text: Rose wearily pulled on her clothes and left the glade. She stood for a while, looking at the forester's peaceful face. She would have to bury him. The samurai was nowhere to be seen. He would like that, she thought, being buried on the slopes of Arashiyama, below a spreading pine. A movement caught her eye. The samurai returning? Then she saw it was the figure of a woman, hurrying in panic through the forest. Rosamund gripped her sash, the only weapon remaining, and hid behind the bole of a tree. She stepped out as the figure passed, slipped her sash over the woman's neck and pulled. The woman gurgled and fell to the ground whimpering. Rose leaped on her and twisted the other woman's hands behind her back.
  
  "Let me go, let me go. I am Ito Haruko. My husband is rich, he will repay you ..." she babbled.
  
  Rosamund turned her over and got a good look at the face in the early light. It fitted the description she had heard.
  
  "You. Have. Caused. Me. A. Great. Deal. Of. Trouble." She emphasized each word with a slap. For the first time she allowed her resentment of Goemon's attention to his work to surface before another human being. Haruko had no idea of the source of this resentment. "And where are you hurrying to?" she asked maliciously. "And why are you dressed, or rather undressed, as you are?"
  
  "Away, away," whimpered Haruko.
  
  "Well, you've caused me a great deal of trouble," said Rosamund ominously while Haruko goggled at her without comprehension. "Now you'll help me. Get up."
  
  Haruko tried to object, but Rosamund slapped her twice, hard, and the older woman quieted. She baulked again as Rosamund ordered her to dig in the moist earth. Without a word Rosamund seized a nearby branch and beat her back and buttocks. Haruko tried to run and Rosamund, her magnificent body exposed in her open kimono, slipped a loop of her sash around Haruko's legs.
  
  "You'll do what I say!" she said fiercely.
  
  At last Haruko capitulated and the two elegant women dug a shallow grave for the mountain man in the thick moist humus, laying him down in it, his precious matchlock across his breast, his nata sheathed by his side.