“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.