"Well, thousands, then!" cried Freddie Firefly. "You don't mean to say there are more of 'em than that?"
"There are tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands," Kiddie Katydid declared solemnly. "They'll eat everything they can find. And we shall be lucky if they leave enough for the rest of us to live on, after they pass on."
"How did you learn all this?" Freddie Firefly wanted to know.
"That's another of my secrets," said Kiddie Katydid.
So Freddie Firefly went off to hunt for Leaper the Locust. He knew now why Leaper had struggled to escape from that mysterious messenger with the curious message. And Freddie intended to ask Leaper a good many questions about his cousins.
But he couldn't find Leaper anywhere. He searched for him high and low, and far and wide. But nobody knew where Leaper was.
"There are lots of Short-horns everywhere to-night," Benjamin Bat told him. "I claim any one of them is just as good as another." And Benjamin grinned horribly.
Freddie Firefly shuddered. It seemed to him that he had never passed such a dreadful night before.
But Benjamin Bat was having the time of his life. He said that he hoped the Short-horns would like Pleasant Valley so well that they would decide to stay right there for the rest of their days. But, strange to say, Benjamin made things as unpleasant as possible for the newcomers. He ate as many of them as he could, remarking that from such a horde a few would scarcely be missed.