Her appeal had been received by the women of America with secret rage, amazement and horror. The Government had commanded their attendance on her lectures. Her reception at first had been cold and formal. But her magnetic personality turned the tide. Within a month there was no hall large enough in America to hold the breathless throngs of women who hung on her words. And strangest of all, they cheered her with an enthusiasm that amazed Waldron. His agents reported this enthusiasm with oft-repeated praise of her uncanny genius. The secret of her popularity they had not dreamed. In each town she took into her confidence but one woman on whose love for country she could depend with absolute certainty. This woman she swore in secret to organize an inner circle whose name to them was the Daughters of Jael. The spies who followed her tour to report to the Governor-General never reached this inner circle. In it were taken under solemn oath those whose love for liberty was a religion. The Daughters of Jael comprised only the wisest women leaders, and with them the strongest and most beautiful girls in the glory of youth from twenty to thirty years of age. They were taught in secret two things--to keep their lithe young bodies hard and sun-tanned and learn to wield a steel knife whose blade was eight inches long, slender and keen. When a million had been sworn and trained the order would come to strike for freedom. The rank and file knew nothing of this purpose. Only their leaders knew. Each had sworn to lay their souls and bodies a free offering on their country’s altar and to obey their commander’s word as the law of God. It was two years from the beginning before Virginia ventured to meet her lover in a deep mountain gorge of the inner Sierras. Their embrace was long and silent. They spoke at last in low, half-articulate sounds that only love could hear and know. When the first wave of emotion had spent itself, she asked him eagerly: “Your last invention--the aerial torpedo?” “A failure like the rest!” he answered sadly. “Great inventions that revolutionize warfare have all required years to perfect--the iron-clad a generation, the submarine ten years, the aeroplane ten years. They required the genius of hundreds in their experiments and the lives of thousands. The hope of miraculous inventions in an hour of crisis is only the vain dream of the novelist. We have ceased to hope for such deliverance. We are training men to master the already perfected mechanism of the submarine--thousands of them. Lake, the inventor, is an admiral. We have a model at work six thousand feet above the sea. I command the Eagle’s Nest, the camp on a great mountain plateau where we are training thousands of aviators. On another peak among the stars we are teaching men to use the range finders and swing big guns to strike a target at twelve miles. Most important of all we are teaching each and every man how to use cold steel at close range--”