"Some of my people who were permitted to look through the telescopes of the Martians, saw you also, and recognized you as members of their own race. There were several thousand of us all together, and we were kept by the Martians to serve them as slaves, and particularly to delight their ears with music, for our people have always been especially skillful in the playing of musical instruments, and in songs, and while the Martians have but little musical skill themselves, they are exceedingly fond of these things.
"Although Mars had completed not less than five thousand circuits about the sun since our ancestors were brought as prisoners to its surface, yet the memory of our distant home had never perished from the hearts of our race, and when we recognized you, as we believed, our own brothers, come to rescue us from long imprisonment, there was great rejoicing. The news spread from mouth to mouth, wherever we were in houses and families of our masters. We seemed to be powerless to aid you or to communicate with you in any manner. Yet our hearts went out to you, as in your ships you hung above the planet, and preparations were secretly made by all the members of our race for your reception when, as we believed, would occur, you should effect a landing upon the planet and destroy our enemies.
"But in some manner the fact that we had recognized you, and were preparing to welcome you, came to the ears of the Martians."
At this point the girl suddenly covered her eyes with her hands, shuddering and falling back in her seat.
"Oh, you do not know them as I do!" at length she exclaimed. "The monsters! Their vengeance was too terrible! Instantly the order went forth that we should all be butchered, and that awful command was executed!"
"How, then, did you escape?" asked the Heidelberg professor.
Aina seemed unable to speak for a while. Finally mastering her emotion, she replied:
"One of the chief officers of the Martians wished me to remain alive. He, with his aides, carried me to one of the military depots of supplies, where I was found and rescued," and as she said this she turned toward Colonel Smith with a smile that reflected on his ruddy face and made it glow like a Chinese lantern.
"By God!" muttered Colonel Smith, "that was the fellow we blew into nothing! Blast him, he got off too easy!"
The remainder of Aina's story may be briefly told.