the older folk trailed back into Apia in the rain; they talked as they went of who had fallen and what heads had been taken upon either side—­they seemed to know by name the losses upon both; and drenched with wet and broken with excitement and fatigue, they crawled into the verandahs of the town to eat and sleep.  The morrow broke grey and drizzly, but as so often happens in the islands, cleared up into a glorious day.  During the night, the majority of the defenders had taken advantage of the rain and darkness and stolen from their forts unobserved.  The rallying sign of the Tamaseses had been a white handkerchief.  With the dawn, the de Coetlogons from the English consulate beheld the ground strewn with these badges discarded; and close by the house, a belated turncoat was still changing white for red.  Matautu was lost; Tamasese was confined to Mulinuu; and by nine o’clock two Mataafa villages paraded the streets of Apia, taking possession.  The cost of this respectable success in ammunition must have been enormous; in life it was but small.  Some compute forty killed on either side, others forty on both, three or four being women and one a white man, master of a schooner from Fiji.  Nor was the number even of the wounded at all proportionate to the surprising din and fury of the affair while it lasted.

CHAPTER VI—­LAST EXPLOITS OF BECKER

September-November 1888

Brandeis had held all day by Mulinuu, expecting the reported real attack.  He woke on the 13th to find himself cut off on that unwatered promontory, and the Mataafa villagers parading Apia.  The same day Fritze received a letter from Mataafa summoning him to withdraw his party from the isthmus; and Fritze, as if in answer, drew in his ship into the small harbour close to Mulinuu, and trained his port battery to assist in the defence.  From a step so decisive, it might be thought the German plans were unaffected by the disastrous issue of the battle.  I conceive nothing would be further from the truth.  Here was Tamasese penned on Mulinuu with his troops; Apia, from which alone these could be subsisted, in the hands of the enemy; a battle imminent, in which the German vessel must apparently take part with men and battery, and the buildings of the German firm were apparently destined to be the first target of fire.  Unless Becker re-established that which he had so lately and so artfully thrown down—­the neutral territory—­the firm would have to suffer.  If he re-established it, Tamasese must retire from Mulinuu.  If Becker saved his goose, he lost his cabbage.  Nothing so well depicts the man’s effrontery as that he should have conceived the design of saving both,—­of re-establishing only so much of the neutral territory as should hamper Mataafa, and leaving in abeyance all that could incommode Tamasese.  By drawing the boundary where he now proposed, across the isthmus, he protected the firm, drove back the Mataafas out of almost all that they had conquered, and, so far from disturbing Tamasese, actually fortified him in his old position.