Indeed, but I had been a fool.
"And it was you," she cried, "who spoke to me from the tower! How
could I dream that my beloved Virginian lay behind that fierce
beard and that yellow skin?"
She had been wont to call me her Virginian as a term of endearment,
for she knew that I loved the sound of that beautiful name, made a
thousand times more beautiful and hallowed by her dear lips, and as
I heard it again after all those long years my eyes became dimmed
with tears and my voice choked with emotion.
But an instant did I crush that dear form to me ere Salensus Oll,
trembling with rage and jealousy, shouldered his way to us.
"Seize the man," he cried to his warriors, and a hundred ruthless
hands tore us apart.
Well it was for the nobles of the court of Okar that John Carter
had been disarmed. As it was, a dozen of them felt the weight of
my clenched fists, and I had fought my way half up the steps before
the throne to which Salensus Oll had carried Dejah Thoris ere ever
they could stop me.
Then I went down, fighting, beneath a half-hundred warriors; but
before they had battered me into unconsciousness I heard that from
the lips of Dejah Thoris that made all my suffering well worth
while.
Standing there beside the great tyrant, who clutched her by the
arm, she pointed to where I fought alone against such awful odds.
"Think you, Salensus Oll, that the wife of such as he is," she
cried, "would ever dishonor his memory, were he a thousand times
dead, by mating with a lesser mortal? Lives there upon any world
such another as John Carter, Prince of Helium? Lives there another
man who could fight his way back and forth across a warlike planet,
facing savage beasts and hordes of savage men, for the love of a
woman?
"I, Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, am his.
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