Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/154

144 moved to Kyoto, so that no one should call him the man from the “hermits’ valley,” and built a big house in the foreign style at Shimo-Kamo, and sent his daughter to a boarding-school for the daughters of gentry.

Of course the radio-active springs gushed out on the land of Igari.

Igari sent “professors” especially from Kyoto to examine them. After this the newspapers raised a great noise about the new mineral springs, which in radio-activity occupied the fourth, or maybe it was the fifth or sixth place in the world. And in less than a year the whole story had become a matter of life and death for the people of Yotani.

Igari Ihei had sold all his land in Yotani to other people. And these other people lost no time in forming a limited company for the exploitation of the Yotani springs. And a hundred and fifty tenants suddenly received notice from the new company to “vacate the land in connection with the transfer of the ownership into other hands.”

Naturally this aroused a storm of indignation. Three hundred persons plunged down the mountain-side in the thick snow-drifts to the Tokaido high-road to Kyoto, and crossed the bridge Kara, till they arrived at Otsu. From there they took the train to Kyoto, to Igari.

Igari admitted that he had made a mistake in selling the land without giving the tenants notice, and promised to give them a hundred thousand yen, at the same time asking their pardon.

A hundred thousand yen!