A man wearing a blue sash came hurrying up. He stopped before the group at the hardware store and gestured for silence.
"The town is well in hand," he said, "and only those of you who are detailed here as guards need remain longer; the others will get back to their planes and await the rise of their designated leaders for the flights of the day.
"Come," said Komoru to his companion. But Ethel did not move. Her mind was racked with perplexity. Here she was in a city of her own people. Why should she continue to accompany this young Japanese whom, despite his gentlemanly conduct, she instinctively feared? Yet what else could she do? She was dressed in the peculiar attire of the invaders, and would certainly have trouble in convincing an American of her identity.
"I must ask you to hurry," said Komoru, as the others moved off. With an effort Ethel gathered her wavering emotions in hand and went with him. If she must go, she reasoned it were well not to arouse Komoru's suspicion of her loyalty.
A few minutes later they were again in the air, following the lead of a plane with bright red wings—the flag-ship, as it were, of the group.
In a half hour the expedition was approaching Houston. Coming over the city, the leader circled high and waited until his followers were better massed.
"Are we going to attack the town?" inquired Ethel, as Komoru asked her for the water-bottle.
"Oh, no," he replied, "nothing of the sort; we are simply bluffing. There are a number of expeditions going out to-day. We must make the appearance of a great invasion."
"How many planes are there all told?"
Komoru smiled. "Not so many," he said.
"But how many?" persisted Ethel.
"Fifteen thousand, maybe," Komoru replied.
"To invade a country with nearly two hundred million inhabitants! We will surely all be killed."
Komoru smiled.
"By sheer force of numbers," explained Ethel.
"Wait and see," replied her enigmatical companion.
For hours the little aerial squadron sailed through the balmy air of Texas. They passed over Austin and Waco and Fort Worth and Dallas. They turned eastward and passed over Texarkana, and thence south to impress the people of Shreveport.
The excitement evinced in the towns increased as the news of their flight was wired ahead. They were frequently shot at by groups of excited citizens or occasional companies of militia, but at the height and speed at which they were flying the bullets went wide. One plane was lost. Something must have snapped. It doubled up and went tumbling downward like a wounded pigeon.
The sun was dropping toward the western horizon. The invaders had been flying for ten hours. They had been without food or sleep for thirty-six hours. Save for the brief relaxation of the morning, Komoru had not taken his hands from the steering wheel, nor his foot from the engine control since the previous sunset in the Bay of Tehauntepec.
As they passed near other planes, Ethel noted that in many cases the women were driving. Notwithstanding her dislike for him, the girl found herself wishing that she could relieve Komoru.
She pondered over his "wait and see" and began to discern a new possibility in an invasion of thirty thousand Japanese. She tried to imagine one of the society favorites of her Chicago girlhood sitting in front of her driving that plane. She remembered distinctly that aeroplane racing was a part of the diversion of such men and that five or six hours of driving was considered quite a feat.
The more she considered the man before her, the more she marvelled at his powers. She confessed he interested her; she wondered why she disliked him. The only answer that seemed acceptable was that he was "not her kind."
Towards dusk, they hove in sight of the derricks of the Beaumont oil region. The leader with the red plane descended in a large meadow. Komoru was well to the front and brought his plane to earth a few meters from the red wings. The man in the flag plane who had that day led them over a thousand miles and a score of cities got out and stretched himself. With an exclamation of joyful surprise, Ethel recognized that he was Professor Oshima.
The Japanese camped where they were for the night. The wings of the planes were guyed to the ground with cordage and little steel stakes. Beneath such improvised tents the tired aerial cavalrymen rolled themselves in their sleeping blankets and for twelve hours the camp was as quiet as a graveyard.
That day had been a great day in history; it was the first consequential aerial invasion that the world had ever known. While the arrivals of the morning had been circling in fear-inspiring flights above the neighboring states, the later starters from the Japanese squadron had continued to arrive in the oil regions. Like migrating birds, they settled down over the rich fields and grazing lands of that wonderful strip of flat, black-soiled prairie that stretches westward from the south center of Louisiana until it emerges into the great semi-arid cattle plains of southern Texas.
