Tardos Mors had finished his story two nights before, and today we were upon the trail.

After stopping for supplies at my cabin at the headwaters of the Colorado, the three of us rode silently for long hours across the scorched Arizona desert, pausing often to water our horses and slack our own thirst beneath the relentless rays of the sun. I'd often considered making this journey, but John Carter's original manuscript hadn’t given the precise location of the cave we now sought.

The Jeddak, I could see, was wearying under the weight of Earth's oppressive gravity. But he uttered no word of discomfort.

Tardos Mors looked oddly at home in the the faded blue jeans, chaps and wide-brimmed hat of the trail. It unnerved me to think that this man, who looked younger than my eldest son, had been born in the time of my great-great grandfather's father.

I contemplated the set of his jaw as he maneuvered El Caballo, as he insisted upon calling his horse, closer to John Carter's mount. Neither used the reigns.

"You were the strange white soldier, the Pindah-Lickoyee, who saved Shis-Inday that day in these very hills," the Jeddak said quietly.

"I was," the Warlord replied, staring straight ahead. "It was long ago."

The Jeddak pondered that for several minutes.

"I've often thought it must be so," he said finally. "I've seen that grim smile play about your lips during battle in just the manner my princess always described it. Only John Carter would be so bold as to strike out at a score of armed beasts in the service of an unknown girl from a faraway land."

"You did no less for the girl," John Carter reminded the Jeddak, who nodded acknowledgement of the simple tribute.

"Thank you for saving my princess, my son, so that she could one day find her way to me," Tardos Mors said.

My uncle made no reply to that, but I guessed his thoughts. He knew, as did Tardos Mors, that had he not saved the Apache princess from the ravages of Coronado's soldiers, his own incomparable Dejah Thoris would never have been born.

Gad! Strange forces direct the fate of men.

Toward dusk, John Carter led us to a trail that curved upward around the face of a high cliff that rose for several hundred feet to our right. On the left was an equal and nearly perpendicular drop to the bottom of a ravine. We followed it for a hundred yards, and then the trail turned sharply right, into the mouth of a large cave.

A bleached skeleton lay near the entrance. "Powell," said John Carter. He looked at Tardos Mors. "A comrade of mine who was killed by Apaches."

"The Men of the Woods were great warriors," said the Jeddak. "They defended their homeland with honor. I have watched them over the years, in the Royal Observatory, and am proud that my princess came from such. It saddens me to think about what has befallen them."

John Carter scooped a shallow grave and, with the stern reverence of a fighting man, laid to rest all that remained of Captain James K. Powell of Richmond.

Stooping, we entered the cave. At the back was the scene described by my uncle at the end of his first manuscript: the mummified remains of a little old woman. At the feet of one of the skeletons on the back wall sat the metal helmet of a conquistador. The woman leaned over a small copper pot filled with greenish powder.

A yellow lizard darted from behind the pot and scampered into a crevice.

Slowly, Tardos Mors approached. Kneeling, he picked up a leather pouch that lay in the lap of the dead woman. It nearly crumbled at his touch.

"Strong medicine," the Jeddak said in a small voice, gently removing the contents of the pouch and laying them softly in the sand. An owl's feather. Green powder. A strip of coyote's fur. "But not strong enough."

The lizard poked its head from behind a rock, then darted to Tardos Mors’ side. It clambered to his knee, and up the Jeddak’s arm.

Barsoom's most powerful ruler turned his back. He walked quietly from the cave, cradling the tiny creature in one cupped hand, and the tokens from Shis-Inday’s medicine pouch in the other.

On the ledge outside, Tardos Mors stared into darkness. I followed his gaze, and saw red Mars blazing there in all its glory.

"O, my princess, my life — my Shis-Inday,” the Jeddak whispered. “The medicine was not strong enough to bring you home to me."

I looked back to where Barsoom hung in the still Arizona sky. The Weeping Lover, as the Human Beings called the planet, seemed very far away.

When my gaze returned to the little ledge on that lonely cliff, John Carter and Tardos Mors were gone.