Yuri turned around in his seat in the car, and gradually a mocking smile spread over his features. Then he spoke to the sentinel.
“I don’t know the fellow,” he declared. “Probably he is an escaped Cupian slave. You had better arrest him.”
The princess shrieked, Yuri’s car shot ahead, and they disappeared northward, leaving me staring after them with mouth agape.
Perhaps I could have argued it out, or even fought it out with my bare hands, with the Cupian sentinel; but at that minute a Formian sentinel emerged from the guardhouse at the gate, to take his tour of duty. Together the pair seized and shackled me, and placed me in a cell.
Thus, just as my hopes had been highest, they were dashed to the ground. Here was I, alone, in chains, still in Formia, awaiting transportation to the south again; while my beloved, free, was speeding northward with my deceitful rival!
10
before Queen Formis
And so, while my princess was borne northward by her cousin and lover, Prince Yuri, I was led southward in chains, a prisoner charged with high treason against the Ant Empire. Yuri had tricked me, and had used me as a cat’s-paw to rescue his sweetheart from her captors. But if I had not been so blindly in love, I should have seen through him, and could have married Lilla at peace under Formian auspices.
Yet, somehow, I did not feel sorry for what I had done. I had set Lilla free. I had won her love and trust for one night, and I was prepared to pay the penalty. In fact, I was glad to pay the penalty, for I realized that marriage between her, a princess, and me, a commoner, would of course never have been possible.
Back in my old room again in Wautoosa! It seemed like home, somehow; and yet how different from before, for now I was no longer a guest, but a prisoner.
Tabby, my pet buntlote, was glad to smell me again; and my conscience gave me a twinge for having so unceremoniously left her behind. Yet if I had taken her with me, what would have become of her in the wreck of the kerkool and the flight through the spider’s tunnel?