A vast, awed silence fell suddenly upon the room, a paralysis seized all forms and held them motionless. Amborg stayed his finger. All eyes sought the doorway. And there, covering the whole of the Cosmobar with the ugliest but most efficient looking piece of private ordnance Chip had seen in his life, stood a man. A tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black; a lean-jawed, hawk-eyed man with tumbling locks of silver and blazing eyes.
A whisper arose from men's lips. A whisper at once respectful and—fearful.
"It's Salvation! Salvation Smith!"
For a long, dramatic moment the ol man stood there in the doorway; then, satisfied that all motion had stopped, he stepped forward into the room. Chip knew, now, who—and what—he was. "Salvation" Smith, sin-driving missionary of the Wastelands, was a legendary, almost fabulous, figure of the Martian scene.
A devoutly religious man with the heart and soul of a pioneer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to the savage outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped. That this God was Him of the Old Testament, a God of wrath and vengeance, fire and flame, was evidenced by those methods Salvation sometimes employed to make his message acceptable to uncivilized breasts. In addition to being the most pious man on Mars, Salvation was also reputed to be the best shot!
Earth's softhanded ecclesiastics did not altogether approve of their wayward missionary's reputation, but had to concede that he, working unaided and alone, had done more to bring the light to Mars than the rest of their emissaries as a group.
Thus Salvation Smith, who stared now at the corpses on the floor and muttered beneath his breath a prayer so hot and violent as to be almost blasphemous.
There came a shrill bleat, and Xuerl, proprietor of the infamous Cosmobar, minced across the floor, grotesque in the rigid habiliments that lent him a humanoid shape.
"Sssalvation," he pleaded, "Thisss wasss none of my doing, sssir! I have kept the peace, as I promisssed—"