The region, though one of the richest in the United States, was but sparsely settled. Save for the few thousand white laborers who were supported by the oil industry, the whole resident population were negroes who were worked under imported white foremen in the rice and truck lands of the region.
The negroes were panic stricken by the Japanese invasion and made practically no resistance. In two or three days, the country for a forty-mile radius around Beaumont was cleared of Americans and practically the entire oil region of Texas with its vast storage tanks at Port Arthur on the Sabine River, were in the hands of the invaders.
There were not ten regiments of American soldiers within five hundred miles. The great mass of the American army had been rushed weeks before to southern California, and the remnant left in the Gulf region had more recently been hastened to Panama. In fact, the American squadron had steamed into Colon on the very morning the Japanese alighted on Texas soil.
On the second morning of their arrival, Japanese officials circling above the captured region, roughly allotted the land to Captains under whose leadership were a hundred planes each. The captains then assigned each couple places to stake their plane, which were located a hundred meters apart, allowing to each about two and a half acres of land.
Professor Oshima and Komoru, as soil chemists, were constantly on the go making studies of the land and advising with the other experts as to the crops to plant, and the methods of tillage for the various locations.
In the cotton lands, where Ethel and her associates were located, the soil was immediately put to a fuller use. The cotton plants were thinned and pruned and between the rows quick growing vegetables were planted. Elsewhere the great pastures were broken up with captured kerosene-driven gang plows and by dint of hard labor the sod was quickly reduced to a fit state for intensive cultivation.
The outside work of the professor and his secretary threw Ethel altogether in the company of Madame Oshima. For this fact she was very grateful, as her aversion to Komoru, to whom she was nominally bound, grew more and more a source of worry and fear. So the two women of Aryan blood worked together in the cotton field side by side with the Orientals—worked and waited and wondered what was awing in the surrounding world.
The gasoline wagons came around and refilled the fuel tanks of the planes. Mechanics inspected the engines carefully and replaced defective parts. The rice cakes and soyu brought from Japan, had been replaced by a diet of wheat and maize products and fresh fruits and vegetables taken from the captured stores and gardens. Such captured foods, however, had all been inspected by the dieteticians, and those of doubtful wholesomeness destroyed or placed under lock and key to be used only as a last resort.
Thus weeks passed. The green things of Japanese planting had poked their tender shoots through the black American soil. There had been no fighting except in few cases, where a company of foolhardy militia or a local posse had tried to attach the Japanese outposts. American aeroplanes had wisely staid away.
But the fight was yet to come. The Federal Government had recalled its ships from Panama and was bringing back the soldiers from California. On the great flat prairie between Galveston and Houston, a mighty military camp was being established. Aeroplane sheds were erected and repair shops built. Long lines of army tents were pitched in close proximity. Army canteens were established that the thirsty soldiers might get pure liquor and good tobacco and a few rods away—over the line—other grog shops were opened wherein were sold similar goods not so guaranteed. Gambling sharks arrived and set up shell games and bedraggled prostitutes—outcasts from urban centers of debauchery—-came and camped nearby and made night hideous with their obscene revelry.
So the American soldier prepared for battle against the enemy who, fifty miles away, slept undisturbed in the midst of gardens beneath the wings of their aeroplanes.
Never since Roman phalanx moved against the hordes of disorganized barbarians had such extremes of method in warfare been pitted against each other. Indeed it is doubtful if the invasion of the Japanese should be called war at all. They were not blood-thirsty. In fact, the Japanese invaders had sent word to the American Government asserting their peaceful intentions if they were unmolested, though threatening dire vengeance by firing cities and poisoning water supplies if they were attacked.
Madame Oshima shook her head. "Such talk is only pretense," she said, "the Japanese intend to live in America and would never so embitter the people—and it will not be necessary."
Ethel was in doubt. She pictured the Japanese planes flying above the unprotected inland cities dropping conflagration bombs upon shingled roof or casks of prussic acid into open reservoirs. She wished she were out of it all. She wanted to escape and yet she knew not how.
