“Same old tactics,” sneered the scientist, “but you can’t get me that way.”
He jerked his gun. But he was destined never to fire. Moawha, with a host of her fighting men swept between them, and brandished their spears in the giant’s face.
“Hold!” Epworth shouted loudly. “Do not kill him. Take him alive. He is the only man who can pilot a ship back to the earth.”
“Ha, ha, ho, ho, the bantam wishes to return. He shall not.”
With a laugh like a demon the giant swept the small figures aside, whirled, and lifting Queen Carza upon his shoulders, leaped away into the night.
The rout of the crickets was complete. When the morning came and the clouds rolled away the field was a shambles and crickets lay gassed in piles. And Moawha and her soldiers were chasing the crickets in every direction. Across the arid wastes of Carza’s kingdom, on to her capital, a handsome city of twenty thousand inhabitants, and up to the mouth of the great crater that shot upward out of the inner world of the moon toward the unknown skies, Moawha’s soldiers followed the crickets.
But now the crickets were in the air, and when they came to the Agrippa Crater the little people were stopped. True they had been able to capture the entire land of the Taunans, and make prisoners of the leading military commanders but Carza and Toplinsky, convoyed by a band of winged crickets, had deserted the field of action and were flying rapidly toward the crater. Epworth, Joan and Moawha chased them to the opening, and stopped. Their gliders, while strong enough to support them in the inner atmosphere, were not able to fly up through that dark forbidding hole.
Toplinsky, although defeated for the moment, discovered this, and stopped his band of crickets at the entrance.
“Ah, ha, ho! ho!” he shouted in his shrill loud voice that carried far into the inner world. “For the moment the American bantam triumphs. But the war has only begun. Soon I shall come again. The next time my valiant crickets and brave Taunans shall be armed with gases and guns that will slay millions. Until that time——”
Epworth and Moawha saw him wave his hands as if in high spirits. His action cast a damper over Moawha’s spirits, and Joan also was troubled.