supporters; the door closed, and Myles Cabot stood guarding the exit with his pike—alone against the hordes of antdom.

He had no difficulty in defending himself from those in front of him, but the ants who began to close in on him from each side were a different matter.

He received several bad scratches on his shoulders and hips, and his toga was ripped and torn; but fortunately he was able to ward off their paralyzing bites. Nevertheless, his enemies pressed so close that it was difficult for him to manipulate his long weapon. In fact, it was only the jamming of the ants upon one another and upon the dead bodies of their slain comrades that kept them from him.

He now was holding his pike by the middle, with both hands, using one end as a club and the other as a dagger. The black circle of the ants was steadily closing in on him. A pair of mandibles from the left snapped angrily within a few inches of his throat. Instantly he drove the point of his lance home between horrid jaws. But at the same instant its butt was seized by a pair of jaws to his right. He could not pull it free.

At last he was weaponless, and not only that, but pinned to the wall by the shaft of his own pike as well.

And then to his surprise the ants before him separated as at a command. The butt of his lance was dropped. As Myles wrenched the point loose from the dead body of the Formian in which it had been stuck, and gazed expectant down the long aisle which had opened before him, he saw confronting him at the other end an ant-man armed with the peculiar type of claw-operated rifle which the Formians had adapted from those which Myles himself had built for Cupian use in the first war of liberation.

Briefly the two surveyed each other. Then slowly the rifle was raised until its aim settled squarely upon the earth-man’s chest.

Instantaneously the glance of Myles Cabot swept the black hordes which hemmed him in on each side. There was no escape!

Yet how can man die better,

Than facing fearful odds?

With a wild warwhoop, which was utterly lost on the radio-sense of the assembled Formians, Myles charged down the narrow way, straight into the muzzle of the rifle of his antagonist. The astonished ant-man hastily pulled the trigger. A shot rang out. But still the impetuous rush of Myles continued, and before the rifle could be discharged a second time, Myles had driven his spear 

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