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As the slimy brown stream, directed by the agitated termite-ruler, squirted toward him, he leaped alertly aside leaped again as the head swung around and saw with savage hope that the monster had exhausted its discharge! The two soldiers from the doorway closed in on him now.
"If I could get loose for just one minute," Jim took the opportunity to whisper to Denny, "and get at my spear I think there would be one termite-ruler less in the world!" Denny nodded. He had been thinking along the same lines as Jim: that bloated, swollen brain seemed a very vulnerable thing.
One of the three flicked drops of the reddish stuff onto the inert slug, till it was well sprinkled. Then they dragged the carcass back to the termite-ruler. They got it there barely in time. In a matter of seconds after they had dropped it before the monarch, the slug had collapsed into a half-liquid puddle of decomposed protoplasm on the floor.
They turned together toward the corner where the termite-ruler was cowering behind the guards that surrounded it. Intellect to a degree phenomenal for an insect, this thing might have; but of the blind fierce courage possessed by its subjects, it assuredly had none!
And now, just as the nearest of the soldiers reached out for them, the termite-ruler lay helpless on the backs of its living crutches, with its attenuated body quivering convulsively, and its balloonlike, fragile head cleft almost in two halves.
They made, naturally, no impression on the bar. The guard retired to its post at the doorway. The termite-ruler seemed to think this over, for a moment. Then at some telepathic order, its two bearers picked up the spear and carried it, and their physically helpless ruler, over to one of the living cisterns one filled with a dark red liquid.
But now, with the admittance of the soldier band that had pressed them in here, the entrance was guarded again by one of the giants permanently stationed there. "What had we better do?" he breathed to Denny. Dennis stared helplessly around. He had noticed that the termites in here were acting differently from the others they had encountered since leaving the lair of the termite-ruler.
By now the termite-ruler seemed to have recovered fully from its gargantuan meal. And while, of course, there was no expression of any kind to be read in the stony, dull eyes, its actions seemed once more to indicate curiosity about these queer, two-legged bugs that wandered in here where they had no business to be. The team of workers bore it close again, lowered the great head close to Denny.
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