“It is a good thing your wall is full of cracks,” said a deep voice, “or otherwise I might have stumbled into trouble. That is a mean-looking gun I saw before you blew out your lamp.”

The voice was familiar, but I could not definitely place it. “Who are you?” I demanded.

“Light your lamp and I’ll come in,” replied my nocturnal visitor. “If you’re nervous, you can keep your gun on the doorway, but please don’t squeeze the trigger until you have had a chance to recognize me.”

“Damn!” I exclaimed under my breath, as I started to relight the lamp.

“Chimney still hot?” inquired the deep voice from the outer room.

“Plenty hot,” I replied, as I succeeded at last in igniting the wick and replacing the hot chimney. “Come in.”

I remained seated on the edge of the bunk, but I kept the doorway covered with my gun. I heard again the clanking of metal upon metal, and then a man stepped into the light of my feeble lamp and halted in the doorway. He was a tall man apparently between twenty-five and thirty with grey eyes and black hair. He was naked but for leather trappings that supported weapons of unearthly design—a short-sword, a long-sword, a dagger, and a pistol; but my eyes did not need to inventory all these details before I recognized him. The instant that I saw him, I tossed my gun aside and sprang to my feet.

“John Carter!” I exclaimed.

“None other,” he replied, with one of his rare smiles.

We grasped hands. “You haven’t changed much,” he said.

“Nor you at all,” I replied.

He sighed and then smiled again. “God alone knows how old I am. I can recall no childhood, nor have I ever looked other than I look tonight; but come,” he added, “you mustn’t stand here in your bare feet. Hop back into bed again. These Arizona nights are none too warm.”

He drew up a chair and sat down. “What were you reading?” he asked, as he picked up the magazine that had fallen to the floor and glanced at the illustration. “It looks like a lurid tale.”

“A pretty little bedtime story of assassination and kidnaping,” I explained.

“Haven’t you enough of that on earth without reading about it for entertainment?” he inquired. “We have on Mars.”

“It is an expression of the normal morbid interest in the horrifying,” I said. “There is really no justification, but the fact remains that I enjoy such tales. However, I have lost my interest now. I want to hear about you and Dejah Thoris and Carthoris, and what brought you here. It has been years since you have been back. I had given up all hope of ever seeing you again.”

He shook his head, a little sadly I thought. “It is a long story, a story of love and loyalty, of hate and crime, a story of dripping swords, of strange places and strange people upon a stranger world. The living of it might have driven a weaker man to madness. To have one you love taken from you and not to know her fate!”

I did not have to ask whom he meant. It could be none other than the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, and consort of John Carter, Warlord of Mars—the woman for whose deathless beauty a million swords had been kept red with blood on the dying planet for many a long year.

For a long time John Carter sat in silence staring at the floor. I knew that his thoughts were forty-three million miles away, and I was loath to interrupt them.

At last he spoke. “Human nature is alike everywhere,” he said. He flicked the edge of the magazine lying on my bunk. “We think that we want to forget the tragedies of life, but we do not.