Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar

CHAPTER I.
Belgian and Arab

Lieutenant Albert Werper had only the prestige of the name he had dishonored to
thank for his narrow escape from being cashiered. At first he had been humbly
thankful, too, that they had sent him to this Godforsaken Congo post instead of
court-martialing him, as he had so justly deserved; but now six months of the
monotony, the frightful isolation and the loneliness had wrought a change. The
young man brooded continually over his fate. His days were filled with morbid
self-pity, which eventually engendered in his weak and vacillating mind a
hatred for those who had sent him here—for the very men he had at first
inwardly thanked for saving him from the ignominy of degradation.

He regretted the gay life of Brussels as he never had regretted the sins which
had snatched him from that gayest of capitals, and as the days passed he came
to center his resentment upon the representative in Congo land of the authority
which had exiled him—his captain and immediate superior.

This officer was a cold, taciturn man, inspiring little love in those directly
beneath him, yet respected and feared by the black soldiers of his little
command.

Werper was accustomed to sit for hours glaring at his superior as the two sat
upon the veranda of their common quarters, smoking their evening cigarets in a
silence which neither seemed desirous of breaking. The senseless hatred of the
lieutenant grew at last into a form of mania. The captain’s natural
taciturnity he distorted into a studied attempt to insult him because of his
past shortcomings. He imagined that his superior held him in contempt, and so
he chafed and fumed inwardly until one evening his madness became suddenly
homicidal. He fingered the butt of the revolver at his hip, his eyes narrowed
and his brows contracted. At last he spoke.

“You have insulted me for the last time!” he cried, springing to
his feet. “I am an officer and a gentleman, and I shall put up with it no
longer without an accounting from you, you pig.”

The captain, an expression of surprise upon his features, turned toward his
junior. He had seen men before with the jungle madness upon them—the
madness of solitude and unrestrained brooding, and perhaps a touch of fever.

He rose and extended his hand to lay it upon the other’s shoulder. Quiet
words of counsel were upon his lips; but they were never spoken. Werper
construed his superior’s action into an attempt to close with him. His
revolver was on a level with the captain’s heart, and the latter had
taken but a step when Werper pulled the trigger. Without a moan the man sank to
the rough planking of the veranda, and as he fell the mists that had clouded
Werper’s brain lifted, so that he saw himself and the deed that he had
done in the same light that those who must judge him would see them.

He heard excited exclamations from the quarters of the soldiers and he heard
men running in his direction. They would seize him, and if they didn’t
kill him they would take him down the Congo to a point where a properly ordered
military tribunal would do so just as effectively, though in a more regular
manner.

Werper had no desire to die. Never before had he so yearned for life as in this
moment that he had so effectively forfeited his right to live. The men were
nearing him. What was he to do? He glanced about as though searching for the
tangible form of a legitimate excuse for his crime; but he could find only the
body of the man he had so causelessly shot down.

In despair, he turned and fled from the oncoming soldiery. Across the compound
he ran, his revolver still clutched tightly in his hand. At the gates a sentry
halted him. Werper did not pause to parley or to exert the influence of his
commission—he merely raised his weapon and shot down the innocent black.
A moment later the fugitive had torn open the gates and vanished into the
blackness of the jungle, but not before he had transferred the rifle and
ammunition belts of the dead sentry to his own person.

All that night Werper fled farther and farther into the heart of the
wilderness. Now and again the voice of a lion brought him to a listening halt;
but with cocked and ready rifle he pushed ahead again, more fearful of the
human huntsmen in his rear than of the wild carnivora ahead.

Dawn came at last, but still the man plodded on. All sense of hunger and
fatigue were lost in the terrors of contemplated capture. He could think only
of escape. He dared not pause to rest or eat until there was no further danger
from pursuit, and so he staggered on until at last he fell and could rise no
more. How long he had fled he did not know, or try to know. When he could flee
no longer the knowledge that he had reached his limit was hidden from him in
the unconsciousness of utter exhaustion.

And thus it was that Achmet Zek, the Arab, found him. Achmet’s followers
were for running a spear through the body of their hereditary enemy; but Achmet
would have it otherwise. First he would question the Belgian. It were easier to
question a man first and kill him afterward, than kill him first and then
question him.

So he had Lieutenant Albert Werper carried to his own tent, and there slaves
administered wine and food in small quantities until at last the prisoner
regained consciousness. As he opened his eyes he saw the faces of strange black
men about him, and just outside the tent the figure of an Arab. Nowhere was the
uniform of his soldiers to be seen.

The Arab turned and seeing the open eyes of the prisoner upon him, entered the
tent.

“I am Achmet Zek,” he announced. “Who are you, and what were
you doing in my country? Where are your soldiers?”

Achmet Zek! Werper’s eyes went wide, and his heart sank. He was in the
clutches of the most notorious of cut-throats—a hater of all Europeans,
especially those who wore the uniform of Belgium. For years the military forces
of Belgian Congo had waged a fruitless war upon this man and his
followers—a war in which quarter had never been asked nor expected by
either side.

But presently in the very hatred of the man for Belgians, Werper saw a faint
ray of hope for himself. He, too, was an outcast and an outlaw. So far, at
least, they possessed a common interest, and Werper decided to play upon it for
all that it might yield.

“I have heard of you,” he replied, “and was searching for
you. My people have turned against me. I hate them. Even now their soldiers are
searching for me, to kill me. I knew that you would protect me from them, for
you, too, hate them. In return I will take service with you. I am a trained
soldier. I can fight, and your enemies are my enemies.”

Achmet Zek eyed the European in silence. In his mind he revolved many thoughts,
chief among which was that the unbeliever lied. Of course there was the chance
that he did not lie, and if he told the truth then his proposition was one well
worthy of consideration, since fighting men were never over
plentiful—especially white men with the training and knowledge of
military matters that a European officer must possess.

Achmet Zek scowled and Werper’s heart sank; but Werper did not know
Achmet Zek, who was quite apt to scowl where another would smile, and smile
where another would scowl.

“And if you have lied to me,” said Achmet Zek, “I will kill
you at any time. What return, other than your life, do you expect for your
services?”

“My keep only, at first,” replied Werper. “Later, if I am
worth more, we can easily reach an understanding.” Werper’s only
desire at the moment was to preserve his life. And so the agreement was reached
and Lieutenant Albert Werper became a member of the ivory and slave raiding
band of the notorious Achmet Zek.

For months the renegade Belgian rode with the savage raider. He fought with a
savage abandon, and a vicious cruelty fully equal to that of his fellow
desperadoes. Achmet Zek watched his recruit with eagle eye, and with a growing
satisfaction which finally found expression in a greater confidence in the man,
and resulted in an increased independence of action for Werper.

Achmet Zek took the Belgian into his confidence to a great extent, and at last
unfolded to him a pet scheme which the Arab had long fostered, but which he
never had found an opportunity to effect. With the aid of a European, however,
the thing might be easily accomplished. He sounded Werper.

“You have heard of the man men call Tarzan?” he asked.

Werper nodded. “I have heard of him; but I do not know him.”

“But for him we might carry on our ‘trading’ in safety and
with great profit,” continued the Arab. “For years he has fought
us, driving us from the richest part of the country, harassing us, and arming
the natives that they may repel us when we come to ‘trade.’ He is
very rich. If we could find some way to make him pay us many pieces of gold we
should not only be avenged upon him; but repaid for much that he has prevented
us from winning from the natives under his protection.”

Werper withdrew a cigaret from a jeweled case and lighted it.

“And you have a plan to make him pay?” he asked.

“He has a wife,” replied Achmet Zek, “whom men say is very
beautiful. She would bring a great price farther north, if we found it too
difficult to collect ransom money from this Tarzan.”

Werper bent his head in thought. Achmet Zek stood awaiting his reply. What good
remained in Albert Werper revolted at the thought of selling a white woman into
the slavery and degradation of a Moslem harem. He looked up at Achmet Zek. He
saw the Arab’s eyes narrow, and he guessed that the other had sensed his
antagonism to the plan. What would it mean to Werper to refuse? His life lay in
the hands of this semi-barbarian, who esteemed the life of an unbeliever less
highly than that of a dog. Werper loved life. What was this woman to him,
anyway? She was a European, doubtless, a member of organized society. He was an
outcast. The hand of every white man was against him. She was his natural
enemy, and if he refused to lend himself to her undoing, Achmet Zek would have
him killed.

“You hesitate,” murmured the Arab.

“I was but weighing the chances of success,” lied Werper,
“and my reward. As a European I can gain admittance to their home and
table. You have no other with you who could do so much. The risk will be great.
I should be well paid, Achmet Zek.”

A smile of relief passed over the raider’s face.

“Well said, Werper,” and Achmet Zek slapped his lieutenant upon the
shoulder. “You should be well paid and you shall. Now let us sit together
and plan how best the thing may be done,” and the two men squatted upon a
soft rug beneath the faded silks of Achmet’s once gorgeous tent, and
talked together in low voices well into the night. Both were tall and bearded,
and the exposure to sun and wind had given an almost Arab hue to the
European’s complexion. In every detail of dress, too, he copied the
fashions of his chief, so that outwardly he was as much an Arab as the other.
It was late when he arose and retired to his own tent.

The following day Werper spent in overhauling his Belgian uniform, removing
from it every vestige of evidence that might indicate its military purposes.
From a heterogeneous collection of loot, Achmet Zek procured a pith helmet and
a European saddle, and from his black slaves and followers a party of porters,
askaris and tent boys to make up a modest safari for a big game hunter. At the
head of this party Werper set out from camp.

CHAPTER II.
On the Road To Opar

It was two weeks later that John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, riding in from a tour
of inspection of his vast African estate, glimpsed the head of a column of men
crossing the plain that lay between his bungalow and the forest to the north
and west.

He reined in his horse and watched the little party as it emerged from a
concealing swale. His keen eyes caught the reflection of the sun upon the white
helmet of a mounted man, and with the conviction that a wandering European
hunter was seeking his hospitality, he wheeled his mount and rode slowly
forward to meet the newcomer.

A half hour later he was mounting the steps leading to the veranda of his
bungalow, and introducing M. Jules Frecoult to Lady Greystoke.

“I was completely lost,” M. Frecoult was explaining. “My head
man had never before been in this part of the country and the guides who were
to have accompanied me from the last village we passed knew even less of the
country than we. They finally deserted us two days since. I am very fortunate
indeed to have stumbled so providentially upon succor. I do not know what I
should have done, had I not found you.”

It was decided that Frecoult and his party should remain several days, or until
they were thoroughly rested, when Lord Greystoke would furnish guides to lead
them safely back into country with which Frecoult’s head man was
supposedly familiar.

In his guise of a French gentleman of leisure, Werper found little difficulty
in deceiving his host and in ingratiating himself with both Tarzan and Jane
Clayton; but the longer he remained the less hopeful he became of an easy
accomplishment of his designs.

Lady Greystoke never rode alone at any great distance from the bungalow, and
the savage loyalty of the ferocious Waziri warriors who formed a great part of
Tarzan’s followers seemed to preclude the possibility of a successful
attempt at forcible abduction, or of the bribery of the Waziri themselves.

A week passed, and Werper was no nearer the fulfillment of his plan, in so far
as he could judge, than upon the day of his arrival, but at that very moment
something occurred which gave him renewed hope and set his mind upon an even
greater reward than a woman’s ransom.

A runner had arrived at the bungalow with the weekly mail, and Lord Greystoke
had spent the afternoon in his study reading and answering letters. At dinner
he seemed distraught, and early in the evening he excused himself and retired,
Lady Greystoke following him very soon after. Werper, sitting upon the veranda,
could hear their voices in earnest discussion, and having realized that
something of unusual moment was afoot, he quietly rose from his chair, and
keeping well in the shadow of the shrubbery growing profusely about the
bungalow, made his silent way to a point beneath the window of the room in
which his host and hostess slept.

Here he listened, and not without result, for almost the first words he
overheard filled him with excitement. Lady Greystoke was speaking as Werper
came within hearing.

“I always feared for the stability of the company,” she was saying;
“but it seems incredible that they should have failed for so enormous a
sum—unless there has been some dishonest manipulation.”

“That is what I suspect,” replied Tarzan; “but whatever the
cause, the fact remains that I have lost everything, and there is nothing for
it but to return to Opar and get more.”

“Oh, John,” cried Lady Greystoke, and Werper could feel the shudder
through her voice, “is there no other way? I cannot bear to think of you
returning to that frightful city. I would rather live in poverty always than to
have you risk the hideous dangers of Opar.”

“You need have no fear,” replied Tarzan, laughing. “I am
pretty well able to take care of myself, and were I not, the Waziri who will
accompany me will see that no harm befalls me.”

“They ran away from Opar once, and left you to your fate,” she
reminded him.

“They will not do it again,” he answered. “They were very
much ashamed of themselves, and were coming back when I met them.”

“But there must be some other way,” insisted the woman.

“There is no other way half so easy to obtain another fortune, as to go
to the treasure vaults of Opar and bring it away,” he replied. “I
shall be very careful, Jane, and the chances are that the inhabitants of Opar
will never know that I have been there again and despoiled them of another
portion of the treasure, the very existence of which they are as ignorant of as
they would be of its value.”

The finality in his tone seemed to assure Lady Greystoke that further argument
was futile, and so she abandoned the subject.

Werper remained, listening, for a short time, and then, confident that he had
overheard all that was necessary and fearing discovery, returned to the
veranda, where he smoked numerous cigarets in rapid succession before retiring.

The following morning at breakfast, Werper announced his intention of making an
early departure, and asked Tarzan’s permission to hunt big game in the
Waziri country on his way out—permission which Lord Greystoke readily
granted.

The Belgian consumed two days in completing his preparations, but finally got
away with his safari, accompanied by a single Waziri guide whom Lord Greystoke
had loaned him. The party made but a single short march when Werper simulated
illness, and announced his intention of remaining where he was until he had
fully recovered. As they had gone but a short distance from the Greystoke
bungalow, Werper dismissed the Waziri guide, telling the warrior that he would
send for him when he was able to proceed. The Waziri gone, the Belgian summoned
one of Achmet Zek’s trusted blacks to his tent, and dispatched him to
watch for the departure of Tarzan, returning immediately to advise Werper of
the event and the direction taken by the Englishman.

The Belgian did not have long to wait, for the following day his emissary
returned with word that Tarzan and a party of fifty Waziri warriors had set out
toward the southeast early in the morning.

Werper called his head man to him, after writing a long letter to Achmet Zek.
This letter he handed to the head man.

“Send a runner at once to Achmet Zek with this,” he instructed the
head man. “Remain here in camp awaiting further instructions from him or
from me. If any come from the bungalow of the Englishman, tell them that I am
very ill within my tent and can see no one. Now, give me six porters and six
askaris—the strongest and bravest of the safari—and I will march
after the Englishman and discover where his gold is hidden.”

And so it was that as Tarzan, stripped to the loin cloth and armed after the
primitive fashion he best loved, led his loyal Waziri toward the dead city of
Opar, Werper, the renegade, haunted his trail through the long, hot days, and
camped close behind him by night.

And as they marched, Achmet Zek rode with his entire following southward toward
the Greystoke farm.

