“Kill the barbarian! kill! kill!” yelled voices behind him, and as the leader rushed towards me, other swordsmen charged around the bend after him, half a score or more in the first bunch.
Between revolver and sword I might possibly have checked and stood off that number, but still others yelled in the path behind them,—and there was utmost need to avoid a clash with the Shogun’s retainers. I turned and ran up the path, hoping to overtake Gengo. The hatamotos redoubled their yells, and dashed after me. I twisted around the turn, and saw before me, less than a hundred yards away, a number of lancemen charging to cut off my retreat.
The silent stealth of this rear attack was more appalling than the open charge of the other party. Had these lancemen come a few seconds sooner I would have been taken by surprise and pierced by their long shafts without warning. Even as it was, I had no time for second thought. At the view-cry of the lancemen, I leaped the hedge of clipped privet on my right, and plunged straight into the coppice beyond.
Fortunately my sandals were bound on firmly, and the coppice, while dense enough to screen me after a dozen yards, was of willowy shrubs that did not catch my loose garments or bar my advance. A louder outburst of yells told me that the two parties of pursuers had met, and from the crashing that followed, I knew that they were beating through the coppice after me in quickly scattering formation. Had I doubled, they would have run me down in the first minute.
I kept straight on, trusting to the gathering gloom to hide the traces of my flight, and to the noise of the pursuit to drown the thud of my iron-shod sandals on the turf. Had the coppice continued I might have gained enough to slip around one of their flanks and make my way back by the path, out of the enclosure.
But within fifty yards I burst out of the thicket into an open garden that lay about a large lotus pond. Upon an island in the centre of the pond stood a kiosk, approached from the left end of the pond over a narrow high-arched bridge of bamboo. Beyond, towering high among the treetops, rose the white roof-crest of a large edifice. Beneath that crest there was a possibility that I might find a palace official able and willing to check my pursuers and conduct me to the Shogun.
Without a pause, I dashed across the garden, veering to pass around the left end of the pond. My pursuers were closer upon me than I had thought. The leaders, who had been running silently through the coppice, burst out almost on my heels. The exultant note of their view-cry sent me clumping down towards the shore of the pond at redoubled speed.
“Is This Loyal Service?” She Asked
For a while I gained rapidly on the hatamotos, the mass of whom broke cover soon after their leaders. Their exultant cries changed to furious imprecations as they perceived that I was outrunning them. But as I plunged down to the pond bank, a little short of the bridge, I was dismayed to find that one of the thongs of my right sandal had burst. A few steps more would find the sandal loose. I could not stop to refasten it, nor was there time to slash the thongs of both sandals and run on in stockinged feet.