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."
With the oil regions again in the hands of the vigilant Japanese, Winslow and Ethel found escape more perilous and difficult. But on the third night they succeeded in getting through the lines and reaching Winslow's confederates, who were awaiting him near St. Charles, La. From hence they travelled by aeroplane to a secluded railroadless valley in the heart of the Ozarks.
It was here that the secret printing plant of the Regenerationist had been established. Ethel knew nothing of printing or journalism, but a place was found for her in the department of circulation.
While news could be received via wireless, the paper and supplies, as well as the men who went to and fro from the secret printing plant of the outlawed publication, had to be transported by plane. Aviators with sufficient skill and daring for the task were hard to find. Already at home in the air, it was only a few days until Ethel was driving a plane on a paper route.
The seven hundred miles to Denver she covered one night, returning the next. She started out with half a ton of papers—seventy-two thousand copies—which in suitable bundles were dropped by the boy in the center of the triangular signal fires which local agents built at night in open fields.
Once she lost her load by a fall in the Kansas River, and once she ran out of fuel and held up a rich country house at the point of a pistol and demanded the supply of automobile gasoline.
Worst of all, she was chased one night by a government secret service plane. Despairing of outflying them, she got and held the position directly above their craft, while the boy rolled a two-hundred-pound bale of Regenerationists over on the other's wing and sent the Federal airmen somersaulting into eternity.
But these stirring times did not last long. With the second Japanese invasion and the Orientals now established in two widely separated sections of the country, the authorities at Washington soon acceded to a truce, and one of the immediate results was abolition of martial law and re-establishment of a free press.
Throughout the summer, in the rice lands in the South, and the wheat lands of the North, the Japanese lived, harmless gardeners of their newly acquired possessions. But their gasoline tanks were full and they carried sufficient conflagration bombs to have fired every city from New Orleans to St. Paul, had the truce been broken by American treachery.
The Regenerationist, now removed to St. Louis, was again a full-sized newspaper. The party in power, supported by the capitalistic and military classes, preached old-fashioned patriotism and with martial music and flying flags tried to enthuse the people. But the terror of the American soldiery in the unfair battle of Beaumont had gone abroad throughout the land. The people feared the draft for military service—they feared the firing of the cities—the poisoning of their water supplies and a hundred other spectres which in the minds of a degenerate and servile city population the presence of a successful aerial enemy had inspired.
The reform party of the Regenerationists had by the fortunes of war achieved a tremendous growth. Their recruits came both from the better element who had thus been awakened from their lethargy, and from the cowardly rabble who supported peace because of the terror in their hearts.
Gerald Stoddard, Chancellor of the University of Illinois, a big sound man of clean mind and clean body, was chosen as the radical presidential candidate, and won with an overwhelming majority.
His election meant peace between the warring powers, and strong likelihood of peace in the world for all time to come. It also meant other things. It meant the complete inversion of the American policy and the welcoming of science as the servant of mankind's larger needs and not merely a flunky to the degenerate, luxury-loving few.
President-elect Stoddard, with masterful hand, began at once the organization of the new administration. Among the appointees whom he early announced was that of Stanley Winslow, to the position of Secretary of Public Health.
In his telegram of acceptance, Winslow said:
"In signifying my intention of accepting the position of Secretary of Public Health in your Cabinet, I wish to say that it will be my sole purpose to prove myself possessed of the larger patriotism which would defend our race against retrogression and annihilation, not by such antiquated and inefficient methods as immigration restriction or mechanical warfare, but by the improvement of the race itself."
And Ethel, too, sent a telegram. It read:
PROFESSOR AND MADAME OSHIMA,
JAPANESE OCCUPATION,
SOUTH DAKOTA.
As soon as travel is freely established come and visit us. When are the children coming over?
ETHEL CALVERT WINSLOW,
Care the Regenerationist.
St. Louis, Mo.
But of Komoru she said not a word. She couldn't forget the unfathomable look in his eyes. At times she even argued with herself that the poor fellow had loved her, but had feared to express himself because he believed (as he had stated in his scientific essays) that inter-racial marriages were uneugenic and hence immoral.