"Fool! With what's left of those Midges that heavy cart will never move again."

The cart had stopped. Curtmann, doubtless regretting his shot of exasperation, was roaring more orders. The straggling columns of his men came toward the cart, and all of them bunched around it in a solid group, out there in the center of the open glade.

"Got them stalled," Jim said grimly. "Much better for us."

If the poison would work. But would it? At three hundred feet we were still circling in great humming sweeps while again I withheld my signal. Did I dare send the Midges down for a general attack? Every shot cut them so horribly into nothingness. Off to the side, in the direction of the Forest City, other Midges were appearing now. Little groups of them, males and females, humming toward us, joining our circling ranks. Reinforcements. In a minute or two it seemed that a new thousand were here to swell our weird little army.

"Look!" Jim suddenly cried triumphantly. "The enta-poison!"

Up to now, in these tentative exchanges, Curtmann and his men doubtless had contemptuously figured that this engagement was harassing, but certainly nothing worse. Some of his men had been stabbed by little thorns. What of it? But down there now a new confusion was apparent. One of his men on the ground beside the cart suddenly staggered and fell. Then another. In the cart a group of them called with startled questions. Two of them by the big projector abruptly slumped in their seats with their fellows bending anxiously over them.

A moment of startled confusion. A dozen stricken men. And then others. What was happening must have dawned on Curtmann. In the starlit dimness down there on the cart we saw the blob of his figure leap erect.

And then Curtmann, at last realizing the deadliness of this menace, went into action! From the cart there was a little puff, with the hissing, popping sound of it coming up to us a few seconds later. A small round blob rose toward us, went harmlessly through us and burst up in the starlight. An electrolite-flare. It glared with a lurid, prismatic splash of color in the sky, illumined brightly the tiny flying dots of our Midges.

Just that few seconds and then the great projector hurled its missile at us—a blob coming slowly up in an arc. The blob burst. It seemed as though suddenly there was an earthquake in the air-split columns of air rushing together with a deafening 

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