“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.”