A Princess of Mars - Page 17/143

My effort was crowned with a success which appalled me no less than it

seemed to surprise the Martian warriors, for it carried me fully thirty

feet into the air and landed me a hundred feet from my pursuers and on

the opposite side of the enclosure.

I alighted upon the soft moss easily and without mishap, and turning

saw my enemies lined up along the further wall. Some were surveying me

with expressions which I afterward discovered marked extreme

astonishment, and the others were evidently satisfying themselves that

I had not molested their young.

They were conversing together in low tones, and gesticulating and

pointing toward me. Their discovery that I had not harmed the little

Martians, and that I was unarmed, must have caused them to look upon me

with less ferocity; but, as I was to learn later, the thing which

weighed most in my favor was my exhibition of hurdling.

While the Martians are immense, their bones are very large and they are

muscled only in proportion to the gravitation which they must overcome.

The result is that they are infinitely less agile and less powerful, in

proportion to their weight, than an Earth man, and I doubt that were

one of them suddenly to be transported to Earth he could lift his own

weight from the ground; in fact, I am convinced that he could not do so.

My feat then was as marvelous upon Mars as it would have been upon

Earth, and from desiring to annihilate me they suddenly looked upon me

as a wonderful discovery to be captured and exhibited among their

fellows.

The respite my unexpected agility had given me permitted me to

formulate plans for the immediate future and to note more closely the

appearance of the warriors, for I could not disassociate these people

in my mind from those other warriors who, only the day before, had been

pursuing me.

I noted that each was armed with several other weapons in addition to

the huge spear which I have described. The weapon which caused me to

decide against an attempt at escape by flight was what was evidently a

rifle of some description, and which I felt, for some reason, they were

peculiarly efficient in handling.

These rifles were of a white metal stocked with wood, which I learned

later was a very light and intensely hard growth much prized on Mars,

and entirely unknown to us denizens of Earth. The metal of the barrel

is an alloy composed principally of aluminum and steel which they have

learned to temper to a hardness far exceeding that of the steel with

which we are familiar. The weight of these rifles is comparatively

little, and with the small caliber, explosive, radium projectiles which

they use, and the great length of the barrel, they are deadly in the

extreme and at ranges which would be unthinkable on Earth. The

theoretic effective radius of this rifle is three hundred miles, but

the best they can do in actual service when equipped with their

wireless finders and sighters is but a trifle over two hundred miles.