The Americans made no hasty attacks. They feared the threats of the Japanese and awaited the gathering of many hundred thousand soldiers. At the end of four weeks the American army was spread in a giant semi-circle surrounding the Japanese encampment from coast to coast. Along the Gulf Coast was also a line of American battleships, so that the Japanese encampment was entirely surrounded with an almost continuous line of aeroplane destroying guns.
All preparations were at last complete and with cavalry beneath and aeroplanes above, the American strategists planned a dash across the Japanese territory with the belief that the outlying lines of artillery would bring to earth those that succeeded in getting into the air.
One evening at the hour of twilight, messengers passed rapidly among the Japanese distributing maps and orders to prepare for flight.
Late that night, their possessions made ready for flight, Komoru and Ethel sat with Professor and Madame Oshima beneath the latter's plane.
"Our scouts have come to the conclusion," said Oshima, "that a cavalry attack is to be expected in the early morning. So our plan is for a signal plane to rise at two o'clock directly over the center of our territory. It will carry a bright yellow light. Beginning with the outlying groups our forces are to fly toward the light, rising as they go. Attaining an altitude of two miles they are thence to fly due north as our maps show. We will suffer some loss, but two miles high and at night I guess American gunners will not inflict great damage."
Ethel shuddered.
"Do you think the American aviators will follow us?" asked Komoru.
"That depends," replied the older man, "upon the reception we give them; we have them outnumbered."
"They carry men gunners," said Madame Oshima.
"So," said the Professor, "but shooting from an aeroplane depends not so much upon the gunner as upon the steersman. Their planes wabble, the metal frame work is too stiff, it doesn't yield to the air pressure."
Along such lines the conversation continued for an hour or so. Neither the men nor Madame Oshima seemed the least bit excited over the prospects; but Ethel, striving to keep up external appearances, was inwardly torn with warring emotions.
Making an excuse of wishing to look for something among her luggage, the girl finally escaped and walked quickly toward the other plane. But instead of stopping, she passed by and continued down between the rows of cotton, avoiding as much as possible the lights that dotted the field about her.
"Oh, God!" she repeated under her breath; "Oh, God! I can't go! I won't go!"
For some time she walked on briskly trying to calm her feverish mind and reason out a sane course of procedure.
She was passing thus where the lights of two planes glowed fifty meters at either side, when she stumbled heavily over some dark object between the cotton rows. She turned to see what it was; and, bending forward, discerned in the starlight the body of a man. She started to run; then, fearing pursuit the more, checked her speed. As she did so some one grasped her arm and a heavy hand was clapped over her mouth.
"Keep quiet," commanded her captor hoarsely. In another instant he had bent her back over his knee and thrown her—or rather dropped her for she did not resist—upon the soft earth beneath.
"If you make a sound, I'll have to shoot," he said, resting a heavy knee upon her chest and clasping her slender wrist in a vise-like grip of a single hand.
The girl breathed heavily.
The man reached toward his hip pocket and drawing forth a bright metallic object held it close to her face. Her breath stopped short. Then a flood of light struck her full in the eyes, as her captor pressed the button on his flash lamp.
"God! a woman!" the man gasped. The exclamation and voice were clearly not Japanese.
Ethel felt the grip loosen from her wrists and the weight shift from her chest.
"You're no Japanese!" he said under his breath, at the same time letting the glowing flash lamp fall from his hand.
Presently Ethel raised her head and reached for the lamp where it lay wasting its rays against the black soil. She now turned the glow on the other and saw kneeling beside her a young man in American clothes. He was hatless and coatless and his soft gray shirt was torn and mud bespattered. A massive head of uncombed hair crowned a handsome forehead, but the face beneath was marred by a stubby growth of beard.
"Who are you?" whispered Ethel finding her voice.
"Put out the light," he commanded, reaching forward to take it from her.
"Who are you?" he asked reversing the query as they were again in darkness.
"I'm a girl," said Ethel.
The man laughed softly.
"I'm not," he said.
Ethel drew herself into a sitting posture. "Which side of this war are you on?" she asked.
