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.