intelligence, however keen, could have functioned.

The fight, though, was by no means over. With five feet of steel
piercing it through, it whirled with hardly abated vitality toward
Dennis. Its gargoyle head came close and closer.

* * * * *

Dennis sprang sideways along its length, lifted the pointed bar he held,
and dashed it down on what looked to him a vital spot--the unbelievably
slender trunk that held its spatulate abdomen to its armored chest.

There was a crack as the bar smashed down on the weak point. The monster
sank quivering to the ground. An instant later it was up, but now its
movements were dazed and sluggish as it dragged its half-paralyzed
abdomen after it, and fumbled and caught on the heavy bar that
transfixed it.

Jim caught the bar and tugged it. "My spear!" he cried. "Denny--help!"

Together the two wrenched to jerk the spear loose from the horny armor
of the dying ant. The rest of the pack were very near now.

"We'll have to let it go...." panted Denny.

But at that instant their desperate efforts tore it loose from the
convulsively jerking hulk. They darted into the tunnel mouth with the
racing horde scarcely twenty yards behind them.

Without hesitation the ants poured in after them. Jim and Dennis leaped
forward, in pitch darkness, now and then bumping heavily against a wall
as the tunnel turned, but having at least no trouble with their footing:
the floor was as smooth as though man-made.

Behind them they could hear the armored horde crashing along in the
blackness. The smashing noise of their progress was growing louder. The
two had run perhaps fifty yards in the darkness. Another fifty, and they
would be caught!

But now, just as their eyes--sharpened also by the danger they were
in--began to grow accustomed to the gloom, they saw ahead of them a
thing that might have stepped straight out of a horrible dream.

* * * * *

Six feet of vulnerable, unarmored body, amply protected by horny head
and shoulders and ten feet of awful, scissor-mandibles, faced them. The
creature was doing a strange sort of war dance, swaying its terrible
bulk back and forth rhythmically, while its feet remained immovable. An
instant it did this, then it charged at the two men. Simultaneously the
crashing of the fierce horde behind sounded with appalling nearness--the
noise and odor of the ants preventing the huge termite guard in front