A roar from the crowd cut him short. It sounded as if all the men simultaneously had been jabbed with ice picks. "Look!" "No!" "They're stealing our Terra!" "Trixie, you can't do this to us--you can't!" "Ain't you got no heart at all?" Horseface goggled, and groaned. Trixie and Goreck had stepped aside, making room for those Martians who were coming out with the blast-tube and its dandelions. "Howling Gizzlesteins!" Horseface moaned. Then determinedly, "One side, Candy!" He launched into the mob, shouldering, prodding and elbowing room for himself until he was out in front. A Martian significantly poked a blaster in his ribs. "Trixie!" Horseface bawled, "what do you think you're doing?" She scowled more fiercely than ever. "You!" she thundered, pointing a muscular arm for emphasis. "You're a fine one, asking me that! I'm clearing out of here, that's what. I'm sick and tired of all you useless loafers preying on my good nature! Ain't it so, Goreck?" The Martian nodded, grinning. "For years and years," Trixie cried on, "you've been bleeding me dry! Trixie will you do this for me? Trixie will you do that? And I been doing it 'cause I felt sorry for you hopeless free-loaders, like as if maybe you was my own Mike. But now I'm through with you--and why? 'Cause you never treated me like no lady, that's why! You don't deserve a woman's kindness, Goreck says, and he's right!" The uproar was dying down, no doubt keeping the miners' spirits company. "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.