To Tarzan of the Apes the expedition was in the nature of a holiday outing. His
civilization was at best but an outward veneer which he gladly peeled off with
his uncomfortable European clothes whenever any reasonable pretext presented
itself. It was a woman’s love which kept Tarzan even to the semblance of
civilization—a condition for which familiarity had bred contempt. He
hated the shams and the hypocrisies of it and with the clear vision of an
unspoiled mind he had penetrated to the rotten core of the heart of the
thing—the cowardly greed for peace and ease and the safe-guarding of
property rights. That the fine things of life—art, music and
literature—had thriven upon such enervating ideals he strenuously denied,
insisting, rather, that they had endured in spite of civilization.

“Show me the fat, opulent coward,” he was wont to say, “who
ever originated a beautiful ideal. In the clash of arms, in the battle for
survival, amid hunger and death and danger, in the face of God as manifested in
the display of Nature’s most terrific forces, is born all that is finest
and best in the human heart and mind.”

And so Tarzan always came back to Nature in the spirit of a lover keeping a
long deferred tryst after a period behind prison walls. His Waziri, at marrow,
were more civilized than he. They cooked their meat before they ate it and they
shunned many articles of food as unclean that Tarzan had eaten with gusto all
his life and so insidious is the virus of hypocrisy that even the stalwart
ape-man hesitated to give rein to his natural longings before them. He ate
burnt flesh when he would have preferred it raw and unspoiled, and he brought
down game with arrow or spear when he would far rather have leaped upon it from
ambush and sunk his strong teeth in its jugular; but at last the call of the
milk of the savage mother that had suckled him in infancy rose to an insistent
demand—he craved the hot blood of a fresh kill and his muscles yearned to
pit themselves against the savage jungle in the battle for existence that had
been his sole birthright for the first twenty years of his life.

CHAPTER III.
The Call of the Jungle

Moved by these vague yet all-powerful urgings the ape-man lay awake one night
in the little thorn boma that protected, in a way, his party from the
depredations of the great carnivora of the jungle. A single warrior stood
sleepy guard beside the fire that yellow eyes out of the darkness beyond the
camp made imperative. The moans and the coughing of the big cats mingled with
the myriad noises of the lesser denizens of the jungle to fan the savage flame
in the breast of this savage English lord. He tossed upon his bed of grasses,
sleepless, for an hour and then he rose, noiseless as a wraith, and while the
Waziri’s back was turned, vaulted the boma wall in the face of the
flaming eyes, swung silently into a great tree and was gone.

For a time in sheer exuberance of animal spirit he raced swiftly through the
middle terrace, swinging perilously across wide spans from one jungle giant to
the next, and then he clambered upward to the swaying, lesser boughs of the
upper terrace where the moon shone full upon him and the air was stirred by
little breezes and death lurked ready in each frail branch. Here he paused and
raised his face to Goro, the moon. With uplifted arm he stood, the cry of the
bull ape quivering upon his lips, yet he remained silent lest he arouse his
faithful Waziri who were all too familiar with the hideous challenge of their
master.

And then he went on more slowly and with greater stealth and caution, for now
Tarzan of the Apes was seeking a kill. Down to the ground he came in the utter
blackness of the close-set boles and the overhanging verdure of the jungle. He
stooped from time to time and put his nose close to earth. He sought and found
a wide game trail and at last his nostrils were rewarded with the scent of the
fresh spoor of Bara, the deer. Tarzan’s mouth watered and a low growl
escaped his patrician lips. Sloughed from him was the last vestige of
artificial caste—once again he was the primeval hunter—the first
man—the highest caste type of the human race. Up wind he followed the
elusive spoor with a sense of perception so transcending that of ordinary man
as to be inconceivable to us. Through counter currents of the heavy stench of
meat eaters he traced the trail of Bara; the sweet and cloying stink of Horta,
the boar, could not drown his quarry’s scent—the permeating, mellow
musk of the deer’s foot.

Presently the body scent of the deer told Tarzan that his prey was close at
hand. It sent him into the trees again—into the lower terrace where he
could watch the ground below and catch with ears and nose the first intimation
of actual contact with his quarry. Nor was it long before the ape-man came upon
Bara standing alert at the edge of a moon-bathed clearing. Noiselessly Tarzan
crept through the trees until he was directly over the deer. In the
ape-man’s right hand was the long hunting knife of his father and in his
heart the blood lust of the carnivore. Just for an instant he poised above the
unsuspecting Bara and then he launched himself downward upon the sleek back.
The impact of his weight carried the deer to its knees and before the animal
could regain its feet the knife had found its heart. As Tarzan rose upon the
body of his kill to scream forth his hideous victory cry into the face of the
moon the wind carried to his nostrils something which froze him to statuesque
immobility and silence. His savage eyes blazed into the direction from which
the wind had borne down the warning to him and a moment later the grasses at
one side of the clearing parted and Numa, the lion, strode majestically into
view. His yellow-green eyes were fastened upon Tarzan as he halted just within
the clearing and glared enviously at the successful hunter, for Numa had had no
luck this night.

From the lips of the ape-man broke a rumbling growl of warning. Numa answered
but he did not advance. Instead he stood waving his tail gently to and fro, and
presently Tarzan squatted upon his kill and cut a generous portion from a hind
quarter. Numa eyed him with growing resentment and rage as, between mouthfuls,
the ape-man growled out his savage warnings. Now this particular lion had never
before come in contact with Tarzan of the Apes and he was much mystified. Here
was the appearance and the scent of a man-thing and Numa had tasted of human
flesh and learned that though not the most palatable it was certainly by far
the easiest to secure, yet there was that in the bestial growls of the strange
creature which reminded him of formidable antagonists and gave him pause, while
his hunger and the odor of the hot flesh of Bara goaded him almost to madness.
Always Tarzan watched him, guessing what was passing in the little brain of the
carnivore and well it was that he did watch him, for at last Numa could stand
it no longer. His tail shot suddenly erect and at the same instant the wary
ape-man, knowing all too well what the signal portended, grasped the remainder
of the deer’s hind quarter between his teeth and leaped into a nearby
tree as Numa charged him with all the speed and a sufficient semblance of the
weight of an express train.

Tarzan’s retreat was no indication that he felt fear. Jungle life is
ordered along different lines than ours and different standards prevail. Had
Tarzan been famished he would, doubtless, have stood his ground and met the
lion’s charge. He had done the thing before upon more than one occasion,
just as in the past he had charged lions himself; but tonight he was far from
famished and in the hind quarter he had carried off with him was more raw flesh
than he could eat; yet it was with no equanimity that he looked down upon Numa
rending the flesh of Tarzan’s kill. The presumption of this strange Numa
must be punished! And forthwith Tarzan set out to make life miserable for the
big cat. Close by were many trees bearing large, hard fruits and to one of
these the ape-man swung with the agility of a squirrel. Then commenced a
bombardment which brought forth earthshaking roars from Numa. One after another
as rapidly as he could gather and hurl them, Tarzan pelted the hard fruit down
upon the lion. It was impossible for the tawny cat to eat under that hail of
missiles—he could but roar and growl and dodge and eventually he was
driven away entirely from the carcass of Bara, the deer. He went roaring and
resentful; but in the very center of the clearing his voice was suddenly hushed
and Tarzan saw the great head lower and flatten out, the body crouch and the
long tail quiver, as the beast slunk cautiously toward the trees upon the
opposite side.

Immediately Tarzan was alert. He lifted his head and sniffed the slow, jungle
breeze. What was it that had attracted Numa’s attention and taken him
soft-footed and silent away from the scene of his discomfiture? Just as the
lion disappeared among the trees beyond the clearing Tarzan caught upon the
down-coming wind the explanation of his new interest—the scent spoor of
man was wafted strongly to the sensitive nostrils. Caching the remainder of the
deer’s hind quarter in the crotch of a tree the ape-man wiped his greasy
palms upon his naked thighs and swung off in pursuit of Numa. A broad,
well-beaten elephant path led into the forest from the clearing. Parallel to
this slunk Numa, while above him Tarzan moved through the trees, the shadow of
a wraith. The savage cat and the savage man saw Numa’s quarry almost
simultaneously, though both had known before it came within the vision of their
eyes that it was a black man. Their sensitive nostrils had told them this much
and Tarzan’s had told him that the scent spoor was that of a
stranger—old and a male, for race and sex and age each has its own
distinctive scent. It was an old man that made his way alone through the gloomy
jungle, a wrinkled, dried up, little old man hideously scarred and tattooed and
strangely garbed, with the skin of a hyena about his shoulders and the dried
head mounted upon his grey pate. Tarzan recognized the ear-marks of the
witch-doctor and awaited Numa’s charge with a feeling of pleasurable
anticipation, for the ape-man had no love for witch-doctors; but in the instant
that Numa did charge, the white man suddenly recalled that the lion had stolen
his kill a few minutes before and that revenge is sweet.

The first intimation the black man had that he was in danger was the crash of
twigs as Numa charged through the bushes into the game trail not twenty yards
behind him. Then he turned to see a huge, black-maned lion racing toward him
and even as he turned, Numa seized him. At the same instant the ape-man dropped
from an overhanging limb full upon the lion’s back and as he alighted he
plunged his knife into the tawny side behind the left shoulder, tangled the
fingers of his right hand in the long mane, buried his teeth in Numa’s
neck and wound his powerful legs about the beast’s torso. With a roar of
pain and rage, Numa reared up and fell backward upon the ape-man; but still the
mighty man-thing clung to his hold and repeatedly the long knife plunged
rapidly into his side. Over and over rolled Numa, the lion, clawing and biting
at the air, roaring and growling horribly in savage attempt to reach the thing
upon its back. More than once was Tarzan almost brushed from his hold. He was
battered and bruised and covered with blood from Numa and dirt from the trail,
yet not for an instant did he lessen the ferocity of his mad attack nor his
grim hold upon the back of his antagonist. To have loosened for an instant his
grip there, would have been to bring him within reach of those tearing talons
or rending fangs, and have ended forever the grim career of this jungle-bred
English lord. Where he had fallen beneath the spring of the lion the
witch-doctor lay, torn and bleeding, unable to drag himself away and watched
the terrific battle between these two lords of the jungle. His sunken eyes
glittered and his wrinkled lips moved over toothless gums as he mumbled weird
incantations to the demons of his cult.

For a time he felt no doubt as to the outcome—the strange white man must
certainly succumb to terrible Simba—whoever heard of a lone man armed
only with a knife slaying so mighty a beast! Yet presently the old black
man’s eyes went wider and he commenced to have his doubts and misgivings.
What wonderful sort of creature was this that battled with Simba and held his
own despite the mighty muscles of the king of beasts and slowly there dawned in
those sunken eyes, gleaming so brightly from the scarred and wrinkled face, the
light of a dawning recollection. Gropingly backward into the past reached the
fingers of memory, until at last they seized upon a faint picture, faded and
yellow with the passing years. It was the picture of a lithe, white-skinned
youth swinging through the trees in company with a band of huge apes, and the
old eyes blinked and a great fear came into them—the superstitious fear
of one who believes in ghosts and spirits and demons.

And came the time once more when the witch-doctor no longer doubted the outcome
of the duel, yet his first judgment was reversed, for now he knew that the
jungle god would slay Simba and the old black was even more terrified of his
own impending fate at the hands of the victor than he had been by the sure and
sudden death which the triumphant lion would have meted out to him. He saw the
lion weaken from loss of blood. He saw the mighty limbs tremble and stagger and
at last he saw the beast sink down to rise no more. He saw the forest god or
demon rise from the vanquished foe, and placing a foot upon the still quivering
carcass, raise his face to the moon and bay out a hideous cry that froze the
ebbing blood in the veins of the witch-doctor.

CHAPTER IV.
Prophecy and Fulfillment

Then Tarzan turned his attention to the man. He had not slain Numa to save the
Negro—he had merely done it in revenge upon the lion; but now that he saw
the old man lying helpless and dying before him something akin to pity touched
his savage heart. In his youth he would have slain the witch-doctor without the
slightest compunction; but civilization had had its softening effect upon him
even as it does upon the nations and races which it touches, though it had not
yet gone far enough with Tarzan to render him either cowardly or effeminate. He
saw an old man suffering and dying, and he stooped and felt of his wounds and
stanched the flow of blood.

“Who are you?” asked the old man in a trembling voice.

“I am Tarzan—Tarzan of the Apes,” replied the ape-man and not
without a greater touch of pride than he would have said, “I am John
Clayton, Lord Greystoke.”

The witch-doctor shook convulsively and closed his eyes. When he opened them
again there was in them a resignation to whatever horrible fate awaited him at
the hands of this feared demon of the woods. “Why do you not kill
me?” he asked.

“Why should I kill you?” inquired Tarzan. “You have not
harmed me, and anyway you are already dying. Numa, the lion, has killed
you.”

“You would not kill me?” Surprise and incredulity were in the tones
of the quavering old voice.

“I would save you if I could,” replied Tarzan, “but that
cannot be done. Why did you think I would kill you?”

For a moment the old man was silent. When he spoke it was evidently after some
little effort to muster his courage. “I knew you of old,” he said,
“when you ranged the jungle in the country of Mbonga, the chief. I was
already a witch-doctor when you slew Kulonga and the others, and when you
robbed our huts and our poison pot. At first I did not remember you; but at
last I did—the white-skinned ape that lived with the hairy apes and made
life miserable in the village of Mbonga, the chief—the forest
god—the Munango-Keewati for whom we set food outside our gates and who
came and ate it. Tell me before I die—are you man or devil?”

Tarzan laughed. “I am a man,” he said.

The old fellow sighed and shook his head. “You have tried to save me from
Simba,” he said. “For that I shall reward you. I am a great
witch-doctor. Listen to me, white man! I see bad days ahead of you. It is writ
in my own blood which I have smeared upon my palm. A god greater even than you
will rise up and strike you down. Turn back, Munango-Keewati! Turn back before
it is too late. Danger lies ahead of you and danger lurks behind; but greater
is the danger before. I see—” He paused and drew a long, gasping
breath. Then he crumpled into a little, wrinkled heap and died. Tarzan wondered
what else he had seen.

It was very late when the ape-man re-entered the boma and lay down among his
black warriors. None had seen him go and none saw him return. He thought about
the warning of the old witch-doctor before he fell asleep and he thought of it
again after he awoke; but he did not turn back for he was unafraid, though had
he known what lay in store for one he loved most in all the world he would have
flown through the trees to her side and allowed the gold of Opar to remain
forever hidden in its forgotten storehouse.

Behind him that morning another white man pondered something he had heard
during the night and very nearly did he give up his project and turn back upon
his trail. It was Werper, the murderer, who in the still of the night had heard
far away upon the trail ahead of him a sound that had filled his cowardly soul
with terror—a sound such as he never before had heard in all his life,
nor dreamed that such a frightful thing could emanate from the lungs of a
God-created creature. He had heard the victory cry of the bull ape as Tarzan
had screamed it forth into the face of Goro, the moon, and he had trembled then
and hidden his face; and now in the broad light of a new day he trembled again
as he recalled it, and would have turned back from the nameless danger the echo
of that frightful sound seemed to portend, had he not stood in even greater
fear of Achmet Zek, his master.

And so Tarzan of the Apes forged steadily ahead toward Opar’s ruined
ramparts and behind him slunk Werper, jackal-like, and only God knew what lay
in store for each.

