Finally came the day. It dawned all right, and there was nothing about it to show that it was going to be different from any other fine day; yet, as soon as the wasp woke up, she knew that, for her, it was the day of Fate.
A very cursory inspection of the budding city showed at once that during the night things had been happening and changes taking place. The domed floors of several of the cells were palpitating with life from within, and there were sounds of the gnawing and tearing of the silken screens.
The queen became greatly excited, and began to hum and dance a little step-dance to herself, all alone in the darkness among the cells, as she saw her triumph evolving before her eyes. And, almost as if the hum had called it, there rushed at her, out of the blackness across the comb, a—a thing.
She knew by instinct that it was an enemy. Indeed, it could not well be anything else, but it fought like a black devil.
It was, in point of fact, a mole-cricket, a creature just like its namesake, if an insect can be said to resemble an animal, only that its jaws were like unto the jaws of a lobster. It was a fearsome apparition, and very much larger even than the queen. The good God alone knoweth why it had chosen that moment and place to run apparently amok.
But, if the mole-cricket ran amok, the queen-wasp went berserk. It was a thing unthinkable that in that moment of triumph she, and the awakening city with her, should be cut off—unthinkable and impossible, unthinkable and maddening. Therefore she fought as few wasps have probably fought before or since, and they are pretty expert exponents, and scarcely backward ones, of warfare.
The battle that followed was awful.
Almost at the start the two insects, grappling, fell headlong to the excavation the queen had made below the city, and there, rolling over and over, continued the struggle in the dark among the refuse, the queen eternally feeling with her poison-dagger for a space to drive home her death-blow between the other's smooth, shining armor-plates; the cricket eternally endeavoring to behead the queen between its awful jaws.
It was a fight to the death, as most insect duels are, and it could not last long. It was too tense, too fiendish, too shockingly wicked for that.
Suddenly the queen's body shot out like a spring. The opening she had been feeling for had appeared, and she had driven her death-blow home. At the same instant, with a supreme effort, she bent double and shot herself free, the last convulsive, shearing crush of her foe's laws clashing to so close above her head that they actually caught in their death-grip, and held, till she pulled them out by the roots, two bristles of her neck.