they are such terrible antagonists in combat.” 

 I wondered why the black man took such pains to discourse thus at length to enemies upon the genesis of life Barsoomian. It seemed a strangely inopportune moment for a proud member of a proud race to unbend in casual conversation with a captor. Especially in view of the fact that the black still lay securely bound upon the deck. 

 It was the faintest straying of his eye beyond me for the barest fraction of a second that explained his motive for thus dragging out my interest in his truly absorbing story. 

 He lay a little forward of where I stood at the levers, and thus he faced the stern of the vessel as he addressed me. It was at the end of his description of the plant men that I caught his eye fixed momentarily upon something behind me. 

 Nor could I be mistaken in the swift gleam of triumph that brightened those dark orbs for an instant. 

 Some time before I had reduced our speed, for we had left the Valley Dor many miles astern, and I felt comparatively safe. 

 I turned an apprehensive glance behind me, and the sight that I saw froze the new-born hope of freedom that had been springing up within me. 

 A great battleship, forging silent and unlighted through the dark night, loomed close astern. 

 

CHAPTER VIII THE DEPTHS OF OMEAN

 Now I realized why the black pirate had kept me engrossed with his strange tale. For miles he had sensed the approach of succour, and but for that single tell-tale glance the battleship would have been directly above us in another moment, and the boarding party which was doubtless even now swinging in their harness from the ship’s keel, would have swarmed our deck, placing my rising hope of escape in sudden and total eclipse. 

 I was too old a hand in aerial warfare to be at a loss now for the right manoeuvre. Simultaneously I reversed the engines and dropped the little vessel a sheer hundred feet. 

 Above my head I could see the dangling forms of the boarding party as the battleship raced over us. Then I rose at a sharp angle, throwing my speed lever to its last notch. 

 Like a bolt from a crossbow my splendid craft shot its steel prow straight at the whirring 

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