At the edge of the desolate valley, overlooking the golden domes and minarets
of Opar, Tarzan halted. By night he would go alone to the treasure vault,
reconnoitering, for he had determined that caution should mark his every move
upon this expedition.

With the coming of night he set forth, and Werper, who had scaled the cliffs
alone behind the ape-man’s party, and hidden through the day among the
rough boulders of the mountain top, slunk stealthily after him. The
boulder-strewn plain between the valley’s edge and the mighty granite
kopje, outside the city’s walls, where lay the entrance to the
passage-way leading to the treasure vault, gave the Belgian ample cover as he
followed Tarzan toward Opar.

He saw the giant ape-man swing himself nimbly up the face of the great rock.
Werper, clawing fearfully during the perilous ascent, sweating in terror,
almost palsied by fear, but spurred on by avarice, following upward, until at
last he stood upon the summit of the rocky hill.

Tarzan was nowhere in sight. For a time Werper hid behind one of the lesser
boulders that were scattered over the top of the hill, but, seeing or hearing
nothing of the Englishman, he crept from his place of concealment to undertake
a systematic search of his surroundings, in the hope that he might discover the
location of the treasure in ample time to make his escape before Tarzan
returned, for it was the Belgian’s desire merely to locate the gold,
that, after Tarzan had departed, he might come in safety with his followers and
carry away as much as he could transport.

He found the narrow cleft leading downward into the heart of the kopje along
well-worn, granite steps. He advanced quite to the dark mouth of the tunnel
into which the runway disappeared; but here he halted, fearing to enter, lest
he meet Tarzan returning.

The ape-man, far ahead of him, groped his way along the rocky passage, until he
came to the ancient wooden door. A moment later he stood within the treasure
chamber, where, ages since, long-dead hands had ranged the lofty rows of
precious ingots for the rulers of that great continent which now lies submerged
beneath the waters of the Atlantic.

No sound broke the stillness of the subterranean vault. There was no evidence
that another had discovered the forgotten wealth since last the ape-man had
visited its hiding place.

Satisfied, Tarzan turned and retraced his steps toward the summit of the kopje.
Werper, from the concealment of a jutting, granite shoulder, watched him pass
up from the shadows of the stairway and advance toward the edge of the hill
which faced the rim of the valley where the Waziri awaited the signal of their
master. Then Werper, slipping stealthily from his hiding place, dropped into
the somber darkness of the entrance and disappeared.

Tarzan, halting upon the kopje’s edge, raised his voice in the thunderous
roar of a lion. Twice, at regular intervals, he repeated the call, standing in
attentive silence for several minutes after the echoes of the third call had
died away. And then, from far across the valley, faintly, came an answering
roar—once, twice, thrice. Basuli, the Waziri chieftain, had heard and
replied.

Tarzan again made his way toward the treasure vault, knowing that in a few
hours his blacks would be with him, ready to bear away another fortune in the
strangely shaped, golden ingots of Opar. In the meantime he would carry as much
of the precious metal to the summit of the kopje as he could.

Six trips he made in the five hours before Basuli reached the kopje, and at the
end of that time he had transported forty-eight ingots to the edge of the great
boulder, carrying upon each trip a load which might well have staggered two
ordinary men, yet his giant frame showed no evidence of fatigue, as he helped
to raise his ebon warriors to the hill top with the rope that had been brought
for the purpose.

Six times he had returned to the treasure chamber, and six times Werper, the
Belgian, had cowered in the black shadows at the far end of the long vault.
Once again came the ape-man, and this time there came with him fifty fighting
men, turning porters for love of the only creature in the world who might
command of their fierce and haughty natures such menial service. Fifty-two more
ingots passed out of the vaults, making the total of one hundred which Tarzan
intended taking away with him.

As the last of the Waziri filed from the chamber, Tarzan turned back for a last
glimpse of the fabulous wealth upon which his two inroads had made no
appreciable impression. Before he extinguished the single candle he had brought
with him for the purpose, and the flickering light of which had cast the first
alleviating rays into the impenetrable darkness of the buried chamber, that it
had known for the countless ages since it had lain forgotten of man,
Tarzan’s mind reverted to that first occasion upon which he had entered
the treasure vault, coming upon it by chance as he fled from the pits beneath
the temple, where he had been hidden by La, the High Priestess of the Sun
Worshipers.

He recalled the scene within the temple when he had lain stretched upon the
sacrificial altar, while La, with high-raised dagger, stood above him, and the
rows of priests and priestesses awaited, in the ecstatic hysteria of
fanaticism, the first gush of their victim’s warm blood, that they might
fill their golden goblets and drink to the glory of their Flaming God.

The brutal and bloody interruption by Tha, the mad priest, passed vividly
before the ape-man’s recollective eyes, the flight of the votaries before
the insane blood lust of the hideous creature, the brutal attack upon La, and
his own part of the grim tragedy when he had battled with the infuriated
Oparian and left him dead at the feet of the priestess he would have profaned.

This and much more passed through Tarzan’s memory as he stood gazing at
the long tiers of dull-yellow metal. He wondered if La still ruled the temples
of the ruined city whose crumbling walls rose upon the very foundations about
him. Had she finally been forced into a union with one of her grotesque
priests? It seemed a hideous fate, indeed, for one so beautiful. With a shake
of his head, Tarzan stepped to the flickering candle, extinguished its feeble
rays and turned toward the exit.

Behind him the spy waited for him to be gone. He had learned the secret for
which he had come, and now he could return at his leisure to his waiting
followers, bring them to the treasure vault and carry away all the gold that
they could stagger under.

The Waziri had reached the outer end of the tunnel, and were winding upward
toward the fresh air and the welcome starlight of the kopje’s summit,
before Tarzan shook off the detaining hand of reverie and started slowly after
them.

Once again, and, he thought, for the last time, he closed the massive door of
the treasure room. In the darkness behind him Werper rose and stretched his
cramped muscles. He stretched forth a hand and lovingly caressed a golden ingot
on the nearest tier. He raised it from its immemorial resting place and weighed
it in his hands. He clutched it to his bosom in an ecstasy of avarice.

Tarzan dreamed of the happy homecoming which lay before him, of dear arms about
his neck, and a soft cheek pressed to his; but there rose to dispel that dream
the memory of the old witch-doctor and his warning.

And then, in the span of a few brief seconds, the hopes of both these men were
shattered. The one forgot even his greed in the panic of terror—the other
was plunged into total forgetfulness of the past by a jagged fragment of rock
which gashed a deep cut upon his head.

CHAPTER V.
The Altar of the Flaming God

It was at the moment that Tarzan turned from the closed door to pursue his way
to the outer world. The thing came without warning. One instant all was quiet
and stability—the next, and the world rocked, the tortured sides of the
narrow passageway split and crumbled, great blocks of granite, dislodged from
the ceiling, tumbled into the narrow way, choking it, and the walls bent inward
upon the wreckage. Beneath the blow of a fragment of the roof, Tarzan staggered
back against the door to the treasure room, his weight pushed it open and his
body rolled inward upon the floor.

In the great apartment where the treasure lay less damage was wrought by the
earthquake. A few ingots toppled from the higher tiers, a single piece of the
rocky ceiling splintered off and crashed downward to the floor, and the walls
cracked, though they did not collapse.

There was but the single shock, no other followed to complete the damage
undertaken by the first. Werper, thrown to his length by the suddenness and
violence of the disturbance, staggered to his feet when he found himself
unhurt. Groping his way toward the far end of the chamber, he sought the candle
which Tarzan had left stuck in its own wax upon the protruding end of an ingot.

By striking numerous matches the Belgian at last found what he sought, and
when, a moment later, the sickly rays relieved the Stygian darkness about him,
he breathed a nervous sigh of relief, for the impenetrable gloom had
accentuated the terrors of his situation.

As they became accustomed to the light the man turned his eyes toward the
door—his one thought now was of escape from this frightful tomb—and
as he did so he saw the body of the naked giant lying stretched upon the floor
just within the doorway. Werper drew back in sudden fear of detection; but a
second glance convinced him that the Englishman was dead. From a great gash in
the man’s head a pool of blood had collected upon the concrete floor.

Quickly, the Belgian leaped over the prostrate form of his erstwhile host, and
without a thought of succor for the man in whom, for aught he knew, life still
remained, he bolted for the passageway and safety.

But his renewed hopes were soon dashed. Just beyond the doorway he found the
passage completely clogged and choked by impenetrable masses of shattered rock.
Once more he turned and re-entered the treasure vault. Taking the candle from
its place he commenced a systematic search of the apartment, nor had he gone
far before he discovered another door in the opposite end of the room, a door
which gave upon creaking hinges to the weight of his body. Beyond the door lay
another narrow passageway. Along this Werper made his way, ascending a flight
of stone steps to another corridor twenty feet above the level of the first.
The flickering candle lighted the way before him, and a moment later he was
thankful for the possession of this crude and antiquated luminant, which, a few
hours before he might have looked upon with contempt, for it showed him, just
in time, a yawning pit, apparently terminating the tunnel he was traversing.

Before him was a circular shaft. He held the candle above it and peered
downward. Below him, at a great distance, he saw the light reflected back from
the surface of a pool of water. He had come upon a well. He raised the candle
above his head and peered across the black void, and there upon the opposite
side he saw the continuation of the tunnel; but how was he to span the gulf?

As he stood there measuring the distance to the opposite side and wondering if
he dared venture so great a leap, there broke suddenly upon his startled ears a
piercing scream which diminished gradually until it ended in a series of dismal
moans. The voice seemed partly human, yet so hideous that it might well have
emanated from the tortured throat of a lost soul, writhing in the fires of
hell.

The Belgian shuddered and looked fearfully upward, for the scream had seemed to
come from above him. As he looked he saw an opening far overhead, and a patch
of sky pinked with brilliant stars.

His half-formed intention to call for help was expunged by the terrifying
cry—where such a voice lived, no human creatures could dwell. He dared
not reveal himself to whatever inhabitants dwelt in the place above him. He
cursed himself for a fool that he had ever embarked upon such a mission. He
wished himself safely back in the camp of Achmet Zek, and would almost have
embraced an opportunity to give himself up to the military authorities of the
Congo if by so doing he might be rescued from the frightful predicament in
which he now was.

He listened fearfully, but the cry was not repeated, and at last spurred to
desperate means, he gathered himself for the leap across the chasm. Going back
twenty paces, he took a running start, and at the edge of the well, leaped
upward and outward in an attempt to gain the opposite side.

In his hand he clutched the sputtering candle, and as he took the leap the rush
of air extinguished it. In utter darkness he flew through space, clutching
outward for a hold should his feet miss the invisible ledge.

He struck the edge of the door of the opposite terminus of the rocky tunnel
with his knees, slipped backward, clutched desperately for a moment, and at
last hung half within and half without the opening; but he was safe. For
several minutes he dared not move; but clung, weak and sweating, where he lay.
At last, cautiously, he drew himself well within the tunnel, and again he lay
at full length upon the floor, fighting to regain control of his shattered
nerves.

When his knees struck the edge of the tunnel he had dropped the candle.
Presently, hoping against hope that it had fallen upon the floor of the
passageway, rather than back into the depths of the well, he rose upon all
fours and commenced a diligent search for the little tallow cylinder, which now
seemed infinitely more precious to him than all the fabulous wealth of the
hoarded ingots of Opar.

And when, at last, he found it, he clasped it to him and sank back sobbing and
exhausted. For many minutes he lay trembling and broken; but finally he drew
himself to a sitting posture, and taking a match from his pocket, lighted the
stump of the candle which remained to him. With the light he found it easier to
regain control of his nerves, and presently he was again making his way along
the tunnel in search of an avenue of escape. The horrid cry that had come down
to him from above through the ancient well-shaft still haunted him, so that he
trembled in terror at even the sounds of his own cautious advance.

He had gone forward but a short distance, when, to his chagrin, a wall of
masonry barred his farther progress, closing the tunnel completely from top to
bottom and from side to side. What could it mean? Werper was an educated and
intelligent man. His military training had taught him to use his mind for the
purpose for which it was intended. A blind tunnel such as this was senseless.
It must continue beyond the wall. Someone, at some time in the past, had had it
blocked for an unknown purpose of his own. The man fell to examining the
masonry by the light of his candle. To his delight he discovered that the thin
blocks of hewn stone of which it was constructed were fitted in loosely without
mortar or cement. He tugged upon one of them, and to his joy found that it was
easily removable. One after another he pulled out the blocks until he had
opened an aperture large enough to admit his body, then he crawled through into
a large, low chamber. Across this another door barred his way; but this, too,
gave before his efforts, for it was not barred. A long, dark corridor showed
before him, but before he had followed it far, his candle burned down until it
scorched his fingers. With an oath he dropped it to the floor, where it
sputtered for a moment and went out.

Now he was in total darkness, and again terror rode heavily astride his neck.
What further pitfalls and dangers lay ahead he could not guess; but that he was
as far as ever from liberty he was quite willing to believe, so depressing is
utter absence of light to one in unfamiliar surroundings.

Slowly he groped his way along, feeling with his hands upon the tunnel’s
walls, and cautiously with his feet ahead of him upon the floor before he could
take a single forward step. How long he crept on thus he could not guess; but
at last, feeling that the tunnel’s length was interminable, and exhausted
by his efforts, by terror, and loss of sleep, he determined to lie down and
rest before proceeding farther.

When he awoke there was no change in the surrounding blackness. He might have
slept a second or a day—he could not know; but that he had slept for some
time was attested by the fact that he felt refreshed and hungry.

Again he commenced his groping advance; but this time he had gone but a short
distance when he emerged into a room, which was lighted through an opening in
the ceiling, from which a flight of concrete steps led downward to the floor of
the chamber.

Above him, through the aperture, Werper could see sunlight glancing from
massive columns, which were twined about by clinging vines. He listened; but he
heard no sound other than the soughing of the wind through leafy branches, the
hoarse cries of birds, and the chattering of monkeys.

Boldly he ascended the stairway, to find himself in a circular court. Just
before him stood a stone altar, stained with rusty-brown discolorations. At the
time Werper gave no thought to an explanation of these stains—later their
origin became all too hideously apparent to him.

Beside the opening in the floor, just behind the altar, through which he had
entered the court from the subterranean chamber below, the Belgian discovered
several doors leading from the enclosure upon the level of the floor. Above,
and circling the courtyard, was a series of open balconies. Monkeys scampered
about the deserted ruins, and gaily plumaged birds flitted in and out among the
columns and the galleries far above; but no sign of human presence was
discernible. Werper felt relieved. He sighed, as though a great weight had been
lifted from his shoulders. He took a step toward one of the exits, and then he
halted, wide-eyed in astonishment and terror, for almost at the same instant a
dozen doors opened in the courtyard wall and a horde of frightful men rushed in
upon him.

They were the priests of the Flaming God of Opar—the same, shaggy,
knotted, hideous little men who had dragged Jane Clayton to the sacrificial
altar at this very spot years before. Their long arms, their short and crooked
legs, their close-set, evil eyes, and their low, receding foreheads gave them a
bestial appearance that sent a qualm of paralyzing fright through the shaken
nerves of the Belgian.

With a scream he turned to flee back into the lesser terrors of the gloomy
corridors and apartments from which he had just emerged, but the frightful men
anticipated his intentions. They blocked the way; they seized him, and though
he fell, groveling upon his knees before them, begging for his life, they bound
him and hurled him to the floor of the inner temple.

