As the hair came out, fear faded from his heart, and his hatred toward the old woman mounted. It grew beyond hatred, becoming a consuming antipathy against all evil.At this instant if anyone had brought up the the question of whether he would starve to death or become a thief—the question which had occurred to him a little while ago—he would not have hesitated to choose death.His hatred toward evil flared up like the piece of pine wood which the old woman had stuck in the floor.

He did not know why she pulled out the hair of the dead. Accordingly, he did not know whether her case was to be put down as good or bad.But in his eyes, pulling out the hair of the dead in the Rashomon on this stormy night was an unpardonable crime.Of course it never entered his mind that a little while ago he had thought of becoming a thief.

Then, summoning strength into his legs, he rose from the stairs and strode, hand on sword, right in front of the old creature. The hag turned, terror in her eyes, and sprang up from the floor, trembling.For a small moment she paused, poised there, then lunged for the stairs with a shriek.

"Wretch!Where are you going?" he shouted, barring the way of the trembling hag who tried to scurry past him. Still she attempted to claw her way by.He pushed her back to prevent her… they struggled, fell among the corpses, and grappled there.The issue was never in doubt.In a moment he had her by the arm, twisted it, and forced her down to the floor.Her arms were all skin and bones, and there was no more flesh on them than on the shanks of a chicken.No sooner was she on the floor than he drew his sword and thrust the silver-white blade before her very nose. She was silent.She trembled as if in a fit, and her eyes were open so wide that they were almost out of their sockets, and her breath come in hoarse gasps.The life of this wretch was his now.This thought cooled his boiling anger and brought a calm pride and satisfaction.He looked down at her, and said in a somewhat calmer voice:

"Look here, I'm not an officer of the High Police Commissioner. I'm a stranger who happened to pass by this gate.I won't bind you or do anything against you, but you must tell me what you're doing up here."

Then the old woman opened her eyes still wider, and gazed at his face intently with the sharp red eyes of a bird of prey. She moved her lips, which were wrinkled into her nose, as though she were chewing something.Then a panting sound like the cawing of a crow came from her throat:

"I pull the hair… I pull out the hair… to make a wig."

Her answer banished all unknown from their encounter and brought disappointment. Suddenly she was only a trembling old woman there at his feet.A ghoul no longer:only a hag who makes wigs from the hair of the dead—to sell, for scraps of food.A cold contempt seized him.Fear left his heart, and his former hatred entered.These feelings must have been sensed by the other.The old creature, still clutching the hair she had pulled off the corpse, mumbled out these words in her harsh broken voice:

"Indeed, making wigs out of the hair of the dead may seem a great evil to you, but these that are here deserve no better. This woman, whose beautiful black hair I was pulling, used to sell cut and dried snake flesh at the guard barracks, saying that it was dried fish.If she hadn't died of the plague, she'd be selling it now.The guards liked to buy from her, and used to say her fish was tasty.What she did couldn't be wrong, because if she hadn't, she would have starved to death.There was no other choice.If she knew I had to do this in order to live, she probably wouldn't care."

He sheathed his sword, and, with his left hand on its hilt, he listened to her meditatively. His right hand touched the big pimple on his cheek.As he listened, a certain courage was born in his heart—the courage which he had not when he sat under the gate a little while ago.A strange power was driving him in the opposite direction of the courage which he had had when he seized the old woman.No longer did he wonder whether he should starve to death or become a thief.Starvation was so far from his mind that it was the last thing that would have entered it.

"Are you sure?" he asked in a mocking tone, when she finished talking. He took his right hand from his pimple, and, bending forward, seized her by the neck and said sharply:

"Then it's right if I rob you. I'd starve if I didn't."

He tore her clothes from her body and kicked her roughly down on the corpses as she struggled and tried to clutch his leg. Five steps, and he was at the top of the stairs.The yellow clothes he had wrested off were under his arm, and in a twinkling he had rushed down the steep stairs into the abyss of night.The thunder of his descending steps pounded in the hollow tower, and then it was quiet.

Shortly after that the hag raised up her body from the corpses. Grumbling and groaning, she crawled to the top stair by the still flickering torchlight, and through the gray hair which hung over her face, she peered down to the last stair in the torch light.

Beyond this was only darkness… unknowing and unknown.