No one, so she said, had stepped across the threshold since that frightful day when, in their fanatical hatred, the danka had murdered her parents.
She had always been kept hidden in one of the upper stories of the pagoda, and at this time no one had seen her save her parents.
On that day she had fled to the very roof in her first impulse of mortal terror; but even from there, with her ears covered by her hands, she had heard the cries of her father and her mother, and the wild, brutal, triumphant shouting of those who had killed them.
A strange sense of quiet came suddenly upon her. She crept stealthily, but fearlessly, back down the seven stories of the pagoda, and opened the great doors that gave ingress to the temple. There for the first time the people of Fukui saw her, standing like a flame upon the altar of the great Shaka, whither she had leaped from the door in a single bound.
Her hair was more glittering than the altar itself; her eyes, her skin were of a color no man in Fukui had ever seen before. She seemed to their dazzled eyes a vengeful spirit, whom the Lord Buddha had uplifted. They stood as if petrified, staring at her as she swayed before them on the very lap of the god. Then, with a concerted cry of superstitious fear and horror, they slunk from the temple, leaving her alone—with her dead!
As the Tojin looked about the great chamber, he felt himself almost unconsciously rehearsing that grim scene of the past. He knew why her hand had been set against the whole world, why she had terrified and defied her tormentors. Even now, as she repeated the tale to him her face was white and fixed.
“Now you know,” she said, “why I am call the fox-woman! Perhaps thas true ’bout me. Mebbe I am gagama!”
“You are not,” he said, “even in spite of them.”
She was silent, staring out before her in some abstracted trance. Suddenly she sighed:
“I nod lig’ udder people! Thas bedder nod come near unto me. I mek the trobble, and sometimes—the death for those who seek me! Down in Fukui perhaps already they have tol’ you of thad—Gihei Matsuyama?”