As he began to topple from his saddle I reached out and tried to take his weight to stop him from falling. With my own wounded arm it was difficult, but I managed to hold him there while I inspected the injury I had inflicted.

Turned slightly by the padded armor, the sword had gone in just below the heart.

I managed somehow to dismount, still holding him, and lifted him down and laid him out on the moss.

He spoke to me then. He seemed very puzzled. "What—?" he said in his thick, brutish accent. "I am in a hurry. There, I have stopped the bleeding. It doesn't look fatal. Your own folk must look after you."

"You—you do not kill me?" "It is not my way to kill if I do not have to!" "But I have failed—the warriors of the Argzoon will torture me to death for that. Slay me, my vanquisher!"

"It is not my way," I insisted. "Then ..." He struggled up, reaching towards a knife in his belt. I forced the huge hand away and he sank back, exhausted. "I will help you to that undergrowth." I pointed to some thick shrubbery nearby. "You can hide there and they will not find you."

I realized I was showing him more mercy than he expected, even from the folk of Varnal. And in helping him I was slowing myself up. Yet a man is a man, I thought—he cannot do what is contrary to his own feelings and principles. If he has a code of honor he must adhere to it. The moment he forgets that code, then all is lost, for even though he forgets on one occasion, it is the beginning of the end. Bit by bit the code will be qualified, any break with it justified, until the man is no longer a man, in truth, at all.

That is why I helped the odd being I had vanquished. I could do nothing less. As I had told him—it was my way. Such emotions may sound oldfashioned, even prudish, in this modern age where values are changing—many think for the worse—or things are losing their values altogether. But though I realize I may sound stiff arid peculiar to many of my contemporaries, I am afraid that then, in that gentle valley on ancient Mars, just as now, on Earth, I had a set of principles—call it what you will—that I knew I must abide by.

As soon as I had hauled the creature to cover, I sent his dahara galloping away and mounted my own.

Within a few minutes I had reached the gates of the city and was riding desperately through them, shouting my warning.

"Attack! Attack! It is the hordes of Argzoon!"

The men looked startled but evidently they, too, recognized the type of sword I was carrying. The gates began to close behind me.