Thuvia screamed and sprang to aid her
fellow-prisoner, and at the same instant I, too, went mad, and
tearing at the bars that spanned my window I ripped them from their
sockets as they had been but copper wire.
Hurling myself through the aperture I reached the garden, but a
hundred feet from where the black was choking the life from my Dejah
Thoris, and with a single great bound I was upon him. I spoke no
word as I tore his defiling fingers from that beautiful throat,
nor did I utter a sound as I hurled him twenty feet from me.
Foaming with rage, Thurid regained his feet and charged me like a
mad bull.
"Yellow man," he shrieked, "you knew not upon whom you had laid
your vile hands, but ere I am done with you, you will know well
what it means to offend the person of a First Born."
Then he was upon me, reaching for my throat, and precisely as I had
done that day in the courtyard of the Temple of Issus I did here
in the garden of the palace of Salensus Oll. I ducked beneath his
outstretched arms, and as he lunged past me I planted a terrific
right upon the side of his jaw.
Just as he had done upon that other occasion he did now. Like a
top he spun round, his knees gave beneath him, and he crumpled to
the ground at my feet. Then I heard a voice behind me.
It was the deep voice of authority that marks the ruler of men,
and when I turned to face the resplendent figure of a giant yellow
man I did not need to ask to know that it was Salensus Oll.
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