The rest was but a repetition of what Tarzan and Jane Clayton had passed
through. The priestesses came, and with them La, the High Priestess. Werper was
raised and laid across the altar. Cold sweat exuded from his every pore as La
raised the cruel, sacrificial knife above him. The death chant fell upon his
tortured ears. His staring eyes wandered to the golden goblets from which the
hideous votaries would soon quench their inhuman thirst in his own, warm
life-blood.

He wished that he might be granted the brief respite of unconsciousness before
the final plunge of the keen blade—and then there was a frightful roar
that sounded almost in his ears. The High Priestess lowered her dagger. Her
eyes went wide in horror. The priestesses, her votaresses, screamed and fled
madly toward the exits. The priests roared out their rage and terror according
to the temper of their courage. Werper strained his neck about to catch a sight
of the cause of their panic, and when, at last he saw it, he too went cold in
dread, for what his eyes beheld was the figure of a huge lion standing in the
center of the temple, and already a single victim lay mangled beneath his cruel
paws.

Again the lord of the wilderness roared, turning his baleful gaze upon the
altar. La staggered forward, reeled, and fell across Werper in a swoon.

CHAPTER VI.
The Arab Raid

After their first terror had subsided subsequent to the shock of the
earthquake, Basuli and his warriors hastened back into the passageway in search
of Tarzan and two of their own number who were also missing.

They found the way blocked by jammed and distorted rock. For two days they
labored to tear a way through to their imprisoned friends; but when, after
Herculean efforts, they had unearthed but a few yards of the choked passage,
and discovered the mangled remains of one of their fellows they were forced to
the conclusion that Tarzan and the second Waziri also lay dead beneath the rock
mass farther in, beyond human aid, and no longer susceptible of it.

Again and again as they labored they called aloud the names of their master and
their comrade; but no answering call rewarded their listening ears. At last
they gave up the search. Tearfully they cast a last look at the shattered tomb
of their master, shouldered the heavy burden of gold that would at least
furnish comfort, if not happiness, to their bereaved and beloved mistress, and
made their mournful way back across the desolate valley of Opar, and downward
through the forests beyond toward the distant bungalow.

And as they marched what sorry fate was already drawing down upon that
peaceful, happy home!

From the north came Achmet Zek, riding to the summons of his lieutenant’s
letter. With him came his horde of renegade Arabs, outlawed marauders, these,
and equally degraded blacks, garnered from the more debased and ignorant tribes
of savage cannibals through whose countries the raider passed to and fro with
perfect impunity.

Mugambi, the ebon Hercules, who had shared the dangers and vicissitudes of his
beloved Bwana, from Jungle Island, almost to the headwaters of the Ugambi, was
the first to note the bold approach of the sinister caravan.

He it was whom Tarzan had left in charge of the warriors who remained to guard
Lady Greystoke, nor could a braver or more loyal guardian have been found in
any clime or upon any soil. A giant in stature, a savage, fearless warrior, the
huge black possessed also soul and judgment in proportion to his bulk and his
ferocity.

Not once since his master had departed had he been beyond sight or sound of the
bungalow, except when Lady Greystoke chose to canter across the broad plain, or
relieve the monotony of her loneliness by a brief hunting excursion. On such
occasions Mugambi, mounted upon a wiry Arab, had ridden close at her
horse’s heels.

The raiders were still a long way off when the warrior’s keen eyes
discovered them. For a time he stood scrutinizing the advancing party in
silence, then he turned and ran rapidly in the direction of the native huts
which lay a few hundred yards below the bungalow.

Here he called out to the lolling warriors. He issued orders rapidly. In
compliance with them the men seized upon their weapons and their shields. Some
ran to call in the workers from the fields and to warn the tenders of the
flocks and herds. The majority followed Mugambi back toward the bungalow.

The dust of the raiders was still a long distance away. Mugambi could not know
positively that it hid an enemy; but he had spent a lifetime of savage life in
savage Africa, and he had seen parties before come thus unheralded. Sometimes
they had come in peace and sometimes they had come in war—one could never
tell. It was well to be prepared. Mugambi did not like the haste with which the
strangers advanced.

The Greystoke bungalow was not well adapted for defense. No palisade surrounded
it, for, situated as it was, in the heart of loyal Waziri, its master had
anticipated no possibility of an attack in force by any enemy. Heavy, wooden
shutters there were to close the window apertures against hostile arrows, and
these Mugambi was engaged in lowering when Lady Greystoke appeared upon the
veranda.

“Why, Mugambi!” she exclaimed. “What has happened? Why are
you lowering the shutters?”

Mugambi pointed out across the plain to where a white-robed force of mounted
men was now distinctly visible.

“Arabs,” he explained. “They come for no good purpose in the
absence of the Great Bwana.”

Beyond the neat lawn and the flowering shrubs, Jane Clayton saw the glistening
bodies of her Waziri. The sun glanced from the tips of their metal-shod spears,
picked out the gorgeous colors in the feathers of their war bonnets, and
reflected the high-lights from the glossy skins of their broad shoulders and
high cheek bones.

Jane Clayton surveyed them with unmixed feelings of pride and affection. What
harm could befall her with such as these to protect her?

The raiders had halted now, a hundred yards out upon the plain. Mugambi had
hastened down to join his warriors. He advanced a few yards before them and
raising his voice hailed the strangers. Achmet Zek sat straight in his saddle
before his henchmen.

“Arab!” cried Mugambi. “What do you here?”

“We come in peace,” Achmet Zek called back.

“Then turn and go in peace,” replied Mugambi. “We do not want
you here. There can be no peace between Arab and Waziri.”

Mugambi, although not born in Waziri, had been adopted into the tribe, which
now contained no member more jealous of its traditions and its prowess than he.

Achmet Zek drew to one side of his horde, speaking to his men in a low voice. A
moment later, without warning, a ragged volley was poured into the ranks of the
Waziri. A couple of warriors fell, the others were for charging the attackers;
but Mugambi was a cautious as well as a brave leader. He knew the futility of
charging mounted men armed with muskets. He withdrew his force behind the
shrubbery of the garden. Some he dispatched to various other parts of the
grounds surrounding the bungalow. Half a dozen he sent to the bungalow itself
with instructions to keep their mistress within doors, and to protect her with
their lives.

Adopting the tactics of the desert fighters from which he had sprung, Achmet
Zek led his followers at a gallop in a long, thin line, describing a great
circle which drew closer and closer in toward the defenders.

At that part of the circle closest to the Waziri, a constant fusillade of shots
was poured into the bushes behind which the black warriors had concealed
themselves. The latter, on their part, loosed their slim shafts at the nearest
of the enemy.

The Waziri, justly famed for their archery, found no cause to blush for their
performance that day. Time and again some swarthy horseman threw hands above
his head and toppled from his saddle, pierced by a deadly arrow; but the
contest was uneven. The Arabs outnumbered the Waziri; their bullets penetrated
the shrubbery and found marks that the Arab riflemen had not even seen; and
then Achmet Zek circled inward a half mile above the bungalow, tore down a
section of the fence, and led his marauders within the grounds.

Across the fields they charged at a mad run. Not again did they pause to lower
fences, instead, they drove their wild mounts straight for them, clearing the
obstacles as lightly as winged gulls.

Mugambi saw them coming, and, calling those of his warriors who remained, ran
for the bungalow and the last stand. Upon the veranda Lady Greystoke stood,
rifle in hand. More than a single raider had accounted to her steady nerves and
cool aim for his outlawry; more than a single pony raced, riderless, in the
wake of the charging horde.

Mugambi pushed his mistress back into the greater security of the interior, and
with his depleted force prepared to make a last stand against the foe.

On came the Arabs, shouting and waving their long guns above their heads. Past
the veranda they raced, pouring a deadly fire into the kneeling Waziri who
discharged their volley of arrows from behind their long, oval
shields—shields well adapted, perhaps, to stop a hostile arrow, or
deflect a spear; but futile, quite, before the leaden missiles of the riflemen.

From beneath the half-raised shutters of the bungalow other bowmen did
effective service in greater security, and after the first assault, Mugambi
withdrew his entire force within the building.

Again and again the Arabs charged, at last forming a stationary circle about
the little fortress, and outside the effective range of the defenders’
arrows. From their new position they fired at will at the windows. One by one
the Waziri fell. Fewer and fewer were the arrows that replied to the guns of
the raiders, and at last Achmet Zek felt safe in ordering an assault.

Firing as they ran, the bloodthirsty horde raced for the veranda. A dozen of
them fell to the arrows of the defenders; but the majority reached the door.
Heavy gun butts fell upon it. The crash of splintered wood mingled with the
report of a rifle as Jane Clayton fired through the panels upon the relentless
foe.

Upon both sides of the door men fell; but at last the frail barrier gave to the
vicious assaults of the maddened attackers; it crumpled inward and a dozen
swarthy murderers leaped into the living-room. At the far end stood Jane
Clayton surrounded by the remnant of her devoted guardians. The floor was
covered by the bodies of those who already had given up their lives in her
defense. In the forefront of her protectors stood the giant Mugambi. The Arabs
raised their rifles to pour in the last volley that would effectually end all
resistance; but Achmet Zek roared out a warning order that stayed their trigger
fingers.

“Fire not upon the woman!” he cried. “Who harms her, dies.
Take the woman alive!”

The Arabs rushed across the room; the Waziri met them with their heavy spears.
Swords flashed, long-barreled pistols roared out their sullen death dooms.
Mugambi launched his spear at the nearest of the enemy with a force that drove
the heavy shaft completely through the Arab’s body, then he seized a
pistol from another, and grasping it by the barrel brained all who forced their
way too near his mistress.

Emulating his example the few warriors who remained to him fought like demons;
but one by one they fell, until only Mugambi remained to defend the life and
honor of the ape-man’s mate.

From across the room Achmet Zek watched the unequal struggle and urged on his
minions. In his hands was a jeweled musket. Slowly he raised it to his
shoulder, waiting until another move should place Mugambi at his mercy without
endangering the lives of the woman or any of his own followers.

At last the moment came, and Achmet Zek pulled the trigger. Without a sound the
brave Mugambi sank to the floor at the feet of Jane Clayton.

An instant later she was surrounded and disarmed. Without a word they dragged
her from the bungalow. A giant Negro lifted her to the pommel of his saddle,
and while the raiders searched the bungalow and outhouses for plunder he rode
with her beyond the gates and waited the coming of his master.

Jane Clayton saw the raiders lead the horses from the corral, and drive the
herds in from the fields. She saw her home plundered of all that represented
intrinsic worth in the eyes of the Arabs, and then she saw the torch applied,
and the flames lick up what remained.

And at last, when the raiders assembled after glutting their fury and their
avarice, and rode away with her toward the north, she saw the smoke and the
flames rising far into the heavens until the winding of the trail into the
thick forests hid the sad view from her eyes.

As the flames ate their way into the living-room, reaching out forked tongues
to lick up the bodies of the dead, one of that gruesome company whose bloody
welterings had long since been stilled, moved again. It was a huge black who
rolled over upon his side and opened blood-shot, suffering eyes. Mugambi, whom
the Arabs had left for dead, still lived. The hot flames were almost upon him
as he raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and crawled slowly
toward the doorway.

Again and again he sank weakly to the floor; but each time he rose again and
continued his pitiful way toward safety. After what seemed to him an
interminable time, during which the flames had become a veritable fiery furnace
at the far side of the room, the great black managed to reach the veranda, roll
down the steps, and crawl off into the cool safety of some nearby shrubbery.

All night he lay there, alternately unconscious and painfully sentient; and in
the latter state watching with savage hatred the lurid flames which still rose
from burning crib and hay cock. A prowling lion roared close at hand; but the
giant black was unafraid. There was place for but a single thought in his
savage mind—revenge! revenge! revenge!

CHAPTER VII.
The Jewel-Room of Opar

For some time Tarzan lay where he had fallen upon the floor of the treasure
chamber beneath the ruined walls of Opar. He lay as one dead; but he was not
dead. At length he stirred. His eyes opened upon the utter darkness of the
room. He raised his hand to his head and brought it away sticky with clotted
blood. He sniffed at his fingers, as a wild beast might sniff at the life-blood
upon a wounded paw.

Slowly he rose to a sitting posture—listening. No sound reached to the
buried depths of his sepulcher. He staggered to his feet, and groped his way
about among the tiers of ingots. What was he? Where was he? His head ached; but
otherwise he felt no ill effects from the blow that had felled him. The
accident he did not recall, nor did he recall aught of what had led up to it.

He let his hands grope unfamiliarly over his limbs, his torso, and his head. He
felt of the quiver at his back, the knife in his loin cloth. Something
struggled for recognition within his brain. Ah! he had it. There was something
missing. He crawled about upon the floor, feeling with his hands for the thing
that instinct warned him was gone. At last he found it—the heavy war
spear that in past years had formed so important a feature of his daily life,
almost of his very existence, so inseparably had it been connected with his
every action since the long-gone day that he had wrested his first spear from
the body of a black victim of his savage training.

Tarzan was sure that there was another and more lovely world than that which
was confined to the darkness of the four stone walls surrounding him. He
continued his search and at last found the doorway leading inward beneath the
city and the temple. This he followed, most incautiously. He came to the stone
steps leading upward to the higher level. He ascended them and continued onward
toward the well.

Nothing spurred his hurt memory to a recollection of past familiarity with his
surroundings. He blundered on through the darkness as though he were traversing
an open plain under the brilliance of a noonday sun, and suddenly there
happened that which had to happen under the circumstances of his rash advance.

He reached the brink of the well, stepped outward into space, lunged forward,
and shot downward into the inky depths below. Still clutching his spear, he
struck the water, and sank beneath its surface, plumbing the depths.

The fall had not injured him, and when he rose to the surface, he shook the
water from his eyes, and found that he could see. Daylight was filtering into
the well from the orifice far above his head. It illumined the inner walls
faintly. Tarzan gazed about him. On the level with the surface of the water he
saw a large opening in the dark and slimy wall. He swam to it, and drew himself
out upon the wet floor of a tunnel.

Along this he passed; but now he went warily, for Tarzan of the Apes was
learning. The unexpected pit had taught him care in the traversing of dark
passageways—he needed no second lesson.

For a long distance the passage went straight as an arrow. The floor was
slippery, as though at times the rising waters of the well overflowed and
flooded it. This, in itself, retarded Tarzan’s pace, for it was with
difficulty that he kept his footing.

The foot of a stairway ended the passage. Up this he made his way. It turned
back and forth many times, leading, at last, into a small, circular chamber,
the gloom of which was relieved by a faint light which found ingress through a
tubular shaft several feet in diameter which rose from the center of the
room’s ceiling, upward to a distance of a hundred feet or more, where it
terminated in a stone grating through which Tarzan could see a blue and sun-lit
sky.

Curiosity prompted the ape-man to investigate his surroundings. Several
metal-bound, copper-studded chests constituted the sole furniture of the round
room. Tarzan let his hands run over these. He felt of the copper studs, he
pulled upon the hinges, and at last, by chance, he raised the cover of one.

