“All right, if it’s brass, let it be brass. I’m going to get it.”
“Why do you think it’s gold again?” asked Ryōtetsu, his assurance seeming to weaken.
“He knows your minds. Pretending that it’s brass, he’s brought a pure gold one. To begin with, a lord with a million koku of rice wouldn’t meekly carry a brass pipe.”
Sōshun said this rapidly and went in alone to Narihiro, leaving the astonished Ryōtetsu outside that golden sliding door on which was the picture of Seiōbo.
An hour later, Ryōtetsu met Kōchiyama in the matted corridor and asked,
“What happened, Sōshun, in that matter?”
“What do you mean, that matter?”
Ryōtetsu, sticking out his lower lip, stared into his face and said,
“Don’t sham. The matter of the pipe, of course.”
“Oh, the pipe? If it’s the pipe you mean, I’ll give it to you.”
Kōchiyama took a shiny yellow pipe out of the bosom of his kimono and, throwing it into Ryōtetsu’s face before he had more than caught a glimpse of it, walked hastily away.
Ryōtetsu, rubbing the place where the pipe had hit him, grumblingly picked it up from where it had fallen and, looking at it, found it to be an elegant piece of workmanship with the plum-blossom-and-spear-point crest scattered over it and made of—brass! With a gesture of detestation, he threw it down on the mats again and, lifting a foot enclosed in a one-toed