RETURN of a LEGEND By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN _Mars' fever they called it. Could the wild boy cheat the Red Planet's skeleton deserts and the dogged trailers from Port Laribee?_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Port Laribee with its score of Nisson huts, sealed against the lifeless atmosphere, the red dust and the cold, was a shabby piece of Earth dropped onto Mars. There, Dave Kort was the first wilderness tramp to be remembered. In warm seasons he'd plod into Port Laribee, burdened by a pack that only the two-fifths-of-terrestrial gravity put within the range of human muscles. He was a great, craggy old man, incredibly grimed and browned, his frostbites bandaged with dry Martian leaves tied on with their own fibre. His snag-toothed grin was bemused and secret through the scratched plastic of his air-hood. He'd trade carven stones, bits of ancient metal, or oddities of plant and animal life for chewing tobacco, chocolate, heavily lined clothes, mending supplies, and new parts for his battered portable air-compressor. He'd refuse a bath with disdain. And at last his rusty, monosyllabic speech would wax eloquent--comparatively. "So long, fellas," he'd say. "See yuh around." The equinoxial winds, heralding autumn, would moan thinly like the ghosts of the Martians wiped out in war those ages back. Dust would blur the horizon of that huge, arid triangle of sea-bottom called Syrtis Major--still the least sterile land on the Red Planet. At night the dry cold would dip to ninety below zero, Fahrenheit. The specialists of Port Laribee, who watched the spinning wind-gauges, thermometers and barometers, and devoted monastic years to learning about Mars, said that they'd never see Dave Kort again. But for three successive summers after he had quit his job as helper among them, he showed up, tattered, filthy, thinned to a scarecrow, but grinning. Young Joe Dayton, fresh from Earth and full of Mars-wonder, asked him a stock question that third summer. The answer was laconic. "Oh--I know the country. I get along." But at the fourth winter's end, Dave Kort did not return. No one ever saw him again, nor found among the ruins and the quiet pastel hues of Mars the dried thing that had been Kort. Somewhere drifting dust had buried it. No one had quite understood him in life. If any affection had been aimed at him, it was for a story, not a man. The man died but the story thrived. Dave Kort had lived off this wilderness, alone and with sketchy artificial aids, for three Martian years--almost six by Earth reckoning. It was quite a feat. For one thing, the open air of Mars has a pressure of only one-ninth of the terrestrial, and above ground it contains but a trace of oxygen.