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Three of them had the trim shipshape look of members of the Formian aristocracy, and the fourth was very old—as indicated by the quantity of duel numbers which he bore—and walked with difficulty.

Side by side the ants approached the foot of the throne and made obeisance to the king, a pleasing sight indeed to those who had long been accustomed to see Cupia bow before Formis! Then one of their delegation sent up a scroll of parchment by a page. Kew’s brow darkened as he read it to himself.

Finally Kew spoke.

“One of your requests is impossible,” he thundered. “Prince Yuri is a traitor. If we had been sure he were still alive, his surrender to us would have been one of the conditions of the treaty. Now that you have revealed his whereabout, know you that Cupia will consider no propositions from Formis until Yuri is in our hands. I have spoken.”

Then suddenly the eyes of the whole multitude shifted from their ruler to the aged ant man. To the horror of all, the entire upper half of his body was opening as if on a hinge! And in the cavity thus exposed, there lay a Cupian! The aged ant man had not been an ant man at all, but merely a clever piece of mechanism, like the wooden horse at Troy.