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There was a flavor of the burial of Sir John Moore about the whole business especially the hush and not a funeral note being heard; we marching with measured tread, the municipal police bringing up the rear, and Seumanutafa in the center, nearly seven feet high, and bearing a white umbrella above his stately head.
One took an immense steel gouge which he said would be grand for making canoes. To old Seumanutafa, high chief of Apia, Mrs. Stevenson gave a four-poster bedstead, with mattress and pillows complete, in which one may imagine that he slept more imposingly but less restfully than on his own native mats.
Is it not said also that blessed is the peacemaker, and that the meek shall inherit the earth?" "Weighty is my grief and pain," said To'oto'o, "but what your Highness asks of me is impossible!" "O To'oto'o," said Seumanutafa, "this house is mine; this land is mine; the plantation i uta is mine also.
"Come, come," I said, "you aren't marrying the girl's adopted uncle." "A traidor to my family? No, gaptain, dat is what I can never be," said Silver Tongue. "Traitor nothing!" I said. "Oh, the silly baker!" said Sasa. "He speaks like a delirious person," said Seumanutafa.
It was well we had brought Marquardt with us, for he and his police caught the humor of the thing, and on reaching the bakery formed us up in a great hollow square with one side blank for Silver Tongue, who stood and gazed at us transfixed from the shade of his veranda. Then Seumanutafa, Sasa, Scanlon, Tautala, To'oto'o, and I broke ranks and marched up to him.
I don't mean to go into the speech-making part of the performance, for what between Seumanutafa and Papalangi Mativa, and the talking-man Sasa had lent me for the occasion, and a divinity student who happened along, and somebody who said he was Fale Upolu and spoke for the entire Group, and an aged faipule from the Union Islands who seemed to have some kind of a grievance about his father's head, and the Chief Justice who had to butt in with the capitation tax we were kept there a matter of three hours or more, until at last the principals officially made it up, To'oto'o was forgiven, and everything ended happily.
Seumanutafa began mild, for he was a past master in the art of graduation, and thought to go slow at first. To'oto'o was informed that he had to make ifonga for the death of O and be carried on the morrow by the taulelea to Papalangi Mativa's house behind the bakery.
All was now ready for their departure, and their native friends gathered from far and wide to take part in what was for them an event of mournful significance. Tusitala's widow was not permitted to go out to the waiting vessel in the ordinary boat, but was taken by the high chief Seumanutafa in the cutter that had been given him by the United States Government.
Though it was eight o'clock, and there was the risk of gossip in my driving Sasa French alone about the Municipality at such an hour, I put her into my buggy, whipped up my horse, and set a straight course for Seumanutafa, the high chief of Apia.
"Preferable far would be death itself than that the son of chiefs should be thus degraded, and his name become a mock throughout the Tuamasanga!" "O To'oto'o," said Seumanutafa, "we know thee for a brave man, and that thou tookst this head in open battle, even as David did that of Goliath, and I swear thee thy honor shall remain undimmed for all the seeming appearance of humiliation.
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