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.
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