It brought a fusillade of shots; but they splattered harmlessly with a great shower of sparks on the blackened rocks. And suddenly the trembling girl gripped Morgan.

"Look! Cah is flying over there." She pointed.

There was a flapping of wings in the Saturn-light. And the bird's eerie, cawing, chattering voice. "Cah sees them. There they are!"

The excited bird's fluttering shape was visible. "Cah sees them! Cah sees everything!" it chattered.

A bolt from one of the pirates mingled with its cries. The flash shot up. The huge bird, its weirdly childish voice stilled forever, came wavering down, turning end over end until it thudded heavily on the rocks.

"Oh poor Cah," Nada murmured. Then she gasped: "Oh look! There by the little gully."

The rocks on the upper lip of the small gully where the crouching pirates were gathered were splashed pale-white by the Saturn-light. And in the glow there now, a thin little red line was visible. A moving line. It stretched back over the rocks, down into another hollow and up again. Morgan caught his breath as he stared. It was a line of tiny, moving red figures. Myriads of them; round things small as the end of his finger.

The rolling, red ants. They came hitching themselves, scuttling; a vast little army. And then he saw other lines of them converging on the gully; marching grimly, silently to battle, summoned perhaps by Cah's excited calls.

Breathlessly Morgan and the girl watched. The pirates undoubtedly didn't notice the marching red hordes of tiny insects behind them. A dozen thin red moving lines now. Silently but inexorably they crawled over the rocks, down into the gully.

Then there was a startled cry. "What in hell!" And one of the pirates incautiously straightened, his arms flailing wildly, his hands plucking at his clothing, at his face.

Morgan raised his gun, but Nada shoved it down. "No need," she murmured. "The bites of those red ants are quite poisonous."

Silently then, they stood and watched the strange battle.

It was a ghastly attack. Within a minute the space-pirates were screaming, staggering. Half a dozen of their frenzied bolts went wild into the air. And then they had flung their guns away, frenzied, demoniac as they fought the 

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