CHAPTER XII—Escort to the Princess
A gust whirled the smoke of the shot into my face. As I paused with half-raised pistol, waiting for the puff to sweep aside, I heard the samurai lady calling cheerfully to her mistress, “My Princess! august lady! Fear nothing. The ronins have fled!”
I gazed about at the norimon. On the far side the brave girl was kneeling in her drenched silks, intent upon reassuring the occupant of the palanquin with word and smile. But the Princess had turned to the window on my side, and, heedless of the rain, was peering out at me through the parted bamboo curtain with even more awe and wonder in her dusky eyes than when she saw me in the temple.
My features, flushed and distorted as they were from the rage of battle and bloodshed, and fully exposed to view by the loss of my hat, must have appeared to her both outré and terrifying. Yet she was aware that I had helped to save her from the ronins. The samurai girl was exclaiming the fact through the other window. I bent toward her with a reassuring smile, but before I could speak, Yoritomo shouted to the bearers, “About, men! To the palace!”
The samurai girl sprang up as the willing bearers swung around over the bodies of the dead and wounded. The two hatamotos who alone had lived to witness the flight of the ronins came staggering to meet the litter, the blood of their many wounds dripping with the rain from their tattered coats. One of them I recognized as Yuki the captain. Past the wounded men darted the aged samurai woman of the foremost norimon, whose bearers had fled at the beginning of the attack, and who had only just contrived to squeeze from her narrow box.
I drew a deep breath, and stared around at the bloody scene through the lessening rain, in sudden bewilderment. To have witnessed the butchery of all those brave hatamotos, to have had so large a part in the defeat and rout of their murderers, to have met again the soft gaze of the Shogun’s daughter, all within little more than two minutes—small wonder I stood dazed! It was my first fight, the first time I had ever met and struck down men in mortal combat.
One of the wounded ronins had dragged himself a little aside and, crouched on knees and heels, was bending forward with the point of his dirk at his bared left loin. I caught at Yoritomo’s arm to point out the man, but before he could turn to look, the ronin had stabbed himself and was drawing the blade across his middle with a horrible deliberateness. After the cross stroke there followed an upward cut. The suicide swayed forward in silent agony, yet still had strength and resolution to draw out the blade and plunge it through his neck.
“Hara-kiri!” murmured Yoritomo, in a tone of deepest respect. “He has saved his family from disgrace and punishment. See! There are two others who would do the same.”