Samoans to accept a Protestant divinity student
for their king. This little war, so remote, so ill understood at home,
so brief, violent, and unjust, swept over the islands like a hurricane.
Abruptly begun by headstrong naval officers and officials on the spot,
it was as abruptly ended by peremptory orders from London and
Washington; but the interval (necessarily a long one) before the news
could go out and the orders return halfway round the world, was
sufficient to reduce Samoa to the verge of ruin.

In such a country, without roads, telegraphs, or newspapers, where rumor
passes from mouth to mouth, and facts, in the process, get twisted out
of all recognition, war brings with it a period of agonizing ignorance,
when anything is told and anything believed. To Jack this waiting became
almost intolerable; his suspense, and the uncertainty of those dreadful
days, told on him with an augmented force, so that he grew thin and
started at a sound. Through an unseen channel the news of fighting
persistently trickled into Oa; more battles; more villages bombarded;
such an one wounded, such an one killed, with stories of the increasing
ruthlessness of the British and Americans. On some days the sound of
cannon could be plainly heard from leeward, the signal for the women and
children to crowd with their pastor into the church, and for the
men--the scanty remnants that still remained--to grasp their rifles and
melt into the forest.

But as time passed, and one false alarm was succeeded by another, Jack
plucked up a little heart. He began to make allowance for native
exaggeration and laughed at his own former fears. If the men-of-war
should come to Oa, were they likely to bombard an undefended village
full of women and children, or burn, pillage, and destroy as mercilessly
as he had been told? Bah! a pack of Kanaka lies, the gradual distortion
of the truth as it passed along the line, until one burned house became
a hundred and one village the whole coast of Atua! He went back to his
neglected plantation, now overgrown with weeds, and set to work again
with a determination not to borrow trouble. But, in spite of himself, he
would find himself listening for the sound of cannon, laying down his ax
or his bush knife in a panic and running back to the shore to make sure
that nothing had happened in the hour he had been gone.

It was during one of these mornings in the bush, a morning singularly
free of the apprehensions which usual