Edgar Rice Burroughs

While thus profitably employed I heard the east door of the living-room open and someone enter. I thought it was Shea returning to speak with me on some matter of tomorrow's work; but when I raised my eyes to the doorway that connects the two rooms I saw framed there the figure of a bronzed giant, his otherwise naked body trapped with a jewel-encrusted harness from which there hung at one side an ornate short-sword and at the other a pistol of strange pattern. The black hair, the steel-gray eyes, brave and smiling, the noble features-I recognized them at once, and leaping to my feet I advanced with outstretched hand. "John Carter " I cried. "You?" "None other, my son," he replied, taking my hand in one of his and placing the other upon my shoulder. "And what are you doing here?" I asked. "It has been long years since you revisited Earth, and never before in the trappings of Mars. Lord but it is good to see you-and not a day older in appearance than when you trotted me on your knee in my babyhood. How do you explain it, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, or do you try to explain it?" "Why attempt to explain the inexplicable?" he replied.

He could see no eyes, yet he knew that somewhere from out of that noiseless mass stealthy eyes were fixed upon him. This was the fourth time that the think had crept from out the wood as darkness was settling - the fourth time during those three horrible weeks since he had been cast upon that lonely shore that he had watched, terror-stricken, while night engulfed the shadowy form that lurked at the forest's edge. It had never attacked him, but to his distorted imagination it seemed to slink closer and closer as night fell - waiting, always waiting for the moment that it might find him unprepared. Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones was not overly courageous. He had been reared among surroundings of culture plus and ultra-intellectuality in the exclusive Back Bay home of his ancestors. He had been taught to look with contempt upon all that savored of muscular superiority - such things were gross, brutal, primitive. It had been a giant intellect only that he had craved - he and a fond mother - and their wishes had been fulfilled. At twenty-one Waldo was an animated encyclopedia - and about as muscular as a real one.