The man was afraid to commit himself—then a happy thought struck him. "The same side that you are," he answered diplomatically.
It was Ethel's turn to smile.
"You are an American?" she ventured at length.
"Yes," he said. "So are you?"
"Yes."
"Then why are you wearing Japanese clothes?"
"Because—" she said hesitatingly, "I haven't any others."
For some minutes he said nothing.
"Are you going to give the alarm of my presence?" he asked at length.
"No."
"Then I'll go," he said.
Rising from his knees, but still stooping, he made off rapidly down the cotton row.
Ethel breathed deeply. Confused thoughts flashed through her mind. She would not return to go with Komoru; in her Japanese garb she feared the early morning sweep of American cavalry; but to the man who had just left her, why could she not explain?
Without further debate, she arose, and at top speed ran after the retreating figure.
The next instalment of this absorbing tale will appear in the September issue of PHYSICAL CULTURE. It tells of how the Japanese attempt to obtain control of the United States through scientific measures rather than barbarous warfare, and is wonderfully interesting and readable. Don't miss it.
PART THREE.
SYNOPSIS: In the year of 1958, Ethel Calvert, a daughter of an American grain-merchant, residing in Japan, because of her father's death in an anti-foreign riot, is forced to take refuge, with Madame Oshima, the French wife of a Japanese scientist. She becomes accustomed to the land and mode of living followed by the Japanese, and is finally persuaded to adopt the costume of the land of her exile. War is declared between Japan and the United States, and Professor Oshima, and Komoru, his Secretary, together with Madame Oshima and Ethel Calvert, sail for the United States in a Japanese war vessel. When near the Pacific Coast, the many men and women who have been passengers on the vessel, leave the ship by means of aeroplanes, and sail eastwardly toward Texas, where they establish plantations and conduct a desultory warfare by aeroplanes with United States troops. While working in the fields Ethel discovers a young American in concealment. He warns her to keep silent, and immediately runs away.
In a few minutes Ethel had caught up with the man who, more cautiously, ran before her. Checking her speed, she followed silently.
For a half-mile she pursued him thus. He came to the end of the field and dodged into the thicket of bushes that lined the fence row. He moved more slowly now, and she followed by sound rather than by sight. At length they came to where a brook ran at right angles to the fence row. The man stopped and crawled under the barbed-wire fence and came out on the turnpike that ran alongside.
Ethel, peering out from the bushes, saw him walk boldly forward and stand upon the end of the stone culvert that conducted the brook beneath the roadway. For a moment only he remained so, and then clambered quickly down at the end of the arch and disappeared in the darkness beneath. She heard a foot splash in the water, and then all was quiet save the gurgle of the stream.
Climbing over the fence, she top ran forward upon the culvert. She listened and looked toward either end, resolved to call to him if he emerged.
As she stood waiting she saw the yellow signal light rise in spirals higher and higher and then circle slowly in one location. A few minutes later the dim tail lights of the planes came up out of the horizon and flew towards the signal light.
After a half-hour of waiting, she boldly resolved to enter the hiding place of the man she had followed.
Cautiously feeling her way, she clambered down over the end of the culvert and peered into its black archway.
At first, dimly and then with brighter flash, she saw a light within. Creeping slowly forward, wading in the stream and stumbling over rough blocks of stone, she made toward the light. Midway the passage, the side wall of the culvert had fallen or been torn down and there in a little damp clay nook, sitting hunched upon a rock was the silhouette of the unshaven man.
Beyond him glowed the dim light and by its faint rays he was hurriedly writing in a note book.
With a start he became aware of her presence, and turned the flash-light upon her.
"I followed you," she stammered. "I want to explain. I'm an American girl captive among the Japanese."
He stared at her quizzically in the dim light.
"I ran from you," he said, "because I was afraid to trust you—there are a number of Europeans among the Japanese forces. I couldn't know that you wouldn't have given the alarm, and for one man to run from fifty thousand isn't cowardice; it's common sense—even bravery, perhaps, when there's a cause at stake."
"I understand," replied the girl.
