Page:A Daughter of the Samurai.pdf/138

112 goda towering above a slanting wall of six-sided stones—the “tortoise back” of all Japanese castles.

From Komoro to Nagaoka! It must have seemed a long trip to the young girl in the teetering bridal kago! I thought of what Honourable Grandmother had told me of her own month-long bridal trip. And then I looked ahead. The Idzumo gods, who plan all marriages, had decreed the same fate for many brides of our family, and, so far as my own future was planned, I seemed destined to follow in the footsteps of my ancestors.

At one place where we had to take kagos I disgraced myself. I dreaded a kago. The big basket swinging from the shoulders of the trotting coolies always made me dizzy and faint, but that day it was raining hard and the mountain path was too rough for a jinrikisha. I stood things as bravely as I could, but finally I became so sick that Brother had the baggage taken off the horse and, wedging me in between cushions on its back, covered me with a tent made of a straw mat and, disdaining comfort for himself, walked all the way up the mountain beside me, the coolie following with the two kagos.

At the top the sun was shining, and when I peeped out from my tent Brother was shaking himself as my poor Shiro used to do when drenched with rain. I ventured to apologize in a shamed voice.

“Kago sickness is a great absorber of pride, Etsu-bo. I’m afraid you have lost your right to be called your father’s ‘brave son.’&thinsp;”

I laughed, but my cheeks were hot.

As he helped me to the ground, Brother pointed toward a wide-spreading cloud of smoke floating lazily above a cone-shaped mountain.

“That’s the signpost for the Robber Station,” he said. “Do you remember?”

Indeed I did. Many times I had heard Father tell the