“Hold, brother!” warned Yoritomo, springing to catch my arm. “Remember, we are only begging priests. He had the right to resent our company. What’s more, he is a hatamoto, one of the Shogun’s samurais. If I remember aright, he is Yuki, a captain of the palace guard.”
“He tried to cut me down in cold blood!” I protested.
“It is a right of all samurais to kill lower-class men, and you affronted Yuki by seeking to board the same boat. Here’s a smaller boat putting off.”
We ran and leaped aboard the small boat as it swung into the stream. For fellow-passengers we had a wealthy old merchant, dressed in plain cotton robes, and the half-naked bearers of his narrow U-shaped basket-litter. In paying our ferry fees, Yoritomo offered one of his gold pieces, and the boat’s owner being unable to make full change, he gave him the difference. As a result the polers bent to their work with such hearty good-will that we reached the opposite bank a full three lengths in advance of the samurai’s boat.
We sprang ashore past a bevy of little brown children who were paddling, stark naked, in the mud. Shortly beyond we met a pair of neatly dressed girls, whose large mushroom hats rested upon black silk skullcaps. They smiled and greeted us in a familiar manner. Yoritomo muttered a hasty response, and pointed back at the samurai. The girls hastened to advance upon that quick-tempered gentleman, with their battery of charming smiles and alluring glances in full action.
“Courtesans?” I asked, as we swung on along the Tokaido.
“No, not joros, only bikunis—begging nuns, daughters of Yamabushi priests. None would be quicker to penetrate our disguise,” replied Yoritomo, and he quickened his pace.
After a mile or so we again met a crowd of southbound travellers, people caught at Omuri by the closing of the highroad. We hastened on to Omuri, the first post village out of Shinagawa. Recently as the daimio’s procession had passed, the place was already alert for business, its shops wide open and teahouse girls standing coy-eyed in the verandas. We hastened on through, pausing only to buy some large dried persimmons that caught my eye.
A mile behind the town we came up with the rear of the Satsuma procession, and were compelled by prudence to slacken our pace to a tortoise-like gait. Making the best of the situation, I relished my persimmons and viewed the scenery. There was much novelty and pleasure in the sight of orange trees and bamboos and even an occasional banana and palm growing in the same garden with pines and other evergreens, while the deep-thatched roofs of the farmhouses were oddly attractive with the beds of blue irises and vivid red lilies blooming on their flattened ridges.
Above us towered the giant red-limbed cryptomerias of the Tokaido, with their pine-like foliage, while on our right the road skirted along near the sparkling blue waters of the bay, upon which sailed flotillas of quaint fishing craft and high-sterned junks that might have served as models for a painter of the sixteenth century.