"Won't you be seated?" he said, arising and offering her his place on the rock. She accepted, and he asked her for more of her story.
In reply she told him whom she was and related as briefly as she could the incidents of her life that accounted for her peculiar predicament.
"I suppose I owe you something of an explanation, too;" he said, when she had finished. "My name is Winslow—Stanley Winslow; I am —or at least was—-the editor of the Regenerationist. Do you know what that is?"
Ethel confessed, that she did not.
"Perhaps I flatter myself, but then I suppose you have had no chance to keep up on American affairs."
Just then a crash, followed by a whirring, clattering noise broke in above the sound of the man's voice and the gurgle of the brook running through their hiding-place.
"What's that?" Winslow exclaimed, starting towards the end of the culvert.
Ethel followed him. Before they reached the open the trees in front of them were lit up by the lurid light of a fire. Beside the road a hundred yards away was the crumpled mass of a metallic aeroplane. The gasolene tank had burst open and was blazing furiously.
"Americans," said Winslow; "let's see if the crew are dead."
The gasolene had largely spent itself by the time they reached the plane.
Poking about in the crumbled debris, they found the driver impaled upon a lever that protruded from his back.
"I wonder what grounded her," mused Winslow, as he inspected the dead man with his flash-lamp. "Oh! here we are! Good shooting that," he added, pointing with his lamp to a soggy hole in the side of the man's head.
"I guess they're at it," he said, pressing out his light and turning his eyes skyward.
The woman, speechless, followed his gaze. Across the sky flashed here and there brilliant beams of search-lights, but far more numerous were the swiftly moving star-like tail-lights of the Japanese planes.
Now and again they heard the crackling of machine guns, occasionally the burr of a disordered propeller and once the faint call of a human voice.
"Look," said Ethel, pointing to the southward. "See that brilliant yellow light. It's the Japanese signal plane; they are all to fly in towards it, and then, soaring high will escape over the American lines."
"The lines are a joke," returned Winslow. "It's plane against plane. And the Japs will get the best of it; or at least they'll get away, which is all they want. They are going to Dakota, where five train loads of gasolene will be setting on a siding waiting to be captured. We printed the story ten days ago, though the administration papers hooted at the idea."
As they walked back toward the culvert, Ethel stumbled over something in the roadway. She asked for the light, and discovered to her horror that she was standing in the midst of the remnants of a man who had been spattered over the hard macadam of the turnpike.
"Ugh! take me away," she shuddered, averting her eyes and running toward the stream,
"The gunner fell out of the plane when she lurched, I guess," commented Winslow to himself, examining the shreds of clothing attached to the mangled remains beneath him.
For some reason Winslow did not immediately follow the girl but went back and looked over the wrecked plane again.
He removed the magazine pistol from the impaled man's pocket and searched about in the locker until he found a supply of cartridges.
The sky was beginning to brighten from approaching dawn now, and the searchlight flashes were less brilliant. Winslow stood gazing upward until the forms of the lower flying planes became visible. Suddenly he saw a disabled plane come somersaulting out of the air and fall into a field quarter of a mile away. Evidently there were explosives aboard, for a shower of flame, smoke and splinters arose where she fell.
The onlooking man hopped over the fence and ran toward the spot. There was little to be seen—a mere ragged hole in the sod. As he unconcernedly walked back he passed at intervals a propeller blade sticking upright in the soil, a broken can of rice cakes and a woman's hand.
The dawn had now so far progressed that the observer could see some order in the movement of the air craft. He studied with fascination the last of the Japanese planes as they circled up toward their aerial guide-post and moved thence in a steady stream to the northward.
The American planes which had been harassing and firing on the Japanese as they circled for altitude, now turned and closed in on the rear of the enemy and the fighting was fast and furious. Plane after plane tumbled sickeningly out of the sky. But for Winslow the sight lasted only a few minutes, for the combatants were flying at full speed and soon became mere flitting insects against the gray light of the morning sky.
Striding down the roadway past the mangled body of the American gunner, Winslow reached the culvert.
Ethel Calvert was sitting on a flat stone at the edge of the water. She held her woven grass sandals in her hands and was washing them by rubbing the soles together in the stream.
