Perhaps the most amusing event of the afternoon was the disgrace brought upon himself by Samau, son of Chief Malatoba, and the crack bat and fielder of the Fauga-sas. Samau was a dandified young blade with a great opinion of himself as a lady's man, who, because of his rather clever handling of a couple of long drives early in the game, had been giving himself airs and doing a deal of noisy boasting. Just as the setting sun dipped behind the towering backbone of the island and a grateful coolness came creeping down with the shadows from the bosky hillsides, Seuka, the pretty taupo of Pago Pago, strolled out through the coconuts, and when near Samau, threw up her lovely arms and hands in the expressive Samoan gesture signifying a complete surrender of heart and soul. Apparently no whit moved, the haughty youth only tossed his Turkish towel-beturbaned head and proceeded to knock down with one hand a sizzling hot drive that came toward him headed for the beach. Thus spurned, the artful Seuka sank down for a space upon a nearby mat in an attitude suggestive of the profoundest grief, shortly, however, to return to the attack from a perch on the veranda of the little white Mission church which stood in the middle of Samau's territory.
The proud youth tried valiantly for a while to stem the tide of his ebbing interest in the game, but the little lady seemed so palpably smitten with his charms that, out of the very softness of his heart, he finally edged over and, still keeping his eye fixed on the batsman, began to talk to her. Soon Seuka was observed holding something playfully behind her back and tantalizing the scornful Samau by denying him a look. At last the unlucky fellow's curiosity got the better of him, and for one fatal moment he was seen to turn his back and begin to scuffle with the laughing coquette for the possession of the keepsake she was withholding. At the same instant the batsman smote the ball a ringing crack and sent it flying into the top of a tall coco palm above the church. From the palm the ball dropped to the roof of the mission, rolled to the veranda, and finally fell off almost upon the head of the frightened Samau, who was standing gaping foolishly at the wildly gesticulating horde of his team mates who came bearing down upon him. It would have been an easy catch had he been attending to business, and as the full enormity of the crushed dandy's offence dawned upon him, he turned tail and ran for the bush, closely followed by a dozen irate Fauga-sa men and a black and white cur. Being the fastest man on his team, Samau easily outdistanced the pursuit, but it was said that he stayed in the bush all night, and that he was only allowed to enter the game next day upon the solemn promise not to speak to another woman until his return to the home village.
The second day the expected storm came on, and on that and the two following days there was a gale of wind and almost incessant rain. Through it all the game went merrily on, and despite unfavourable conditions Pago Pago continued to add to its score until, when the last batsman was out on the fifth day, a total of 1,386 runs had been chalked up to its credit. By this time fine weather had set in again, but even with this in their favour it did not seem possible for the Fauga-sas to equal the tremendous score that faced them. When twenty-three wickets went down the first day for a paltry three hundred runs the situation looked more hopeless than ever.
Things brightened up for a while on the second day when Samau, the disgraced one, batted up a rattling eighty-two, fifteen of which were put up by his speedy runners during a diversion among the fielders caused by a nest of hornets which one of the batsman's swift drives had unexpectedly dislodged from a bread-fruit tree. After this the Fauga-sa batting slumped off again, and the day closed with something in excess of seven hundred runs to the team's credit, and thirty-nine wickets down. The third day seventeen more wickets fell for fewer than three hundred runs, so that on the morning of the fourth day—the ninth of the match—the fag end of the Fauga-sa batting faced a shortage of nearly four hundred runs.
The first man to encounter the bowling on what proved to be the final day of the match was a youth called "Johnny," a nickname which took its origin from the fact that its bearer had once been employed as a dishwasher in the galley of the American gunboat stationed in the harbour. He had been playing baseball with the Yankee marines, and that this was his first game of cricket was evident when he squared away with his bat over his shoulder as though facing pitching instead of bowling. Heedless of the ridicule heaped upon him for his lack of "form," "Johnny" calmly stepped out and slammed the first ball—which chanced to be a full pitch—over the tops of the highest palms and down into a running stream in the bottom of a little gully. Down the stream it went, bobbing merrily on the way to the beach, and before it was recovered the swift-footed runners had traversed the course a dozen times. The second ball came at the batsman's feet, and the hockey-like sweep he made of it narrowly missed being caught by the bowler. The third ball struck away in front of him, and, stepping back, "Johnny" smote it hard and true, straight into the house where sat the scorers, the visitors and the members of Chief Mauga's household. All scattered as they saw it coming, and the whizzing sphere had traversed nearly the whole distance to the further side of the house before it landed, dull and heavy, in the ribs of little Oo-hee, the misshapen dwarf kept by Mauga in the capacity of mascot and jester.
Oo-hee was stretched bawling on the mat, but the question of how hard he was hit was entirely lost sight of in the excitement surrounding the momentous import attaching to the fact that he had been hit at all. A dwarf is regarded with the same superstitious awe in Samoa as in other parts of the world, and there, too, no better method is known of deflecting a current of bad luck than by touching the hump of a hunchback. But actually to bring down a hunchback with a cricket ball was a thing unprecedented. Pago Pago looked serious about it and Fauga-sa began to take heart—surely something was going to happen!
And something did happen, too, and that right speedily. "Johnny" missed his fourth ball, and the fifth, just touching the butt of his bat, went hopping and spinning off along the ground like a wounded duck. Some idea of such a resemblance must have been awakened in the active mind of the little black and white village cur, who, cocked up in the shade of a palm had been conducting a punitive expedition against a particularly aggravating flea, for he pounced on the ball with a glad yelp and began shaking it like a thing alive. No whit dampened in ardour by the failure of the object of his attack to fight back, the frisky canine kept valiantly at his task, and when the onrush of fielders seemed to threaten him with total annihilation, he began to dodge and skip about among them as though proud to be the centre of so much attention. But when he saw Mauga, roaring with rage at the thought of the Fauga-sa runners adding to their team's score at the rate of a run every three or four seconds, seize a cutlass and come charging down upon him, he realized that he had made a mistake. Whereupon, therefore, he tucked his wisp of a tail between his legs and flew as the bee flies, straight for the bush, even forgetting, in his terror, to drop the ball.
When Mauga and the rest of his braves came back from a bootless chase, it was to be met with the disconcerting news that not another ball was to be found in the village. Anxiously renewed inquiry, however, met with better reward, for one of the missionary's boys was found to have an old ball, still quite hard and round and in good condition in every respect, save for the fact that one side of it, in lieu of anything better to hand, had been patched with a piece of shark's hide. Under ordinary conditions the Pago Pagos would not have thought of consenting to use such a ball, for the surface of dry shark's hide has all the roughness of a rasp combined with the sharpness of the nettle; but the game seemed nearly won, and it is not in the Samoan nature to brook the postponement of a certain triumph if it can possibly be helped.
Fauga-sa was chalked up with twenty runs for the lost ball, and the game was started up again. Gingerly settling the prickly sphere back in his fingers, the bowler delivered the sixth ball of "Johnny's" over, and this the latter, swinging wildly, missed and was clean bowled.
This lucky beginning filled the Pago Pagos with great elation, from which state they were rudely jostled a moment later when the next batsman drove a hot line ball which scoured out the palm of the hand of one of the swarm of cover-points and set him howling home to bind the wound with ti leaves. After that the fielders handled the dreaded ball as if it was a live coal, and though wickets kept falling from time to time, runs came fast between until, when the last Fauga-sa man but one was out, the total of the team's runs was but four behind the aggregate of Pago Pago.