An exclamation of delight broke from his lips at sight of the pretty contents.
Gleaming and glistening in the subdued light of the chamber, lay a great tray
full of brilliant stones. Tarzan, reverted to the primitive by his accident,
had no conception of the fabulous value of his find. To him they were but
pretty pebbles. He plunged his hands into them and let the priceless gems
filter through his fingers. He went to others of the chests, only to find still
further stores of precious stones. Nearly all were cut, and from these he
gathered a handful and filled the pouch which dangled at his side—the
uncut stones he tossed back into the chests.

Unwittingly, the ape-man had stumbled upon the forgotten jewel-room of Opar.
For ages it had lain buried beneath the temple of the Flaming God, midway of
one of the many inky passages which the superstitious descendants of the
ancient Sun Worshipers had either dared not or cared not to explore.

Tiring at last of this diversion, Tarzan took up his way along the corridor
which led upward from the jewel-room by a steep incline. Winding and twisting,
but always tending upward, the tunnel led him nearer and nearer to the surface,
ending finally in a low-ceiled room, lighter than any that he had as yet
discovered.

Above him an opening in the ceiling at the upper end of a flight of concrete
steps revealed a brilliant sunlit scene. Tarzan viewed the vine-covered columns
in mild wonderment. He puckered his brows in an attempt to recall some
recollection of similar things. He was not sure of himself. There was a
tantalizing suggestion always present in his mind that something was eluding
him—that he should know many things which he did not know.

His earnest cogitation was rudely interrupted by a thunderous roar from the
opening above him. Following the roar came the cries and screams of men and
women. Tarzan grasped his spear more firmly and ascended the steps. A strange
sight met his eyes as he emerged from the semi-darkness of the cellar to the
brilliant light of the temple.

The creatures he saw before him he recognized for what they were—men and
women, and a huge lion. The men and women were scuttling for the safety of the
exits. The lion stood upon the body of one who had been less fortunate than the
others. He was in the center of the temple. Directly before Tarzan, a woman
stood beside a block of stone. Upon the top of the stone lay stretched a man,
and as the ape-man watched the scene, he saw the lion glare terribly at the two
who remained within the temple. Another thunderous roar broke from the savage
throat, the woman screamed and swooned across the body of the man stretched
prostrate upon the stone altar before her.

The lion advanced a few steps and crouched. The tip of his sinuous tail
twitched nervously. He was upon the point of charging when his eyes were
attracted toward the ape-man.

Werper, helpless upon the altar, saw the great carnivore preparing to leap upon
him. He saw the sudden change in the beast’s expression as his eyes
wandered to something beyond the altar and out of the Belgian’s view. He
saw the formidable creature rise to a standing position. A figure darted past
Werper. He saw a mighty arm upraised, and a stout spear shoot forward toward
the lion, to bury itself in the broad chest.

He saw the lion snapping and tearing at the weapon’s shaft, and he saw,
wonder of wonders, the naked giant who had hurled the missile charging upon the
great beast, only a long knife ready to meet those ferocious fangs and talons.

The lion reared up to meet this new enemy. The beast was growling frightfully,
and then upon the startled ears of the Belgian, broke a similar savage growl
from the lips of the man rushing upon the beast.

By a quick side step, Tarzan eluded the first swinging clutch of the
lion’s paws. Darting to the beast’s side, he leaped upon the tawny
back. His arms encircled the maned neck, his teeth sank deep into the
brute’s flesh. Roaring, leaping, rolling and struggling, the giant cat
attempted to dislodge this savage enemy, and all the while one great, brown
fist was driving a long keen blade repeatedly into the beast’s side.

During the battle, La regained consciousness. Spellbound, she stood above her
victim watching the spectacle. It seemed incredible that a human being could
best the king of beasts in personal encounter and yet before her very eyes
there was taking place just such an improbability.

At last Tarzan’s knife found the great heart, and with a final, spasmodic
struggle the lion rolled over upon the marble floor, dead. Leaping to his feet
the conqueror placed a foot upon the carcass of his kill, raised his face
toward the heavens, and gave voice to so hideous a cry that both La and Werper
trembled as it reverberated through the temple.

Then the ape-man turned, and Werper recognized him as the man he had left for
dead in the treasure room.

CHAPTER VIII.
The Escape from Opar

Werper was astounded. Could this creature be the same dignified Englishman who
had entertained him so graciously in his luxurious African home? Could this
wild beast, with blazing eyes, and bloody countenance, be at the same time a
man? Could the horrid, victory cry he had but just heard have been formed in
human throat?

Tarzan was eyeing the man and the woman, a puzzled expression in his eyes, but
there was no faintest tinge of recognition. It was as though he had discovered
some new species of living creature and was marveling at his find.

La was studying the ape-man’s features. Slowly her large eyes opened very
wide.

“Tarzan!” she exclaimed, and then, in the vernacular of the great
apes which constant association with the anthropoids had rendered the common
language of the Oparians: “You have come back to me! La has ignored the
mandates of her religion, waiting, always waiting for Tarzan—for her
Tarzan. She has taken no mate, for in all the world there was but one with whom
La would mate. And now you have come back! Tell me, O Tarzan, that it is for me
you have returned.”

Werper listened to the unintelligible jargon. He looked from La to Tarzan.
Would the latter understand this strange tongue? To the Belgian’s
surprise, the Englishman answered in a language evidently identical to hers.

“Tarzan,” he repeated, musingly. “Tarzan. The name sounds
familiar.”

“It is your name—you are Tarzan,” cried La.

“I am Tarzan?” The ape-man shrugged. “Well, it is a good
name—I know no other, so I will keep it; but I do not know you. I did not
come hither for you. Why I came, I do not know at all; neither do I know from
whence I came. Can you tell me?”

La shook her head. “I never knew,” she replied.

Tarzan turned toward Werper and put the same question to him; but in the
language of the great apes. The Belgian shook his head.

“I do not understand that language,” he said in French.

Without effort, and apparently without realizing that he made the change,
Tarzan repeated his question in French. Werper suddenly came to a full
realization of the magnitude of the injury of which Tarzan was a victim. The
man had lost his memory—no longer could he recollect past events. The
Belgian was upon the point of enlightening him, when it suddenly occurred to
him that by keeping Tarzan in ignorance, for a time at least, of his true
identity, it might be possible to turn the ape-man’s misfortune to his
own advantage.

“I cannot tell you from whence you came,” he said; “but this
I can tell you—if we do not get out of this horrible place we shall both
be slain upon this bloody altar. The woman was about to plunge her knife into
my heart when the lion interrupted the fiendish ritual. Come! Before they
recover from their fright and reassemble, let us find a way out of their
damnable temple.”

Tarzan turned again toward La.

“Why,” he asked, “would you have killed this man? Are you
hungry?”

The High Priestess cried out in disgust.

“Did he attempt to kill you?” continued Tarzan.

The woman shook her head.

“Then why should you have wished to kill him?” Tarzan was
determined to get to the bottom of the thing.

La raised her slender arm and pointed toward the sun.

“We were offering up his soul as a gift to the Flaming God,” she
said.

Tarzan looked puzzled. He was again an ape, and apes do not understand such
matters as souls and Flaming Gods.

“Do you wish to die?” he asked Werper.

The Belgian assured him, with tears in his eyes, that he did not wish to die.

“Very well then, you shall not,” said Tarzan. “Come! We will
go. This SHE would kill you and keep me for herself. It is no place anyway for
a Mangani. I should soon die, shut up behind these stone walls.”

He turned toward La. “We are going now,” he said.

The woman rushed forward and seized the ape-man’s hands in hers.

“Do not leave me!” she cried. “Stay, and you shall be High
Priest. La loves you. All Opar shall be yours. Slaves shall wait upon you.
Stay, Tarzan of the Apes, and let love reward you.”

The ape-man pushed the kneeling woman aside. “Tarzan does not desire
you,” he said, simply, and stepping to Werper’s side he cut the
Belgian’s bonds and motioned him to follow.

Panting—her face convulsed with rage, La sprang to her feet.

“Stay, you shall!” she screamed. “La will have you—if
she cannot have you alive, she will have you dead,” and raising her face
to the sun she gave voice to the same hideous shriek that Werper had heard once
before and Tarzan many times.

In answer to her cry a babel of voices broke from the surrounding chambers and
corridors.

“Come, Guardian Priests!” she cried. “The infidels have
profaned the holiest of the holies. Come! Strike terror to their hearts; defend
La and her altar; wash clean the temple with the blood of the polluters.”

Tarzan understood, though Werper did not. The former glanced at the Belgian and
saw that he was unarmed. Stepping quickly to La’s side the ape-man seized
her in his strong arms and though she fought with all the mad savagery of a
demon, he soon disarmed her, handing her long, sacrificial knife to Werper.

“You will need this,” he said, and then from each doorway a horde
of the monstrous, little men of Opar streamed into the temple.

They were armed with bludgeons and knives, and fortified in their courage by
fanatical hate and frenzy. Werper was terrified. Tarzan stood eyeing the foe in
proud disdain. Slowly he advanced toward the exit he had chosen to utilize in
making his way from the temple. A burly priest barred his way. Behind the first
was a score of others. Tarzan swung his heavy spear, clublike, down upon the
skull of the priest. The fellow collapsed, his head crushed.

Again and again the weapon fell as Tarzan made his way slowly toward the
doorway. Werper pressed close behind, casting backward glances toward the
shrieking, dancing mob menacing their rear. He held the sacrificial knife ready
to strike whoever might come within its reach; but none came. For a time he
wondered that they should so bravely battle with the giant ape-man, yet
hesitate to rush upon him, who was relatively so weak. Had they done so he knew
that he must have fallen at the first charge. Tarzan had reached the doorway
over the corpses of all that had stood to dispute his way, before Werper
guessed at the reason for his immunity. The priests feared the sacrificial
knife! Willingly would they face death and welcome it if it came while they
defended their High Priestess and her altar; but evidently there were deaths,
and deaths. Some strange superstition must surround that polished blade, that
no Oparian cared to chance a death thrust from it, yet gladly rushed to the
slaughter of the ape-man’s flaying spear.

Once outside the temple court, Werper communicated his discovery to Tarzan. The
ape-man grinned, and let Werper go before him, brandishing the jeweled and holy
weapon. Like leaves before a gale, the Oparians scattered in all directions and
Tarzan and the Belgian found a clear passage through the corridors and chambers
of the ancient temple.

The Belgian’s eyes went wide as they passed through the room of the seven
pillars of solid gold. With ill-concealed avarice he looked upon the age-old,
golden tablets set in the walls of nearly every room and down the sides of many
of the corridors. To the ape-man all this wealth appeared to mean nothing.

On the two went, chance leading them toward the broad avenue which lay between
the stately piles of the half-ruined edifices and the inner wall of the city.
Great apes jabbered at them and menaced them; but Tarzan answered them after
their own kind, giving back taunt for taunt, insult for insult, challenge for
challenge.

Werper saw a hairy bull swing down from a broken column and advance,
stiff-legged and bristling, toward the naked giant. The yellow fangs were
bared, angry snarls and barkings rumbled threateningly through the thick and
hanging lips.

The Belgian watched his companion. To his horror, he saw the man stoop until
his closed knuckles rested upon the ground as did those of the anthropoid. He
saw him circle, stiff-legged about the circling ape. He heard the same bestial
barkings and growlings issue from the human throat that were coming from the
mouth of the brute. Had his eyes been closed he could not have known but that
two giant apes were bridling for combat.

But there was no battle. It ended as the majority of such jungle encounters
end—one of the boasters loses his nerve, and becomes suddenly interested
in a blowing leaf, a beetle, or the lice upon his hairy stomach.

In this instance it was the anthropoid that retired in stiff dignity to inspect
an unhappy caterpillar, which he presently devoured. For a moment Tarzan seemed
inclined to pursue the argument. He swaggered truculently, stuck out his chest,
roared and advanced closer to the bull. It was with difficulty that Werper
finally persuaded him to leave well enough alone and continue his way from the
ancient city of the Sun Worshipers.

The two searched for nearly an hour before they found the narrow exit through
the inner wall. From there the well-worn trail led them beyond the outer
fortification to the desolate valley of Opar.

Tarzan had no idea, in so far as Werper could discover, as to where he was or
whence he came. He wandered aimlessly about, searching for food, which he
discovered beneath small rocks, or hiding in the shade of the scant brush which
dotted the ground.

The Belgian was horrified by the hideous menu of his companion. Beetles,
rodents and caterpillars were devoured with seeming relish. Tarzan was indeed
an ape again.

At last Werper succeeded in leading his companion toward the distant hills
which mark the northwestern boundary of the valley, and together the two set
out in the direction of the Greystoke bungalow.

What purpose prompted the Belgian in leading the victim of his treachery and
greed back toward his former home it is difficult to guess, unless it was that
without Tarzan there could be no ransom for Tarzan’s wife.

That night they camped in the valley beyond the hills, and as they sat before a
little fire where cooked a wild pig that had fallen to one of Tarzan’s
arrows, the latter sat lost in speculation. He seemed continually to be trying
to grasp some mental image which as constantly eluded him.

At last he opened the leathern pouch which hung at his side. From it he poured
into the palm of his hand a quantity of glittering gems. The firelight playing
upon them conjured a multitude of scintillating rays, and as the wide eyes of
the Belgian looked on in rapt fascination, the man’s expression at last
acknowledged a tangible purpose in courting the society of the ape-man.

CHAPTER IX.
The Theft of the Jewels

For two days Werper sought for the party that had accompanied him from the camp
to the barrier cliffs; but not until late in the afternoon of the second day
did he find clew to its whereabouts, and then in such gruesome form that he was
totally unnerved by the sight.

In an open glade he came upon the bodies of three of the blacks, terribly
mutilated, nor did it require considerable deductive power to explain their
murder. Of the little party only these three had not been slaves. The others,
evidently tempted to hope for freedom from their cruel Arab master, had taken
advantage of their separation from the main camp, to slay the three
representatives of the hated power which held them in slavery, and vanish into
the jungle.

Cold sweat exuded from Werper’s forehead as he contemplated the fate
which chance had permitted him to escape, for had he been present when the
conspiracy bore fruit, he, too, must have been of the garnered.

Tarzan showed not the slightest surprise or interest in the discovery. Inherent
in him was a calloused familiarity with violent death. The refinements of his
recent civilization expunged by the force of the sad calamity which had
befallen him, left only the primitive sensibilities which his childhood’s
training had imprinted indelibly upon the fabric of his mind.

The training of Kala, the examples and precepts of Kerchak, of Tublat, and of
Terkoz now formed the basis of his every thought and action. He retained a
mechanical knowledge of French and English speech. Werper had spoken to him in
French, and Tarzan had replied in the same tongue without conscious realization
that he had departed from the anthropoidal speech in which he had addressed La.
Had Werper used English, the result would have been the same.

Again, that night, as the two sat before their camp fire, Tarzan played with
his shining baubles. Werper asked him what they were and where he had found
them. The ape-man replied that they were gay-colored stones, with which he
purposed fashioning a necklace, and that he had found them far beneath the
sacrificial court of the temple of the Flaming God.

Werper was relieved to find that Tarzan had no conception of the value of the
gems. This would make it easier for the Belgian to obtain possession of them.
Possibly the man would give them to him for the asking. Werper reached out his
hand toward the little pile that Tarzan had arranged upon a piece of flat wood
before him.