As Winslow looked down at her in silence, the girl looked up and eyed him curiously. Neither spoke. The man stooped and washed his hands in the brook and then stepping up-stream a few paces he drank from the rivulet.
Returning he regarded the girl. She had placed her sandals beyond her on the grassy bank and sat with her bare feet in the shallow stream. Her head, buried in her arms, rested upon her knees. The slender shoulders now shook convulsively and the sound of a sob escaped her. In the calmness of his cynicism, the man sat down on the rock and placed a strong arm around the trembling woman.
"I know," he said, "it's a dirty damned mess, but we didn't start it."
After a time the girl raised her head. "I know we didn't start it," she said; "but isn't there something we can do to stop it?"
"Well," he replied slowly, "I rather hope to have a hand in stopping it, and perhaps you can help."
"How?"
"Surely you can do as much in stopping it as one of those poor devils that get smashed does in keeping it going," he went on.
"How?" she repeated.
"Well, that's quite a long story," he replied; "if you don't already know."
"I told you who I was."
"Yes."
"Well, the Regenerationists, along with many other sincere men and women in this country tried to prevent this war and are trying to get it peaceably settled now. The Japs don't want to die. They want a chance to live. We've got a lot of vainglorious, debauched, professional soldiery that wanted to fight something, and now they're getting their fill. In the first place, there is no need of war and in the second place, when there is war, the same stamina that will make efficient humans for the ordinary walks of life will make good soldiers. But money talks louder than reason. The ruling powers in American government are a crew of beer-bloated politicians who are in the pay of a cabal of wine-soaked plutocrats, and the American people under such administration have become a race of mental and physical degenerates. The Japs knew this or they would never have invaded the country."
"What are you going to do about it? And what are you doing here now within the Japanese lines?" asked Ethel when her companion paused.
"Oh, I am acting as my own war correspondent," he replied, smiling a little.
"Pat-a-pat, pat-a-pat"—Winslow jumped up excitedly and clambered to the top of the embankment.
Ethel noting his alarm, slipped her feet into her sandals and rose to follow him.
"Quick," he exclaimed, hurrying down the bank again. "It's American cavalry."
"But let us go meet them," said the girl.
"No, never," replied Winslow, taking her by the arm and hurrying her into the culvert. "You don't understand. As for you in kimo, your reception would be anything but pleasant; and as for me, I'm an outlaw with a price on my head."
Reaching the chink where the rocks had fallen out of the culvert wall, Winslow squeezed into it and pulled the girl down beside him. Carefully he crowded her feet and his own back so that their presence could not be detected from the end of the culvert.
"I'm afraid we left tracks on the bank, but we can at least die game," he said, pulling his magazine pistol from his belt and handing it to the girl, while he drew from his hip pocket the weapon he had taken from the dead aviator.
"I hate these things," he said, "but when a man is in a corner and no chance to run, I suppose he's justified in using a cowardly fighting machine."
They heard clearly now the hoof beats on the roadway above. Presently an officer rode his horse down to the stream at the head of the culvert. "Anything under there?" called a voice from above.
"Nothing doing," replied the other, peering beneath the archway.
"You're a fool sitting there like that," called a third voice. "Company C lost two men back there from a wounded Jap under a bridge."
The horseman urged his beast up the bank and the troop passed on.
For some hours the man and the girl remained in the culvert; meanwhile Winslow explained the Regenerationist movement, which was not as his enemies interpreted, a traitorous party favoring the Japanese, but only a group of thinkers who advocated principles not unlike those which had made the Japanese such a superior race either at peace or at war.
As she listened, it seemed to Ethel as if her own dream had come true, for here indeed was a man of her own blood with stamina of physique and mental and moral courage, who professed and practiced all she had found that was good among the people of her enforced adoption and in addition much that, to her with her racial prejudice in his favor, seemed even better than the ways of Japanese.
In reply to her questions as to the cause of his outlawry, Winslow explained that he and other leaders of his party had long been at swords' points with the conservatives who were in power and that the administration, taking advantage of the martial frenzy of the war, were persecuting the Regenerationists as supposed traitors.
