Side by side the ants approached the foot of the throne and made obeisance to the king, a pleasing sight indeed to those who had long been accustomed to see Cupia bow before Formis! Then one of their delegation sent up a scroll of parchment by a page. Kew’s brow darkened as he read it to himself.
Finally Kew spoke.
“One of your requests is impossible,” he thundered. “Prince Yuri is a traitor. If we had been sure he were still alive, his surrender to us would have been one of the conditions of the treaty. Now that you have revealed his whereabout, know you that Cupia will consider no propositions from Formis until Yuri is in our hands. I have spoken.”
Then suddenly the eyes of the whole multitude shifted from their ruler to the aged ant man. To the horror of all, the entire upper half of his body was opening as if on a hinge! And in the cavity thus exposed, there lay a Cupian! The aged ant man had not been an ant man at all, but merely a clever piece of mechanism, like the wooden horse at Troy.
The Cupian now sprang to his feet and approached the throne. It was Prince Yuri himself!
“Is that so, my uncle?” he shouted. “Know then that Yuri is no traitor, but rather is King of Poros!”
And before any one could interfere, the prince had drawn his revolver and fired, and the beloved King Kew the Twelfth had fallen with a bullet through his heart. Instantly a cheer arose, and from one end of that huge forum to the other, there were flung out, not the red pennant of the Kew dynasty, but rather the yellow pennant of Prince Yuri and the black pennant of the ants. A few red flags fluttered pitiably, but the administration was outnumbered two to one. Quite evidently the stadium had been packed. Yuri, the traitor and outcast, at one stroke had become King of Cupia.
So this was the situation of the match and the powder: Kew the Twelfth lying on the floor of the royal box, his noble heart stilled forever; Yuri, his nephew, the traitor to Cupia and friend of the ants, standing over the body, with a smoking revolver in his hand; Myles Cabot and the others of Kew’s cabinet and retinue transfixed by horror; and a vast majority of the huge concourse proclaiming the assassin as their new king!
What irony of fate that firearms, which had been unknown on Poros until the earthman had introduced them for the overthrow of the ants, should now be employed to confound the earthman himself and to restore the ants to power! Well, he, too, was armed. As Field Marshal of Cupia, he determined that Kew’s death must be avenged. So he, too, drew his revolver and fired at the renegade prince.
But, as he did this, Hah Babbuh, his own Chief of Staff and friend, struck his hand aside so that the bullet missed its mark.