“Let me see them,” said the Belgian.

Tarzan placed a large palm over his treasure. He bared his fighting fangs, and
growled. Werper withdrew his hand more quickly than he had advanced it. Tarzan
resumed his playing with the gems, and his conversation with Werper as though
nothing unusual had occurred. He had but exhibited the beast’s jealous
protective instinct for a possession. When he killed he shared the meat with
Werper; but had Werper ever, by accident, laid a hand upon Tarzan’s
share, he would have aroused the same savage, and resentful warning.

From that occurrence dated the beginning of a great fear in the breast of the
Belgian for his savage companion. He had never understood the transformation
that had been wrought in Tarzan by the blow upon his head, other than to
attribute it to a form of amnesia. That Tarzan had once been, in truth, a
savage, jungle beast, Werper had not known, and so, of course, he could not
guess that the man had reverted to the state in which his childhood and young
manhood had been spent.

Now Werper saw in the Englishman a dangerous maniac, whom the slightest
untoward accident might turn upon him with rending fangs. Not for a moment did
Werper attempt to delude himself into the belief that he could defend himself
successfully against an attack by the ape-man. His one hope lay in eluding him,
and making for the far distant camp of Achmet Zek as rapidly as he could; but
armed only with the sacrificial knife, Werper shrank from attempting the
journey through the jungle. Tarzan constituted a protection that was by no
means despicable, even in the face of the larger carnivora, as Werper had
reason to acknowledge from the evidence he had witnessed in the Oparian temple.

Too, Werper had his covetous soul set upon the pouch of gems, and so he was
torn between the various emotions of avarice and fear. But avarice it was that
burned most strongly in his breast, to the end that he dared the dangers and
suffered the terrors of constant association with him he thought a mad man,
rather than give up the hope of obtaining possession of the fortune which the
contents of the little pouch represented.

Achmet Zek should know nothing of these—these would be for Werper alone,
and so soon as he could encompass his design he would reach the coast and take
passage for America, where he could conceal himself beneath the veil of a new
identity and enjoy to some measure the fruits of his theft. He had it all
planned out, did Lieutenant Albert Werper, living in anticipation the luxurious
life of the idle rich. He even found himself regretting that America was so
provincial, and that nowhere in the new world was a city that might compare
with his beloved Brussels.

It was upon the third day of their progress from Opar that the keen ears of
Tarzan caught the sound of men behind them. Werper heard nothing above the
humming of the jungle insects, and the chattering life of the lesser monkeys
and the birds.

For a time Tarzan stood in statuesque silence, listening, his sensitive
nostrils dilating as he assayed each passing breeze. Then he withdrew Werper
into the concealment of thick brush, and waited. Presently, along the game
trail that Werper and Tarzan had been following, there came in sight a sleek,
black warrior, alert and watchful.

In single file behind him, there followed, one after another, near fifty
others, each burdened with two dull-yellow ingots lashed upon his back. Werper
recognized the party immediately as that which had accompanied Tarzan on his
journey to Opar. He glanced at the ape-man; but in the savage, watchful eyes he
saw no recognition of Basuli and those other loyal Waziri.

When all had passed, Tarzan rose and emerged from concealment. He looked down
the trail in the direction the party had gone. Then he turned to Werper.

“We will follow and slay them,” he said.

“Why?” asked the Belgian.

“They are black,” explained Tarzan. “It was a black who
killed Kala. They are the enemies of the Manganis.”

Werper did not relish the idea of engaging in a battle with Basuli and his
fierce fighting men. And, again, he had welcomed the sight of them returning
toward the Greystoke bungalow, for he had begun to have doubts as to his
ability to retrace his steps to the Waziri country. Tarzan, he knew, had not
the remotest idea of whither they were going. By keeping at a safe distance
behind the laden warriors, they would have no difficulty in following them
home. Once at the bungalow, Werper knew the way to the camp of Achmet Zek.
There was still another reason why he did not wish to interfere with the
Waziri—they were bearing the great burden of treasure in the direction he
wished it borne. The farther they took it, the less the distance that he and
Achmet Zek would have to transport it.

He argued with the ape-man therefore, against the latter’s desire to
exterminate the blacks, and at last he prevailed upon Tarzan to follow them in
peace, saying that he was sure they would lead them out of the forest into a
rich country, teeming with game.

It was many marches from Opar to the Waziri country; but at last came the hour
when Tarzan and the Belgian, following the trail of the warriors, topped the
last rise, and saw before them the broad Waziri plain, the winding river, and
the distant forests to the north and west.

A mile or more ahead of them, the line of warriors was creeping like a giant
caterpillar through the tall grasses of the plain. Beyond, grazing herds of
zebra, hartebeest, and topi dotted the level landscape, while closer to the
river a bull buffalo, his head and shoulders protruding from the reeds watched
the advancing blacks for a moment, only to turn at last and disappear into the
safety of his dank and gloomy retreat.

Tarzan looked out across the familiar vista with no faintest gleam of
recognition in his eyes. He saw the game animals, and his mouth watered; but he
did not look in the direction of his bungalow. Werper, however, did. A puzzled
expression entered the Belgian’s eyes. He shaded them with his palms and
gazed long and earnestly toward the spot where the bungalow had stood. He could
not credit the testimony of his eyes—there was no bungalow—no
barns—no out-houses. The corrals, the hay stacks—all were gone.
What could it mean?

And then, slowly there filtered into Werper’s consciousness an
explanation of the havoc that had been wrought in that peaceful valley since
last his eyes had rested upon it—Achmet Zek had been there!

Basuli and his warriors had noted the devastation the moment they had come in
sight of the farm. Now they hastened on toward it talking excitedly among
themselves in animated speculation upon the cause and meaning of the
catastrophe.

When, at last they crossed the trampled garden and stood before the charred
ruins of their master’s bungalow, their greatest fears became convictions
in the light of the evidence about them.

Remnants of human dead, half devoured by prowling hyenas and others of the
carnivora which infested the region, lay rotting upon the ground, and among the
corpses remained sufficient remnants of their clothing and ornaments to make
clear to Basuli the frightful story of the disaster that had befallen his
master’s house.

“The Arabs,” he said, as his men clustered about him.

The Waziri gazed about in mute rage for several minutes. Everywhere they
encountered only further evidence of the ruthlessness of the cruel enemy that
had come during the Great Bwana’s absence and laid waste his property.

“What did they with ‘Lady’?” asked one of the blacks.

They had always called Lady Greystoke thus.

“The women they would have taken with them,” said Basuli.
“Our women and his.”

A giant black raised his spear above his head, and gave voice to a savage cry
of rage and hate. The others followed his example. Basuli silenced them with a
gesture.

“This is no time for useless noises of the mouth,” he said.
“The Great Bwana has taught us that it is acts by which things are done,
not words. Let us save our breath—we shall need it all to follow up the
Arabs and slay them. If ‘Lady’ and our women live the greater the
need of haste, and warriors cannot travel fast upon empty lungs.”

From the shelter of the reeds along the river, Werper and Tarzan watched the
blacks. They saw them dig a trench with their knives and fingers. They saw them
lay their yellow burdens in it and scoop the overturned earth back over the
tops of the ingots.

Tarzan seemed little interested, after Werper had assured him that that which
they buried was not good to eat; but Werper was intensely interested. He would
have given much had he had his own followers with him, that he might take away
the treasure as soon as the blacks left, for he was sure that they would leave
this scene of desolation and death as soon as possible.

The treasure buried, the blacks removed themselves a short distance up wind
from the fetid corpses, where they made camp, that they might rest before
setting out in pursuit of the Arabs. It was already dusk. Werper and Tarzan sat
devouring some pieces of meat they had brought from their last camp. The
Belgian was occupied with his plans for the immediate future. He was positive
that the Waziri would pursue Achmet Zek, for he knew enough of savage warfare,
and of the characteristics of the Arabs and their degraded followers to guess
that they had carried the Waziri women off into slavery. This alone would
assure immediate pursuit by so warlike a people as the Waziri.

Werper felt that he should find the means and the opportunity to push on ahead,
that he might warn Achmet Zek of the coming of Basuli, and also of the location
of the buried treasure. What the Arab would now do with Lady Greystoke, in view
of the mental affliction of her husband, Werper neither knew nor cared. It was
enough that the golden treasure buried upon the site of the burned bungalow was
infinitely more valuable than any ransom that would have occurred even to the
avaricious mind of the Arab, and if Werper could persuade the raider to share
even a portion of it with him he would be well satisfied.

But by far the most important consideration, to Werper, at least, was the
incalculably valuable treasure in the little leathern pouch at Tarzan’s
side. If he could but obtain possession of this! He must! He would!

His eyes wandered to the object of his greed. They measured Tarzan’s
giant frame, and rested upon the rounded muscles of his arms. It was hopeless.
What could he, Werper, hope to accomplish, other than his own death, by an
attempt to wrest the gems from their savage owner?

Disconsolate, Werper threw himself upon his side. His head was pillowed on one
arm, the other rested across his face in such a way that his eyes were hidden
from the ape-man, though one of them was fastened upon him from beneath the
shadow of the Belgian’s forearm. For a time he lay thus, glowering at
Tarzan, and originating schemes for plundering him of his
treasure—schemes that were discarded as futile as rapidly as they were
born.

Tarzan presently let his own eyes rest upon Werper. The Belgian saw that he was
being watched, and lay very still. After a few moments he simulated the regular
breathing of deep slumber.

Tarzan had been thinking. He had seen the Waziri bury their belongings. Werper
had told him that they were hiding them lest some one find them and take them
away. This seemed to Tarzan a splendid plan for safeguarding valuables. Since
Werper had evinced a desire to possess his glittering pebbles, Tarzan, with the
suspicions of a savage, had guarded the baubles, of whose worth he was entirely
ignorant, as zealously as though they spelled life or death to him.

For a long time the ape-man sat watching his companion. At last, convinced that
he slept, Tarzan withdrew his hunting knife and commenced to dig a hole in the
ground before him. With the blade he loosened up the earth, and with his hands
he scooped it out until he had excavated a little cavity a few inches in
diameter, and five or six inches in depth. Into this he placed the pouch of
jewels. Werper almost forgot to breathe after the fashion of a sleeper as he
saw what the ape-man was doing—he scarce repressed an ejaculation of
satisfaction.

Tarzan become suddenly rigid as his keen ears noted the cessation of the
regular inspirations and expirations of his companion. His narrowed eyes bored
straight down upon the Belgian. Werper felt that he was lost—he must risk
all on his ability to carry on the deception. He sighed, threw both arms
outward, and turned over on his back mumbling as though in the throes of a bad
dream. A moment later he resumed the regular breathing.

Now he could not watch Tarzan, but he was sure that the man sat for a long time
looking at him. Then, faintly, Werper heard the other’s hands scraping
dirt, and later patting it down. He knew then that the jewels were buried.

It was an hour before Werper moved again, then he rolled over facing Tarzan and
opened his eyes. The ape-man slept. By reaching out his hand Werper could touch
the spot where the pouch was buried.

For a long time he lay watching and listening. He moved about, making more
noise than necessary, yet Tarzan did not awaken. He drew the sacrificial knife
from his belt, and plunged it into the ground. Tarzan did not move. Cautiously
the Belgian pushed the blade downward through the loose earth above the pouch.
He felt the point touch the soft, tough fabric of the leather. Then he pried
down upon the handle. Slowly the little mound of loose earth rose and parted.
An instant later a corner of the pouch came into view. Werper pulled it from
its hiding place, and tucked it in his shirt. Then he refilled the hole and
pressed the dirt carefully down as it had been before.

Greed had prompted him to an act, the discovery of which by his companion could
lead only to the most frightful consequences for Werper. Already he could
almost feel those strong, white fangs burying themselves in his neck. He
shuddered. Far out across the plain a leopard screamed, and in the dense reeds
behind him some great beast moved on padded feet.

Werper feared these prowlers of the night; but infinitely more he feared the
just wrath of the human beast sleeping at his side. With utmost caution the
Belgian arose. Tarzan did not move. Werper took a few steps toward the plain
and the distant forest to the northwest, then he paused and fingered the hilt
of the long knife in his belt. He turned and looked down upon the sleeper.

“Why not?” he mused. “Then I should be safe.”

He returned and bent above the ape-man. Clutched tightly in his hand was the
sacrificial knife of the High Priestess of the Flaming God!

CHAPTER X.
Achmet Zek Sees the Jewels

Mugambi, weak and suffering, had dragged his painful way along the trail of the
retreating raiders. He could move but slowly, resting often; but savage hatred
and an equally savage desire for vengeance kept him to his task. As the days
passed his wounds healed and his strength returned, until at last his giant
frame had regained all of its former mighty powers. Now he went more rapidly;
but the mounted Arabs had covered a great distance while the wounded black had
been painfully crawling after them.

They had reached their fortified camp, and there Achmet Zek awaited the return
of his lieutenant, Albert Werper. During the long, rough journey, Jane Clayton
had suffered more in anticipation of her impending fate than from the hardships
of the road.

Achmet Zek had not deigned to acquaint her with his intentions regarding her
future. She prayed that she had been captured in the hope of ransom, for if
such should prove the case, no great harm would befall her at the hands of the
Arabs; but there was the chance, the horrid chance, that another fate awaited
her. She had heard of many women, among whom were white women, who had been
sold by outlaws such as Achmet Zek into the slavery of black harems, or taken
farther north into the almost equally hideous existence of some Turkish
seraglio.

Jane Clayton was of sterner stuff than that which bends in spineless terror
before danger. Until hope proved futile she would not give it up; nor did she
entertain thoughts of self-destruction only as a final escape from dishonor. So
long as Tarzan lived there was every reason to expect succor. No man nor beast
who roamed the savage continent could boast the cunning and the powers of her
lord and master. To her, he was little short of omnipotent in his native
world—this world of savage beasts and savage men. Tarzan would come, and
she would be rescued and avenged, of that she was certain. She counted the days
that must elapse before he would return from Opar and discover what had
transpired during his absence. After that it would be but a short time before
he had surrounded the Arab stronghold and punished the motley crew of
wrongdoers who inhabited it.

That he could find her she had no slightest doubt. No spoor, however faint,
could elude the keen vigilance of his senses. To him, the trail of the raiders
would be as plain as the printed page of an open book to her.

And while she hoped, there came through the dark jungle another. Terrified by
night and by day, came Albert Werper. A dozen times he had escaped the claws
and fangs of the giant carnivora only by what seemed a miracle to him. Armed
with nothing more than the knife he had brought with him from Opar, he had made
his way through as savage a country as yet exists upon the face of the globe.

By night he had slept in trees. By day he had stumbled fearfully on, often
taking refuge among the branches when sight or sound of some great cat warned
him from danger. But at last he had come within sight of the palisade behind
which were his fierce companions.

At almost the same time Mugambi came out of the jungle before the walled
village. As he stood in the shadow of a great tree, reconnoitering, he saw a
man, ragged and disheveled, emerge from the jungle almost at his elbow.
Instantly he recognized the newcomer as he who had been a guest of his master
before the latter had departed for Opar.

The black was upon the point of hailing the Belgian when something stayed him.
He saw the white man walking confidently across the clearing toward the village
gate. No sane man thus approached a village in this part of Africa unless he
was sure of a friendly welcome. Mugambi waited. His suspicions were aroused.

