The Red Dust

r

. Life has been greatly altered, and tiny Man is now in the process of becoming acclimated to the change. We again meet our hero Burl, but this time a far greater danger menaces the hum

from the steaming earth. Haze that hung always among the mushroom forests and above the fungus hill

. The insects of the night-the great moths whose wings spread far and wide in the dimness, and the huge fireflies, four feet i

nt-hill towered a hundred feet in the air. Upon its gr

ble opening, then a dark chasm appeared, an

ten inches long, this ant, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. A second and third warrior came from the inside of the ant-hill

ll-smelling workers poured out of the opening and dispersed upon their business. The clickings of their limbs and an occasional whining stridulation made an incessant sound as they scattered over the

t supervision or coercion. Deep in the recesses of the pyramid galleries were hollow

he queen-ant reposed, waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal s

aws of the city than they. From the time of waking to the time of rest, she was ordained to be the queen-mother in the strictest and most literal sense of the word, for at intervals to be measure

n it took the places of its nurses until its soft skin had hardened into the horny armor of the workers and soldiers, and then it joined the throng of workers that poured out from the city at dawn to forage for food, to bring back its finds and to share with the warriors and the nurses, the drone males and the young queens,

il, for purposes they do not understand, and to an end of which they cannot dream. At intervals all over the world of Burl's time these ant-cities rose above the surrounding ground, some small and barely begun, and others ancient colonies which were truly the conti

ts surface. The bees were four feet and more in length. And slender-waisted wasps darted here and there, preying upon the

waiting for some luckless giant insect to be entangled in the gummy traps. And butterflies fluttered over the

until the shining quartz was hidden almost completely from view, but the whole glistened like tinted crystal from the dank wetnes

g of rock looked innocent and still,

e. Presently the worm would be completely paralyzed, and would be carried to the burrow of the wasp, where an egg would be laid upon it, from which a ti

ll tinier mite, the little, many-legged larva of the oil-beetle, known as the bee-louse. The almost infinit

a combat of midgets which was soon over. When the spider had grown and was feared as a huge, black-

red the rock, making it a riot of tints and shades. But hanging from the rooflike projection of the stone there was a strange, drab-white object. It was in the shape of half a globe, perhaps

pon yards, anchoring the habitation firmly, but the most striking of the things about the house-still and quiet and innocent, like

eature. Here a snail-shell, two feet in diameter, hanging at the end of an inch-thick cable

. The shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws of a cricket-the pitiful shreds of

ntents, corselets of horny armor forever to be unused by any creature, a wing of this insect, the head of that. And dangling by the longest cord

ion of softest down filled all the bulging bottom of the hemisphere. A canopy of similarly luxuriou

the darkness, but the loathsome, attenuated legs were tucked und

emotions or perplexities, in comfortable, placid, machineli

the silken castle. When hunger came again, a nocturnal foray, a creature would be pounced upon and slain, brought bodily to the nest, and feasted upon,

he mushroom forest that led to the outcropping of rock under which the clotho sp

antenn? of a night-flying moth he had bound to his forehead. In his hand was a horny, chitinous spear

. Hitherto it had been but a leaderless, formless group of people, creeping to the same hiding-place at

s they envied and admired. They hung upon his words as he struggled to tell them of his adventures, and slowly and dimly they began to look to him for leadership. He was wonde

d formed a funeral pyre for the horde of army ants, and for uncounted thousands of flying creatures. He had caught a leaping tarantula upon the point of his spear, and had escape

lcomed by Saya-Saya of the swift feet and slender limbs

e gruesome decorations had killed and eaten one of the men of the tribe. Burl and the spider's victim had been together when the spider appeared, and the f

gaped wide, and its jaws clashed horribly as it forme

e spider dozed. Two or three of them bore spears like Burl himself, but they bore them awkwardly and timorously. Burl himself was possessed by a stra

ke his newly discovered inner self, that had furnished him with such marvelous plans. Quite accidental

some forty feet from the ground, on the undersurface of a shelf of rock. There was sheer open space beneath it, but it was

and they did so, their knees knocking together from their fright. At the slightest alarm

he precipitous edge. He drew near the point where the rock fell away. A long, tentacle-like silk

as one of the anchoring cables that held the spider's castle secure. He looked and found others, six or seven

. They obeyed him solely because they were afraid, and he spoke in an authoritative tone,

he did so, but something within him drove him on. Then, while beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead-induced by nothing less

eavy stone to each of the cables he saw, and as a matter of fact, there was but one of them he failed to n

url did not attempt to double the weights on the cables. He took his followers aside and expla

ence of the day. The boulders clashed and clattered down the rocky side of the precipice, tearing-perhaps "peeling"-the cables from their adhesion to the stone

s it fell forty feet and more, imprisoned in its heavily weighted home. His eyes sparkled with tr

tle from a fall, though the nest had been torn from its anchorage, and now dangled

d confused by the light of day, but still venomous and still deadly. It found but a si

legs grasped the slender thread eagerly while i

on fangs unsheathed and its mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy hair upon its body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity, and

ruck one of the heavy boulders. Exerting every ounce of his strength, he pushed it over the cliff just where the cable appeared

clatter of the boulder striking the earth below. Somehow, the soun

the forest, and had seen the sheen of shining armor just before him. He cried out and waited for death, but only a delicat

if the spider had hauled itself over the rocky edge and darted toward him, slavering its thick spittle and uttering sounds of mad fury, Burl would not even have scre

ble, still freighted with its gruesome trophies, but on the ground below a c

us jaw tried to clamp upon something-and there was no other jaw to meet it. An evil-smelling, sticky li

d out, and three or four other foot-long ants hastened up to wait patiently just outside the spider's reach until its struggles sh

nths before. Glory was his. All the tribesmen had seen the spider living. Now he would show them the spider dead. He stopped his dance of triump

e, no one had attempted to give orders before, or to enforce their execution, but Burl had reached

rowing more and more angry with the other men for having deserted him. He would reproach them, would proba

reme back of his mind-he reasoned that not only did a larger number of men present at a scene of peril increase the chances of coping

ious, but none the less effective. He grew quite furious with th

k of the insect, engaged in scraping shreds of flesh from the corselet of one of the smaller beetles slain the previous night. The ant dashed at Burl like an infur

cult to penetrate, and could be blocked on occasion with stones and toadstool pulp. Burl made his way toward

weeping beneath an over-shadowing toadstool. She was not yet the mate of Burl, but the time would

upon, then the next and the next. There was a cry of astonishment, and the

ing that the spider was dead, that its legs, each one the length of a man, w

of pink-skinned people to the spot below the cliff where the spid

purple hills, and sat down in splendor upon a crumbling toadstool, to feast upon the glances of admiration and awe that were sent toward him. Only Saya

had been strange red mushrooms growing slowly here and there all over the earth, they knew. The tribefolk had speculated

And to-day, while Burl luxuriated in his position of feared and admired great man of his tribe, at a spot a long distance away, upon a hill-top, one of the red mushrooms burst. The spores in

entered the tinted atmosphere when her movements became awkward and convulsive, effortful and excited. She trem

bdomens. This bee had breathed in some of the red mushroom's spores. She thrashed about

d everywhere the red fringe grew, such explosions were taking place, one by one, and wherever the r