the flier, he saw what appeared to be a red
woman being dragged across the plaza by a huge green warrior--one
of those fierce, cruel denizens of the dead sea-bottoms and deserted
cities of dying Mars.

Carthoris waited to see no more. Reaching for the control board,
he sent his craft racing plummet-like toward the ground.

The green man was hurrying his captive toward a huge thoat that
browsed upon the ochre vegetation of the once scarlet-gorgeous
plaza. At the same instant a dozen red warriors leaped from the
entrance of a nearby ersite palace, pursuing the abductor with
naked swords and shouts of rageful warning.

Once the woman turned her face upward toward the falling flier,
and in the single swift glance Carthoris saw that it was Thuvia of
Ptarth!

CHAPTER IV

A GREEN MAN'S CAPTIVE

When the light of day broke upon the little craft to whose deck
the Princess of Ptarth had been snatched from her father's garden,
Thuvia saw that the night had wrought a change in her abductors.

No longer did their trappings gleam with the metal of Dusar, but
instead there was emblazoned there the insignia of the Prince of
Helium.

The girl felt renewed hope, for she could not believe that in the
heart of Carthoris could lie intent to harm her.

She spoke to the warrior squatting before the control board.

"Last night you wore the trappings of a Dusarian," she said. "Now
your metal is that of Helium. What means it?"

The man looked at her with a grin.

"The Prince of Helium is no fool," he said.

Just then an officer emerged from the tiny cabin. He reprimanded
the warrior for conversing with the prisoner, nor would he himself
reply to any of her inquiries.

No harm was offered her during the journey, and so they came at last
to their destination with the girl no wiser as to her abductors or
their purpose than at first.

Here the flier settled slowly into the plaza of one of those mute
monuments of Mars' dead and forgotten past--the deserted cities
that fringe the sad ochre sea-bottoms where once rolled the mighty
floods upon whose bosoms moved the maritime commerce of the peoples
that are gone for ever.

Thuvia of Ptarth was no stranger to such places. During her
wanderings in search of the River Iss, that time she had set out
upon what, for countless ages, had been the last, long pilgrimage
of Martians, toward the Valley Dor, where lies the Lost Sea of
Korus, she had encountered several of these s