He heard Werper halloo; he saw the gates swing open, and he witnessed the
surprised and friendly welcome that was accorded the erstwhile guest of Lord
and Lady Greystoke. A light broke upon the understanding of Mugambi. This white
man had been a traitor and a spy. It was to him they owed the raid during the
absence of the Great Bwana. To his hate for the Arabs, Mugambi added a still
greater hate for the white spy.

Within the village Werper passed hurriedly toward the silken tent of Achmet
Zek. The Arab arose as his lieutenant entered. His face showed surprise as he
viewed the tattered apparel of the Belgian.

“What has happened?” he asked.

Werper narrated all, save the little matter of the pouch of gems which were now
tightly strapped about his waist, beneath his clothing. The Arab’s eyes
narrowed greedily as his henchman described the treasure that the Waziri had
buried beside the ruins of the Greystoke bungalow.

“It will be a simple matter now to return and get it,” said Achmet
Zek. “First we will await the coming of the rash Waziri, and after we
have slain them we may take our time to the treasure—none will disturb it
where it lies, for we shall leave none alive who knows of its existence.

“And the woman?” asked Werper.

“I shall sell her in the north,” replied the raider. “It is
the only way, now. She should bring a good price.”

The Belgian nodded. He was thinking rapidly. If he could persuade Achmet Zek to
send him in command of the party which took Lady Greystoke north it would give
him the opportunity he craved to make his escape from his chief. He would
forego a share of the gold, if he could but get away unscathed with the jewels.

He knew Achmet Zek well enough by this time to know that no member of his band
ever was voluntarily released from the service of Achmet Zek. Most of the few
who deserted were recaptured. More than once had Werper listened to their
agonized screams as they were tortured before being put to death. The Belgian
had no wish to take the slightest chance of recapture.

“Who will go north with the woman,” he asked, “while we are
returning for the gold that the Waziri buried by the bungalow of the
Englishman?”

Achmet Zek thought for a moment. The buried gold was of much greater value than
the price the woman would bring. It was necessary to rid himself of her as
quickly as possible and it was also well to obtain the gold with the least
possible delay. Of all his followers, the Belgian was the most logical
lieutenant to intrust with the command of one of the parties. An Arab, as
familiar with the trails and tribes as Achmet Zek himself, might collect the
woman’s price and make good his escape into the far north. Werper, on the
other hand, could scarce make his escape alone through a country hostile to
Europeans while the men he would send with the Belgian could be carefully
selected with a view to preventing Werper from persuading any considerable
portion of his command to accompany him should he contemplate desertion of his
chief.

At last the Arab spoke: “It is not necessary that we both return for the
gold. You shall go north with the woman, carrying a letter to a friend of mine
who is always in touch with the best markets for such merchandise, while I
return for the gold. We can meet again here when our business is
concluded.”

Werper could scarce disguise the joy with which he received this welcome
decision. And that he did entirely disguise it from the keen and suspicious
eyes of Achmet Zek is open to question. However, the decision reached, the Arab
and his lieutenant discussed the details of their forthcoming ventures for a
short time further, when Werper made his excuses and returned to his own tent
for the comforts and luxury of a long-desired bath and shave.

Having bathed, the Belgian tied a small hand mirror to a cord sewn to the rear
wall of his tent, placed a rude chair beside an equally rude table that stood
beside the glass, and proceeded to remove the rough stubble from his face.

In the catalog of masculine pleasures there is scarce one which imparts a
feeling of greater comfort and refreshment than follows a clean shave, and now,
with weariness temporarily banished, Albert Werper sprawled in his rickety
chair to enjoy a final cigaret before retiring. His thumbs, tucked in his belt
in lazy support of the weight of his arms, touched the belt which held the
jewel pouch about his waist. He tingled with excitement as he let his mind
dwell upon the value of the treasure, which, unknown to all save himself, lay
hidden beneath his clothing.

What would Achmet Zek say, if he knew? Werper grinned. How the old
rascal’s eyes would pop could he but have a glimpse of those
scintillating beauties! Werper had never yet had an opportunity to feast his
eyes for any great length of time upon them. He had not even counted
them—only roughly had he guessed at their value.

He unfastened the belt and drew the pouch from its hiding place. He was alone.
The balance of the camp, save the sentries, had retired—none would enter
the Belgian’s tent. He fingered the pouch, feeling out the shapes and
sizes of the precious, little nodules within. He hefted the bag, first in one
palm, then in the other, and at last he wheeled his chair slowly around before
the table, and in the rays of his small lamp let the glittering gems roll out
upon the rough wood.

The refulgent rays transformed the interior of the soiled and squalid canvas to
the splendor of a palace in the eyes of the dreaming man. He saw the gilded
halls of pleasure that would open their portals to the possessor of the wealth
which lay scattered upon this stained and dented table top. He dreamed of joys
and luxuries and power which always had been beyond his grasp, and as he
dreamed his gaze lifted from the table, as the gaze of a dreamer will, to a far
distant goal above the mean horizon of terrestrial commonplaceness.

Unseeing, his eyes rested upon the shaving mirror which still hung upon the
tent wall above the table; but his sight was focused far beyond. And then a
reflection moved within the polished surface of the tiny glass, the man’s
eyes shot back out of space to the mirror’s face, and in it he saw
reflected the grim visage of Achmet Zek, framed in the flaps of the tent
doorway behind him.

Werper stifled a gasp of dismay. With rare self-possession he let his gaze
drop, without appearing to have halted upon the mirror until it rested again
upon the gems. Without haste, he replaced them in the pouch, tucked the latter
into his shirt, selected a cigaret from his case, lighted it and rose. Yawning,
and stretching his arms above his head, he turned slowly toward the opposite
end of the tent. The face of Achmet Zek had disappeared from the opening.

To say that Albert Werper was terrified would be putting it mildly. He realized
that he not only had sacrificed his treasure; but his life as well. Achmet Zek
would never permit the wealth that he had discovered to slip through his
fingers, nor would he forgive the duplicity of a lieutenant who had gained
possession of such a treasure without offering to share it with his chief.

Slowly the Belgian prepared for bed. If he were being watched, he could not
know; but if so the watcher saw no indication of the nervous excitement which
the European strove to conceal. When ready for his blankets, the man crossed to
the little table and extinguished the light.

It was two hours later that the flaps at the front of the tent separated
silently and gave entrance to a dark-robed figure, which passed noiselessly
from the darkness without to the darkness within. Cautiously the prowler
crossed the interior. In one hand was a long knife. He came at last to the pile
of blankets spread upon several rugs close to one of the tent walls.

Lightly, his fingers sought and found the bulk beneath the blankets—the
bulk that should be Albert Werper. They traced out the figure of a man, and
then an arm shot upward, poised for an instant and descended. Again and again
it rose and fell, and each time the long blade of the knife buried itself in
the thing beneath the blankets. But there was an initial lifelessness in the
silent bulk that gave the assassin momentary wonder. Feverishly he threw back
the coverlets, and searched with nervous hands for the pouch of jewels which he
expected to find concealed upon his victim’s body.

An instant later he rose with a curse upon his lips. It was Achmet Zek, and he
cursed because he had discovered beneath the blankets of his lieutenant only a
pile of discarded clothing arranged in the form and semblance of a sleeping
man—Albert Werper had fled.

Out into the village ran the chief, calling in angry tones to the sleepy Arabs,
who tumbled from their tents in answer to his voice. But though they searched
the village again and again they found no trace of the Belgian. Foaming with
anger, Achmet Zek called his followers to horse, and though the night was
pitchy black they set out to scour the adjoining forest for their quarry.

As they galloped from the open gates, Mugambi, hiding in a nearby bush,
slipped, unseen, within the palisade. A score of blacks crowded about the
entrance to watch the searchers depart, and as the last of them passed out of
the village the blacks seized the portals and drew them to, and Mugambi lent a
hand in the work as though the best of his life had been spent among the
raiders.

In the darkness he passed, unchallenged, as one of their number, and as they
returned from the gates to their respective tents and huts, Mugambi melted into
the shadows and disappeared.

For an hour he crept about in the rear of the various huts and tents in an
effort to locate that in which his master’s mate was imprisoned. One
there was which he was reasonably assured contained her, for it was the only
hut before the door of which a sentry had been posted. Mugambi was crouching in
the shadow of this structure, just around the corner from the unsuspecting
guard, when another approached to relieve his comrade.

“The prisoner is safe within?” asked the newcomer.

“She is,” replied the other, “for none has passed this
doorway since I came.”

The new sentry squatted beside the door, while he whom he had relieved made his
way to his own hut. Mugambi slunk closer to the corner of the building. In one
powerful hand he gripped a heavy knob-stick. No sign of elation disturbed his
phlegmatic calm, yet inwardly he was aroused to joy by the proof he had just
heard that “Lady” really was within.

The sentry’s back was toward the corner of the hut which hid the giant
black. The fellow did not see the huge form which silently loomed behind him.
The knob-stick swung upward in a curve, and downward again. There was the sound
of a dull thud, the crushing of heavy bone, and the sentry slumped into a
silent, inanimate lump of clay.

A moment later Mugambi was searching the interior of the hut. At first slowly,
calling, “Lady!” in a low whisper, and finally with almost frantic
haste, until the truth presently dawned upon him—the hut was empty!

CHAPTER XI.
Tarzan Becomes a Beast Again

For a moment Werper had stood above the sleeping ape-man, his murderous knife
poised for the fatal thrust; but fear stayed his hand. What if the first blow
should fail to drive the point to his victim’s heart? Werper shuddered in
contemplation of the disastrous consequences to himself. Awakened, and even
with a few moments of life remaining, the giant could literally tear his
assailant to pieces should he choose, and the Belgian had no doubt but that
Tarzan would so choose.

Again came the soft sound of padded footsteps in the reeds—closer this
time. Werper abandoned his design. Before him stretched the wide plain and
escape. The jewels were in his possession. To remain longer was to risk death
at the hands of Tarzan, or the jaws of the hunter creeping ever nearer.
Turning, he slunk away through the night, toward the distant forest.

Tarzan slept on. Where were those uncanny, guardian powers that had formerly
rendered him immune from the dangers of surprise? Could this dull sleeper be
the alert, sensitive Tarzan of old?

Perhaps the blow upon his head had numbed his senses, temporarily—who may
say? Closer crept the stealthy creature through the reeds. The rustling curtain
of vegetation parted a few paces from where the sleeper lay, and the massive
head of a lion appeared. The beast surveyed the ape-man intently for a moment,
then he crouched, his hind feet drawn well beneath him, his tail lashing from
side to side.

It was the beating of the beast’s tail against the reeds which awakened
Tarzan. Jungle folk do not awaken slowly—instantly, full consciousness
and full command of their every faculty returns to them from the depth of
profound slumber.

Even as Tarzan opened his eyes he was upon his feet, his spear grasped firmly
in his hand and ready for attack. Again was he Tarzan of the Apes, sentient,
vigilant, ready.

No two lions have identical characteristics, nor does the same lion invariably
act similarly under like circumstances. Whether it was surprise, fear or
caution which prompted the lion crouching ready to spring upon the man, is
immaterial—the fact remains that he did not carry out his original
design, he did not spring at the man at all, but, instead, wheeled and sprang
back into the reeds as Tarzan arose and confronted him.

The ape-man shrugged his broad shoulders and looked about for his companion.
Werper was nowhere to be seen. At first Tarzan suspected that the man had been
seized and dragged off by another lion, but upon examination of the ground he
soon discovered that the Belgian had gone away alone out into the plain.

For a moment he was puzzled; but presently came to the conclusion that Werper
had been frightened by the approach of the lion, and had sneaked off in terror.
A sneer touched Tarzan’s lips as he pondered the man’s
act—the desertion of a comrade in time of danger, and without warning.
Well, if that was the sort of creature Werper was, Tarzan wished nothing more
of him. He had gone, and for all the ape-man cared, he might remain
away—Tarzan would not search for him.

A hundred yards from where he stood grew a large tree, alone upon the edge of
the reedy jungle. Tarzan made his way to it, clambered into it, and finding a
comfortable crotch among its branches, reposed himself for uninterrupted sleep
until morning.

And when morning came Tarzan slept on long after the sun had risen. His mind,
reverted to the primitive, was untroubled by any more serious obligations than
those of providing sustenance, and safeguarding his life. Therefore, there was
nothing to awaken for until danger threatened, or the pangs of hunger assailed.
It was the latter which eventually aroused him.

Opening his eyes, he stretched his giant thews, yawned, rose and gazed about
him through the leafy foliage of his retreat. Across the wasted meadowlands and
fields of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, Tarzan of the Apes looked, as a
stranger, upon the moving figures of Basuli and his braves as they prepared
their morning meal and made ready to set out upon the expedition which Basuli
had planned after discovering the havoc and disaster which had befallen the
estate of his dead master.

The ape-man eyed the blacks with curiosity. In the back of his brain loitered a
fleeting sense of familiarity with all that he saw, yet he could not connect
any of the various forms of life, animate and inanimate, which had fallen
within the range of his vision since he had emerged from the darkness of the
pits of Opar, with any particular event of the past.

Hazily he recalled a grim and hideous form, hairy, ferocious. A vague
tenderness dominated his savage sentiments as this phantom memory struggled for
recognition. His mind had reverted to his childhood days—it was the
figure of the giant she-ape, Kala, that he saw; but only half recognized. He
saw, too, other grotesque, manlike forms. They were of Terkoz, Tublat, Kerchak,
and a smaller, less ferocious figure, that was Neeta, the little playmate of
his boyhood.

Slowly, very slowly, as these visions of the past animated his lethargic
memory, he came to recognize them. They took definite shape and form, adjusting
themselves nicely to the various incidents of his life with which they had been
intimately connected. His boyhood among the apes spread itself in a slow
panorama before him, and as it unfolded it induced within him a mighty longing
for the companionship of the shaggy, low-browed brutes of his past.

He watched the blacks scatter their cook fire and depart; but though the face
of each of them had but recently been as familiar to him as his own, they
awakened within him no recollections whatsoever.

When they had gone, he descended from the tree and sought food. Out upon the
plain grazed numerous herds of wild ruminants. Toward a sleek, fat bunch of
zebra he wormed his stealthy way. No intricate process of reasoning caused him
to circle widely until he was down wind from his prey—he acted
instinctively. He took advantage of every form of cover as he crawled upon all
fours and often flat upon his stomach toward them.

A plump young mare and a fat stallion grazed nearest to him as he neared the
herd. Again it was instinct which selected the former for his meat. A low bush
grew but a few yards from the unsuspecting two. The ape-man reached its
shelter. He gathered his spear firmly in his grasp. Cautiously he drew his feet
beneath him. In a single swift move he rose and cast his heavy weapon at the
mare’s side. Nor did he wait to note the effect of his assault, but
leaped cat-like after his spear, his hunting knife in his hand.

For an instant the two animals stood motionless. The tearing of the cruel barb
into her side brought a sudden scream of pain and fright from the mare, and
then they both wheeled and broke for safety; but Tarzan of the Apes, for a
distance of a few yards, could equal the speed of even these, and the first
stride of the mare found her overhauled, with a savage beast at her shoulder.
She turned, biting and kicking at her foe. Her mate hesitated for an instant,
as though about to rush to her assistance; but a backward glance revealed to
him the flying heels of the balance of the herd, and with a snort and a shake
of his head he wheeled and dashed away.

