about her
as she came, and asked him, trembling, what he did in the camp of
Tamasese. He was there after news, he told her. She took him by the
hand. "You must not stay here, you will get killed," she said. "The bush
is full of our people, the others are watching them, fighting may begin
at any moment, and we are both here too long." So they set off together;
and she told him by the way that she had came to the hostile camp with a
present of bananas, so that the Tamasese men might spare her house. By
the Vaisingano they met an old man, a woman, and a child; and these also
she warned and turned back. Such is the strange part played by women
among the scenes of Samoan warfare, such were the liberties then
permitted to the whites, that these two could pass the lines, talk
together in Tamasese's camp on the eve of an engagement, and pass forth
again bearing intelligence, like privileged spies. And before a few
hours the white man was in direct communication with the opposing
general. The next morning he was accosted "about breakfast-time" by two
natives who stood leaning against the pickets of a public-house, where
the Siumu road strikes in at right angles to the main street of Apia.
They told him battle was imminent, and begged him to pass a little way
inland and speak with Mataafa. The road is at this point broad and
fairly good, running between thick groves of cocoa-palm and breadfruit.
A few hundred yards along this the white man passed a picket of four
armed warriors, with red handkerchiefs and their faces blackened in the
form of a full beard, the Mataafa rallying signs for the day; a little
farther on, some fifty; farther still, a hundred; and at last a quarter
of a mile of them sitting by the wayside armed and blacked. Near by, in
the verandah of a house on a knoll, he found Mataafa seated in white
clothes, a Winchester across his knees. His men, he said, were still
arriving from behind, and there was a turning movement in operation
beyond the Fuisa, so that the Tamaseses should be assailed at the same
moment from the south and east. And this is another indication that the
attack on Matautu was the true attack; had any design on Mulinuu been in
the wind, not even a Samoan general would have detached these troops
upon the other side. While they still spoke, five Tamasese women were
brought in with their hands bound; they had been stealing "our" bananas.

All morning the town was strangely deserted, the very children