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 gone.  A sense of expectation reigned, and sympathy for the attack was expressed publicly.  Some men with unblacked faces came to Moors’s store for biscuit.  A native woman, who was there marketing, inquired after the news, and, hearing that the battle was now near at hand, “Give them two more tins,” said she; “and don’t put them down to my husband—­he would growl; put them down to me.”  Between twelve and one, two white men walked toward Matautu, finding as they went no sign of war until they had passed the Vaisingano and come to the corner of a by-path leading to the bush.  Here were four blackened warriors on guard,—­the extreme left wing of the Mataafa force, where it touched the waters of the bay.  Thence the line (which the white men followed) stretched inland among bush and marsh, facing the forts of the Tamaseses.  The warriors lay as yet inactive behind trees; but all the young boys and harlots of Apia toiled in the front upon a trench, digging with knives and cocoa-shells; and a continuous stream of children brought them water.  The young sappers worked crouching; from the outside only an occasional head, or a hand emptying a shell of earth, was visible; and their enemies looked on inert from the line of the opposing forts.  The lists were not yet prepared, the tournament was not yet open; and the attacking force was suffered to throw up works under the silent guns of the defence.  But there is an end even to the delay of islanders.  As the white men stood and looked, the Tamasese line thundered into a volley; it was answered; the crowd of silent workers broke forth in laughter and cheers; and the battle had begun.