While he was doing this Toplinsky came down near the crater opening on the back of a crawling cricket, discovered the army camped beneath him, and dropped two large bombs on the Selinites.
“That’s just a reminder,” the giant shouted through a huge megaphone, “that I am getting busy. In two weeks—ah, ha! perhaps in two weeks—I shall come again.” The Selinites shot up at him and his crickets with their chloroform guns, and were rewarded by a loud laugh, and then silence.
A terrifying, baffling gloom settled down on the Selinites. They had won a great victory, they had chased the crickets out of their country and had captured the Land of Taunan, and yet they realized that a man who could drop bombs out of the sky in the end would defeat them. Epworth, who was also puzzled deeply over a way to get into the crater, heard this underground rumbling, and felt his own spirits dampen. He and his sister, Joan, and Billy, of all the people in the Lunar world, knew just how dangerous Toplinsky was.
It was during a period of his deepest gloom that the leader of the Sons of the Great Selina came out of his mountain retreat and called on him.
“You wish to go up into the crater?” the councilman inquired with a sly smile.
Epworth did not like the smile. There seemed to be hidden treachery behind the smirk. But he was in a desperate hurry. He felt sure that if given time he could finally build an airship operated by electricity with a wire line attached to a power plant constructed beneath the crater to run an electric motor on the plane but this could only carry a limited number of soldiers, and what he had to do must be done at once. “I certainly do,” he answered abruptly, putting aside his suspicions.
“I am not boasting of courage,” the young American said quietly.
“The path leads through a nest of ramphs—many thousands of the most vicious reptiles known.”
Epworth shuddered. The fights he had had with this monstrous Thing on the bridge, and inside of the crater were still fresh in his mind.
The councilman of the Great Selina patted him on the shoulder.
“Certainly you have courage. It is a pity you are not a Son of the Great Selina. Perhaps if you clean out the dangers of this world we may make you an honorary member. You remember the dark chasm beneath the bridge that is near the retreat of our order?”