As the sun indicated mid-forenoon the dishevelled editor of the Regenerationist and his newly found follower sauntered forth and took to the turnpike.
"We may as well be on the road," he argued. "The sooner the American people get the inside facts of this affair the sooner they will decide to stop it, and it's forty-five miles to the nearest place where I can get in touch with my people."
Bareheaded, through the hot sun, they travelled rapidly along the turnpike, keeping a sharp lookout for occasional parties of cavalry and hiding in the fields until they passed. Sometimes they talked of the contrasted ways of life in Japan and in America, and again Winslow wrote hurriedly in his note-book as he walked.
About three o'clock in the afternoon they stopped in the shade where a rivulet fell over a small cataract.
"Aren't you hungry?" asked Ethel, after they had drunk from the brook.
"I don't know. I hadn't thought of it particularly," replied her companion. "Let's see, the last time I ate was in a farmhouse north of Houston. That was eight days ago. When have you last eaten?"
"Yesterday morning," replied the girl.
"Then you are probably hungrier than I am."
With their conversation and the murmur of the waterfall they had failed to detect the approach of two cavalry officers, who, walking their tired mounts, had come up unheeded.
"Hey! look at the beauty in breeches!" called one of the approaching men.
"Her for mine," returned the other.
"I saw it first—hie!" returned the first, drawing rein.
"Give it to me, you hog; you've got one!"
"All right, all right—go take it—maybe the bum will object," laughed the first, as the unshaven Winslow advanced in front of the girl.
"Run quick," called Winslow to Ethel. "They're too drunk to shoot straight."
The turnpike was inclosed by a high, woven-wire fence, and the girl obeying turned down the road. Her would-be claimant put spurs to his horse and dashed after her, leaving Winslow covering the rear horseman with his magazine pistol.
"Well," said the drunken officer weakly, "I ain't doing nothing."
"Then ride down the road the other way as fast as you can go."
The officer obeyed.
For a moment Winslow watched him and then turned to see Ethel climbing over the woven-wire fence with the soldier trying to urge his horse up the embankment to reach her.
Winslow started to run to the girl's rescue, but no sooner had he turned than a bullet sang past his ear. Wheeling about he saw the other cavalryman riding toward him firing as he came.
With lewd brutality calling for vengeance in one direction and a man firing at his back from the other, Winslow's aversion to bloodshed became nil; and, aiming cool, he began firing at the approaching officer.
It must have been the horse that got the bullet, for with the third shot mount and rider somersaulted upon the macadam.
Without compunction, Winslow turned and sprinted down the roadway. He saw Ethel dashing across the field, hurdling the cotton rows. The officer was racing down the road, seeming away from her, but in another moment he turned through a gap in the fence and rode down upon the fleeing woman.
The athletic Winslow vaulted the six-foot fence with an easy spring, and tore madly through the obstructing vegetation.
The rider overtaking the woman, tried to hold her, first by the arm, and failing in that, he grabbed her by the hair. Winslow wondered why she did not shoot him, and then he recalled that he was carrying both weapons.
In another instant he was up with them and had dragged the man from his horse and flung him to the ground. The soldier kicked and swore, but half drunk, his resistance was of small consequence to his well-trained adversary.
"Here," called Winslow to the girl, who had tumbled down in a heap more from fright than physical exhaustion, "come and get my knife and cut the rein from the horse's bridle."
Thus equipped, the two strapped their captive's hands and one foot together behind him.
"There now," said Winslow, as he relieved the officer of his weapon. "Hop back to the bridge and look after your comrade. He fell on the turnpike a while ago and I'm afraid he hurt his head. We'll have to be going."
"Shall we take the horse?" asked Ethel.
"No," replied her companion, beginning to throw clods at the animal, "we'll simply run him away. As for us, we are safer on foot, and will in the long run make better time."
"You are not tired, are you?" he asked, as they turned into the roadway again.
"No," she replied, "only a bit tired and weak from my scare. How far have we come?"
