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Rapidly Turan exalance about the chamber revealed a wooden table and a bench Set in the walls were several heavy rings to which rusty chains were attached-all too significant of the purpose to which the room was dedicated In the dirt floor near the ere two or three holes reseiant Martian rat He had observed thishiht the table and the bench Placing the latter against the wall he drew the table in front of hiripped in readiness before hiht before they took hi for he knew not what No sound penetrated to his subterranean dungeon He slowly revolved in his ate; the lighted doorway-the only one he had seen thus open and lighted along the avenue he had followed; the advance of the warriors at precisely the moment that he could find no other avenue of escape or concealment; the corridors and charound prison leaving no other path for him to pursue

"By my first ancestor!" he swore; "but it was simple and I a simpleton They trickedthemselves to a scratch; but for what purpose?"

He wished that he hts turned to the girl waiting there on the hill beyond the city for hie peoples of Barsoom No, he would never come, now He had disobeyed her He smiled at the sweet recollection of those words of command that had fallen from her dear lips He had disobeyed her and now he had lost the reward

But what of her? What noould be her fate-starving before a hostile city with only an inhuht-obtruded itself upon hihts she had witnessed in the burrows of the kaldanes and he knew that they ate hu Should he eat his rykor he would be helpless; but-there was sustenance there for them both, for the rykor and the kaldane Turan cursed himself for a fool Why had he left her? Far better to have remained and died with her, ready always to protect her, than to have left her at the mercy of the hideous Bantoomian