“Not yet, by a long shot!” exclaimed the earth man, with a sudden burst of loyalty and affection toward the man whom he had wrongly suspected all this while, “for you forget Prince Toron. The Assembly long ago canceled Yuri’s title to the crown because of his treason in the Great War of Liberation. The succession they awarded to his younger brother, the loyal Toron. So Yuri’s foul deed made Toron king, unless”—and here a horrible fear clouded Cabot’s firmament—“unless Toron is among the missing.”
“You have spoken well,” replied the old man, “for Toron truly is among the missing. He has not been seen or heard of since the assassination of the old king.”
Myles groaned. Then he remembered something which, in fact, had scarcely been absent from his thoughts for as much as a paraparth ever since he had found the body of his murdered son in the banquet hall at Luno Castle. It is remarkable how a fact which you remember in one connection will often fail to suggest itself in another connection, although equally pat. This is doubtless for much the same psychological reason as is set forth in the following proverb of Poblath, the philosopher: “A face well known to you in Kuana is oft a stranger in Ktuth.”
So, in the present instance, the note which Cabot had found, signed by the name of Toron and pinned to the baby’s bier by a jeweled dagger, had suggested so vividly to Cabot that Toron might perhaps be the actual murderer, that he had failed to grasp the really more obvious significance of the note, namely, that Toron had come at least as far as Luno alive and well. This latter significance now dawned on the earth man for the first time, and hurriedly he imparted the information to his aged host.
“It is well,” Glamp-glamp replied, “for if Toron got that far, doubtless he has reached, or will reach, your army. Almost would I think that he came from your planet Minos, for, as Poblath says: ‘You cannot kill a Minorian.’”
“But we have strayed far from the story you were telling,” said the Minorian himself. “You had just related how that accursed yellow Yuri murdered my little son. What then?”
Glamp-glamp resumed his tale: “The attendants of the princess at once attacked the forces of Yuri for his duplicity, but were driven into the lake. Yuri then sped to the southward with his prize, and the surviving loyalists, led by Poblath and Emsul, retreated north to join your army. Since then the ant men have consolidated all the territory from Kuana to a point just north of Lake Luno, but have not been able to penetrate very far into the mountains. The princess is safe, and is respectfully treated in Kuana.”
Cabot heaved a sigh of relief. Then a suspicion clouded his mind.
“How do you know all this?” he asked, to which Glamp-glamp replied enigmatically, “The holy father knows everything.”
“Who is this ‘holy father,’” Cabot interrogated, “and who are all of you?”