"Maybe I ain't no raving beauty," Trixie continued, "but that don't mean I ain't no lady, see?" In her next remark she used questionable words of interstellar origin—it is doubtful if they could have been said to have enriched any language. "Why, you frownzley glorfels, you even swear in front of me! So I'm clearing out. I've more than paid my debt to Mike, Lord rest him."
As the groans began, she gestured airily. "Put the flowers in the rocket, lads!"
"But Trixie!" Horseface called, pushing a step ahead. The Martian's gun dug a trifle deeper into his side.
"Eassy doess it," the Martian admonished in his whistling accent.
Horseface cried, "We're your own people, Trixie! You can't ditch us for Martians!"
"My people are the people treating me with respect!" she retorted, and Horseface's long visage fell several inches longer.
Goreck's Martians slid the dandelion-container into the rocket's baggage compartment and stood back, forming a lane down which Goreck assisted Trixie with exaggerated politeness. Surely she should have seen that his smirk was purely one of triumph!
But she didn't. She swung along on her wooden leg, thrilled to the core, beaming coyly at Goreck and actually blushing. He handed her into the rocket, let her arrange herself comfortably, then went to the other side of the flyer and swung aboard.
He slammed the door shut and reached for the controls. He treated the assemblage to one last sneer so poisonous that even a coral snake would have flinched from it. Trixie leaned across him to thumb her nose—after all, Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt had been dead for a century.
The Martian with his gun in Horseface's midriff stepped back and away. Horseface would have rushed after him, but Mouse Digby caught him from behind.