school. Now they had cause to regret the omission. They were mere beginners at the great game of war, while others, younger in years, were already their seniors in the profession of arms.

At Featherston Malcolm worked harder than ever