"Fifteen miles, perhaps; I really hardly know; we've been interrupted so much."
They made a long detour through the fields to avoid a group of buildings. Striking the road again, they soon came upon a slight rise of land that stood well above the level of the surrounding country.
"Are we not rather conspicuous here?" asked the girl.
"Well, rather," admitted her companion, pausing to look around; "but I guess we can see as far as we can be seen."
"Look! look!" called Ethel excitedly, jerking her companion's arm and pointing to the south, where the flat horizon was broken by the derricks and tanks of the oil fields.
At first Winslow saw nothing, and then shading his eyes he sighted what looked like a great bevy of birds flying just above the horizon.
Larger and larger grew the specks against the sky.
"They will be over us in fifteen minutes," said Winslow; "let's get up in that oak over there, where we can see without being seen."
Safely hidden by the enveloping foliage, the man and the girl now watched the approach of the planes. As they came over the oil region the planes began swooping near the ground and then rapidly rising again.
"Its Japanese after the American cavalry, I guess," said Winslow. In a few minutes black smoke belched forth at numerous points from the petroleum works.
After a time a cloud of dust arose from a great meadow that spread for several miles to the north of the oil wells. A group of aeroplanes hovered closely above the dust cloud and kept up that periodical swooping towards the earth.
"It's stampeding cavalry," said the sharp-eyed Ethel, "and the airmen are dropping bombs on them."
The cloud of dust came nearer and nearer until they could see the swift fall of the deadly missiles from the swooping planes and the havoc wrought in the straggling ranks by the showers of pellets from the shrapnel exploding above their heads.
When the foremost of the cavalry troop were perhaps a quarter of a mile from the observers, a commanding officer, who was riding well in the lead, wheeled his horse, threw away his jacket, tore off his white shirt and waived it frantically above his head.
An answering truce flag soon appeared from a plane above and the jaded horsemen, riding up, drew rein and waited.
The truce plane now swooped low and dropped a message fastened to a white cloth. A soldier caught it and brought it to the officer, who signalled assent.
Orders were called along the line, and the men filed by and piled their weapons in an inglorious heap.
After this most of the lazy circling planes rose and made off to the left, while a few assigned to guard duty circled above the retreating cavalry, as they moved off slowly in the opposite direction.
Two belated members of the troop, who had lost their horses, flung themselves down to rest for a moment in the lengthening shadow of the oak tree.
"Oh Gawd!" said one, as he panted and mopped his forehead. "Oh Gawd! I was scared! That damned shrapnel bursting right over us and no chance to fight back or get away. It ain't no fair fighting like that—you can't get at 'em."
"They've tricked us, they have," returned his companion. "Our own airmen's up in Nebraska chasing the Japs that gave us the slip this morning, and here these damn hawks come swooping in. I reckon it's reinforcements from Japan. The transports that brought the first bunch must have been back and got another load, and this time it seems to be regular soldiers—here to kill—the others were just decoys."
"No, they ain't exactly decoys; they're here to stay and raise families, and damned if that ain't what I'm going to do, if I ever get out of this. Gawd! our loss must be something awful, and they're at it yet. Look! see 'em over there by Beaumont like a flock of crows. The bunch that got us was just a few of them."
For a time both soldiers eyed the distant fighting.
"When I get out of this," continued the first speaker; "when I get out, I'm going to join the Regenerationists."
"What's that; peace cranks?"
"Yep; but it's more than that, it's health cranks and temperance cranks, and moral cranks, and socialist cranks, and every other kind of crank that believes in people being decent and living happy—health, quiet lives, instead of fighting and robbing and—boozing and abusing themselves and each other to death."
"Oh, Hell! don't preach just because you're scared," said the other, getting up.
"Call it preaching if you like, but believe me, I've been getting letters from the folks back home, and my people ain't such poor stuff either, if I did join the army, and I want to tell you that such preaching is getting damn popular lately. This fall's election, you know, and the way we've been done up here to-day, will have a lot to do with the outcome."
"We'd better move," said the other, looking up. "That Jap up there thinks we're going back after our guns."