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.