All Story Magazine, December 1913 — page 149: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

WARLORD skilled and fearless than the average among their race. While it lasted it was indeed as joyous a conflict as I had ever expe- rienced. ‘Twice at least | saved my breast from the mortal thrust of piercing steel only by the wondrous agility with which my earthly muscles endow me under the conditions of lesser gravity and air pressure upon Mars. Yet even so I came near to tasting death that day in the gloomy corridor beneath Mars’s southern pole, for Lakor played a trick upon me that in all my experience of fighting upon two planets I had never before witnessed the like of. The other thern was engaging me at the time, and I was forcing him back —touching him here and there with my point until he was bleeding from a dozen wounds, yet not being able to penetrate his marvelous guard to reach a vulnerable spot for the brief instant that would have been sufficient to send him to his ancestors. It was then that Lakor quickly un- slung a belt from his harness, and as I stepped back to parry a wicked thrust ‘he lashed one end of it about my left ankle so that it wound there for an instant, while he jerked suddenly upon the other end, throwing me heavily upon my back. Then, like leaping panthers, they were upon me; but they had reckoned without Woola, and before ever a blade touched me a roaring embodiment of a thousand demons hurtled above my prostrate form and my loyal Martian calot was upon them. Imagine, if you can, a huge grizzly with ten legs armed with mighty talons and an enormous froglike mouth split- ting his head form ear. to ear, ex- posing three rows of long, white tusks. Then endow this creature of your im- agination with the agility and ferocity of a half-starved Bengal tiger and the strength of a span of bulls, and you will have some faint conception of Woola in action. OF MARS. 859 Before I could call him off he had crushed Lakor into a jelly with a sin- gle blow of one mighty paw, and had literally torn the other thern to rib- bons; yet when I spoke to him sharply he cowed sheepishly as though he had done a thing to deserve censure and chastisement. Never had I had the heart to punish Woola during the long years that had passed since that first day upon Mars when the green jed of the Tharks had placed him on guard oyer me, and I had won his love and loyalty from the cruel and loveless masters of his for- mer life, yet I believe that he would have submitted to any cruelty that I might have inflicted upon him, so won- drous was his affection for me. The diadem in the center of the circlet of gold upon the brow of Lakor proclaimed him a Holy Thern, while his companion, not thus adorned, was a lesser thern, though from his harness I gleaned that he had reached the Ninth Cycle, which is but one below that of the Holy Therns. As I stood for a moment looking at the gruesome havoc Woola_ had wrought there recurred to me _ the memory of that other occasion upon which I had masqueraded in the wig, diadem, and harness of Sator Throg, the Holy Thern whom Thuvia of Ptarth had slain, and now it occurred to me that it might prove of worth to utilize Lakor’s trappings for the same purpose. A moment later I had torn his yellow wig from his bald pate and transferred it and the circlet, as well as all his harness, to my own person. Woola did not approve of the meta- morphosis. He sniffed at me and growled ominously, but when I spoke _ to him and patted his huge head he at length becaine reconciled to the change, and at my command trotted off along the corridor in the direction we had been going when our progress had been interrupted by the therns. We moved cautiously now, warned by the fragment of conversation I had comicloooks.com