houted aloud and
clutched Jim's arm with trembling fingers.

* * * * *

That scene of carnage suggested to his mind the day he had seen a cloud
of vultures fighting over the carcass of a horse in the desert. The mad
pushing, the slashing and rending of each other as all fought for the
choice morsels of dead flesh! It was identical.

The termites, he knew, were deliberately cannibalistic. A race so
efficiently run, so ingenious in letting nothing of possible value go to
waste, would almost inevitably be trained to consume the bodies of dead
fellow beings. And now--now ...

The gruesome monarch, that thing of monstrous brain and almost
nonexistent body, was no longer the monarch. It was either dead, or
utterly helpless. In that moment of death or helplessness--was it being
fallen upon and eaten by the horde of savage things it normally ruled?
Did the termite hordes make a practice of devouring their helpless and
worn-out directing brains as it was known they devoured all their
worn-out, no longer potent queens?

It certainly looked as if that was what the leaderless horde of soldiers
was doing here! Or, at any rate, trying to do; accustomed to being fed
by the workers, with mandibles too huge to permit of normal
self-feeding, they would probably be able to hardly more than strain
clumsily after the choice mass beneath them and absorb it in morsels so
small as to be more a source of baffled madness than of satisfaction.

Which latter conjecture seemed certainly to support the theory that the
soldier termites were not trying to help their fallen monarch, but were
trampling and slashing it to death in an effort to devour it!

"Quick!" snapped Denny, realizing that it was a chance that must not be
overlooked; that even if he were wrong, they might as well die trying to
get to the doorway as be crushed to death where they stood. "Run to the
exit!"

"Through that nightmare army?" said Jim, astounded. "Why, we haven't a
chance of making it!"

"Come, I say!" Denny dragged him a few feet by main force. "I hope--I
believe--we won't be bothered. If a pair of jaws crushes us, it will
probably be by accident and not design--the brutes are too busy to
bother about us now."

Still gazing at Denny as though he thought him insane, Jim tarried no
longer. He began to edge his way, by Denny's side, toward the distant
door.

* * * * *

In a very few feet Denny's the