their line of forts. About the midst he sat down, and here a woman drew
near to him. The moon shone in her face, and he knew her for a
householder near by, and a partisan of Mataafa's. She looked 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