gilded by the morning sun, and whenever one of them in his flight hit the drum, it resounded deeply. And their swarming seemed to form the noble strokes of ideographs in which the reclining knight read the renowned kyó or sutra about love and forgiveness, about the nothingness of all things and the vanity of illusions . . . .
Thus the villagers found him: smiling and gazing somewhere beyond visible things into other and more perfect worlds. They found him entangled in awful cobwebs; but when, putting aside their useless weapons, they set about liberating him, they discovered that the phantom tissue vanished like mist before the sun, hardly was it separated from the ronin’s body.
»But who beat the drum?« they asked in amazement, after hearing the ronin’s account of the night’s happenings.
»Somebody’s beautiful thoughts turned into butterflies,« said the knight errant, slowly gathering himself up from the ground, »and these butterflies, fluttering about the statue of Shaka Muni and hitting the drum, summoned you, honorable sirs,«
He arose and looked around the temple; and then a great wonder filled his soul. For the imprints left by the bleeding Goblin Spider looked at first glance exactly like his family emblem. »But here on the floor you see the traces of an evil thought that took on the form of the Goblin Spider,« he added thoughtfully. »Somebody’s hatred embodied itself in an Iki-ryó; but the hatred weakened, as the years went by, and the Iki-ryó lost its ivincibility. Small indeed is my merit!«
And he bade the muraosa with his villagers to follow him in the purple tracks of the wounded goblin. They went out of the temple into the yard, from the yard they penetrated into the forlorn garden, where azalea clumps long ago had forgotten their trimmed shapes and gone wild, and there, away in the corner, between two fallen lanterns they found the Goblin Spider, moaning and groaning horribly.
A long-dried-out little fishpond was filled with the purple blood of the monster, which had not had the strength to crawl to the hole yawning beneath one of the prostrate toros. The immense spotted feet twitched in the throes of death, and the bulging yellow eyes turned upwards; the horrible claws, however, had disappeared from the extremities, and the villagers wondered how the Spider could have fought so murderously when he vas almost unarmed.
For a while the ronin gazed motionlessly at the Goblin Spider; then he smiled, raised his sword, and merely touching the monster’s body with it, at one stroke severed the head from the hideous body.