Clinging with one hand to the short mane of his quarry, Tarzan struck again and
again with his knife at the unprotected heart. The result had, from the first,
been inevitable. The mare fought bravely, but hopelessly, and presently sank to
the earth, her heart pierced. The ape-man placed a foot upon her carcass and
raised his voice in the victory call of the Mangani. In the distance, Basuli
halted as the faint notes of the hideous scream broke upon his ears.

“The great apes,” he said to his companion. “It has been long
since I have heard them in the country of the Waziri. What could have brought
them back?”

Tarzan grasped his kill and dragged it to the partial seclusion of the bush
which had hidden his own near approach, and there he squatted upon it, cut a
huge hunk of flesh from the loin and proceeded to satisfy his hunger with the
warm and dripping meat.

Attracted by the shrill screams of the mare, a pair of hyenas slunk presently
into view. They trotted to a point a few yards from the gorging ape-man, and
halted. Tarzan looked up, bared his fighting fangs and growled. The hyenas
returned the compliment, and withdrew a couple of paces. They made no move to
attack; but continued to sit at a respectful distance until Tarzan had
concluded his meal. After the ape-man had cut a few strips from the carcass to
carry with him, he walked slowly off in the direction of the river to quench
his thirst. His way lay directly toward the hyenas, nor did he alter his course
because of them.

With all the lordly majesty of Numa, the lion, he strode straight toward the
growling beasts. For a moment they held their ground, bristling and defiant;
but only for a moment, and then slunk away to one side while the indifferent
ape-man passed them on his lordly way. A moment later they were tearing at the
remains of the zebra.

Back to the reeds went Tarzan, and through them toward the river. A herd of
buffalo, startled by his approach, rose ready to charge or to fly. A great bull
pawed the ground and bellowed as his bloodshot eyes discovered the intruder;
but the ape-man passed across their front as though ignorant of their
existence. The bull’s bellowing lessened to a low rumbling, he turned and
scraped a horde of flies from his side with his muzzle, cast a final glance at
the ape-man and resumed his feeding. His numerous family either followed his
example or stood gazing after Tarzan in mild-eyed curiosity, until the opposite
reeds swallowed him from view.

At the river, Tarzan drank his fill and bathed. During the heat of the day he
lay up under the shade of a tree near the ruins of his burned barns. His eyes
wandered out across the plain toward the forest, and a longing for the
pleasures of its mysterious depths possessed his thoughts for a considerable
time. With the next sun he would cross the open and enter the forest! There was
no hurry—there lay before him an endless vista of tomorrows with naught
to fill them but the satisfying of the appetites and caprices of the moment.

The ape-man’s mind was untroubled by regret for the past, or aspiration
for the future. He could lie at full length along a swaying branch, stretching
his giant limbs, and luxuriating in the blessed peace of utter thoughtlessness,
without an apprehension or a worry to sap his nervous energy and rob him of his
peace of mind. Recalling only dimly any other existence, the ape-man was happy.
Lord Greystoke had ceased to exist.

For several hours Tarzan lolled upon his swaying, leafy couch until once again
hunger and thirst suggested an excursion. Stretching lazily he dropped to the
ground and moved slowly toward the river. The game trail down which he walked
had become by ages of use a deep, narrow trench, its walls topped on either
side by impenetrable thicket and dense-growing trees closely interwoven with
thick-stemmed creepers and lesser vines inextricably matted into two solid
ramparts of vegetation. Tarzan had almost reached the point where the trail
debouched upon the open river bottom when he saw a family of lions approaching
along the path from the direction of the river. The ape-man counted
seven—a male and two lionesses, full grown, and four young lions as large
and quite as formidable as their parents. Tarzan halted, growling, and the
lions paused, the great male in the lead baring his fangs and rumbling forth a
warning roar. In his hand the ape-man held his heavy spear; but he had no
intention of pitting his puny weapon against seven lions; yet he stood there
growling and roaring and the lions did likewise. It was purely an exhibition of
jungle bluff. Each was trying to frighten off the other. Neither wished to turn
back and give way, nor did either at first desire to precipitate an encounter.
The lions were fed sufficiently so as not to be goaded by pangs of hunger and
as for Tarzan he seldom ate the meat of the carnivores; but a point of ethics
was at stake and neither side wished to back down. So they stood there facing
one another, making all sorts of hideous noises the while they hurled jungle
invective back and forth. How long this bloodless duel would have persisted it
is difficult to say, though eventually Tarzan would have been forced to yield
to superior numbers.

There came, however, an interruption which put an end to the deadlock and it
came from Tarzan’s rear. He and the lions had been making so much noise
that neither could hear anything above their concerted bedlam, and so it was
that Tarzan did not hear the great bulk bearing down upon him from behind until
an instant before it was upon him, and then he turned to see Buto, the
rhinoceros, his little, pig eyes blazing, charging madly toward him and already
so close that escape seemed impossible; yet so perfectly were mind and muscles
coordinated in this unspoiled, primitive man that almost simultaneously with
the sense perception of the threatened danger he wheeled and hurled his spear
at Buto’s chest. It was a heavy spear shod with iron, and behind it were
the giant muscles of the ape-man, while coming to meet it was the enormous
weight of Buto and the momentum of his rapid rush. All that happened in the
instant that Tarzan turned to meet the charge of the irascible rhinoceros might
take long to tell, and yet would have taxed the swiftest lens to record. As his
spear left his hand the ape-man was looking down upon the mighty horn lowered
to toss him, so close was Buto to him. The spear entered the rhinoceros’
neck at its junction with the left shoulder and passed almost entirely through
the beast’s body, and at the instant that he launched it, Tarzan leaped
straight into the air alighting upon Buto’s back but escaping the mighty
horn.

Then Buto espied the lions and bore madly down upon them while Tarzan of the
Apes leaped nimbly into the tangled creepers at one side of the trail. The
first lion met Buto’s charge and was tossed high over the back of the
maddened brute, torn and dying, and then the six remaining lions were upon the
rhinoceros, rending and tearing the while they were being gored or trampled.
From the safety of his perch Tarzan watched the royal battle with the keenest
interest, for the more intelligent of the jungle folk are interested in such
encounters. They are to them what the racetrack and the prize ring, the theater
and the movies are to us. They see them often; but always they enjoy them for
no two are precisely alike.

For a time it seemed to Tarzan that Buto, the rhinoceros, would prove victor in
the gory battle. Already had he accounted for four of the seven lions and badly
wounded the three remaining when in a momentary lull in the encounter he sank
limply to his knees and rolled over upon his side. Tarzan’s spear had
done its work. It was the man-made weapon which killed the great beast that
might easily have survived the assault of seven mighty lions, for
Tarzan’s spear had pierced the great lungs, and Buto, with victory almost
in sight, succumbed to internal hemorrhage.

Then Tarzan came down from his sanctuary and as the wounded lions, growling,
dragged themselves away, the ape-man cut his spear from the body of Buto,
hacked off a steak and vanished into the jungle. The episode was over. It had
been all in the day’s work—something which you and I might talk
about for a lifetime Tarzan dismissed from his mind the moment that the scene
passed from his sight.

CHAPTER XII.
La Seeks Vengeance

Swinging back through the jungle in a wide circle the ape-man came to the river
at another point, drank and took to the trees again and while he hunted, all
oblivious of his past and careless of his future, there came through the dark
jungles and the open, parklike places and across the wide meadows, where grazed
the countless herbivora of the mysterious continent, a weird and terrible
caravan in search of him. There were fifty frightful men with hairy bodies and
gnarled and crooked legs. They were armed with knives and great bludgeons and
at their head marched an almost naked woman, beautiful beyond compare. It was
La of Opar, High Priestess of the Flaming God, and fifty of her horrid priests
searching for the purloiner of the sacred sacrificial knife.

Never before had La passed beyond the crumbling outer walls of Opar; but never
before had need been so insistent. The sacred knife was gone! Handed down
through countless ages it had come to her as a heritage and an insignia of her
religious office and regal authority from some long-dead progenitor of lost and
forgotten Atlantis. The loss of the crown jewels or the Great Seal of England
could have brought no greater consternation to a British king than did the
pilfering of the sacred knife bring to La, the Oparian, Queen and High
Priestess of the degraded remnants of the oldest civilization upon earth. When
Atlantis, with all her mighty cities and her cultivated fields and her great
commerce and culture and riches sank into the sea long ages since, she took
with her all but a handful of her colonists working the vast gold mines of
Central Africa. From these and their degraded slaves and a later intermixture
of the blood of the anthropoids sprung the gnarled men of Opar; but by some
queer freak of fate, aided by natural selection, the old Atlantean strain had
remained pure and undegraded in the females descended from a single princess of
the royal house of Atlantis who had been in Opar at the time of the great
catastrophe. Such was La.

Burning with white-hot anger was the High Priestess, her heart a seething,
molten mass of hatred for Tarzan of the Apes. The zeal of the religious fanatic
whose altar has been desecrated was triply enhanced by the rage of a woman
scorned. Twice had she thrown her heart at the feet of the godlike ape-man and
twice had she been repulsed. La knew that she was beautiful—and she was
beautiful, not by the standards of prehistoric Atlantis alone, but by those of
modern times was La physically a creature of perfection. Before Tarzan came
that first time to Opar, La had never seen a human male other than the
grotesque and knotted men of her clan. With one of these she must mate sooner
or later that the direct line of high priestesses might not be broken, unless
Fate should bring other men to Opar. Before Tarzan came upon his first visit,
La had had no thought that such men as he existed, for she knew only her
hideous little priests and the bulls of the tribe of great anthropoids that had
dwelt from time immemorial in and about Opar, until they had come to be looked
upon almost as equals by the Oparians. Among the legends of Opar were tales of
godlike men of the olden time and of black men who had come more recently; but
these latter had been enemies who killed and robbed. And, too, these legends
always held forth the hope that some day that nameless continent from which
their race had sprung, would rise once more out of the sea and with slaves at
the long sweeps would send her carven, gold-picked galleys forth to succor the
long-exiled colonists.

The coming of Tarzan had aroused within La’s breast the wild hope that at
last the fulfillment of this ancient prophecy was at hand; but more strongly
still had it aroused the hot fires of love in a heart that never otherwise
would have known the meaning of that all-consuming passion, for such a wondrous
creature as La could never have felt love for any of the repulsive priests of
Opar. Custom, duty and religious zeal might have commanded the union; but there
could have been no love on La’s part. She had grown to young womanhood a
cold and heartless creature, daughter of a thousand other cold, heartless,
beautiful women who had never known love. And so when love came to her it
liberated all the pent passions of a thousand generations, transforming La into
a pulsing, throbbing volcano of desire, and with desire thwarted this great
force of love and gentleness and sacrifice was transmuted by its own fires into
one of hatred and revenge.

It was in a state of mind superinduced by these conditions that La led forth
her jabbering company to retrieve the sacred emblem of her high office and
wreak vengeance upon the author of her wrongs. To Werper she gave little
thought. The fact that the knife had been in his hand when it departed from
Opar brought down no thoughts of vengeance upon his head. Of course, he should
be slain when captured; but his death would give La no pleasure—she
looked for that in the contemplated death agonies of Tarzan. He should be
tortured. His should be a slow and frightful death. His punishment should be
adequate to the immensity of his crime. He had wrested the sacred knife from
La; he had lain sacrilegious hands upon the High Priestess of the Flaming God;
he had desecrated the altar and the temple. For these things he should die; but
he had scorned the love of La, the woman, and for this he should die horribly
with great anguish.

The march of La and her priests was not without its adventures. Unused were
these to the ways of the jungle, since seldom did any venture forth from behind
Opar’s crumbling walls, yet their very numbers protected them and so they
came without fatalities far along the trail of Tarzan and Werper. Three great
apes accompanied them and to these was delegated the business of tracking the
quarry, a feat beyond the senses of the Oparians. La commanded. She arranged
the order of march, she selected the camps, she set the hour for halting and
the hour for resuming and though she was inexperienced in such matters, her
native intelligence was so far above that of the men or the apes that she did
better than they could have done. She was a hard taskmaster, too, for she
looked down with loathing and contempt upon the misshapen creatures amongst
which cruel Fate had thrown her and to some extent vented upon them her
dissatisfaction and her thwarted love. She made them build her a strong
protection and shelter each night and keep a great fire burning before it from
dusk to dawn. When she tired of walking they were forced to carry her upon an
improvised litter, nor did one dare to question her authority or her right to
such services. In fact they did not question either. To them she was a goddess
and each loved her and each hoped that he would be chosen as her mate, so they
slaved for her and bore the stinging lash of her displeasure and the habitually
haughty disdain of her manner without a murmur.

For many days they marched, the apes following the trail easily and going a
little distance ahead of the body of the caravan that they might warn the
others of impending danger. It was during a noonday halt while all were lying
resting after a tiresome march that one of the apes rose suddenly and sniffed
the breeze. In a low guttural he cautioned the others to silence and a moment
later was swinging quietly up wind into the jungle. La and the priests gathered
silently together, the hideous little men fingering their knives and bludgeons,
and awaited the return of the shaggy anthropoid.

Nor had they long to wait before they saw him emerge from a leafy thicket and
approach them. Straight to La he came and in the language of the great apes
which was also the language of decadent Opar he addressed her.

“The great Tarmangani lies asleep there,” he said, pointing in the
direction from which he had just come. “Come and we can kill him.”

“Do not kill him,” commanded La in cold tones. “Bring the
great Tarmangani to me alive and unhurt. The vengeance is La’s. Go; but
make no sound!” and she waved her hands to include all her followers.

Cautiously the weird party crept through the jungle in the wake of the great
ape until at last he halted them with a raised hand and pointed upward and a
little ahead. There they saw the giant form of the ape-man stretched along a
low bough and even in sleep one hand grasped a stout limb and one strong, brown
leg reached out and overlapped another. At ease lay Tarzan of the Apes,
sleeping heavily upon a full stomach and dreaming of Numa, the lion, and Horta,
the boar, and other creatures of the jungle. No intimation of danger assailed
the dormant faculties of the ape-man—he saw no crouching hairy figures
upon the ground beneath him nor the three apes that swung quietly into the tree
beside him.

The first intimation of danger that came to Tarzan was the impact of three
bodies as the three apes leaped upon him and hurled him to the ground, where he
alighted half stunned beneath their combined weight and was immediately set
upon by the fifty hairy men or as many of them as could swarm upon his person.
Instantly the ape-man became the center of a whirling, striking, biting
maelstrom of horror. He fought nobly but the odds against him were too great.
Slowly they overcame him though there was scarce one of them that did not feel
the weight of his mighty fist or the rending of his fangs.

CHAPTER XIII.
Condemned To Torture and Death

La had followed her company and when she saw them clawing and biting at Tarzan,
she raised her voice and cautioned them not to kill him. She saw that he was
weakening and that soon the greater numbers would prevail over him, nor had she
long to wait before the mighty jungle creature lay helpless and bound at her
feet.

“Bring him to the place at which we stopped,” she commanded and
they carried Tarzan back to the little clearing and threw him down beneath a
tree.

“Build me a shelter!” ordered La. “We shall stop here tonight
and tomorrow in the face of the Flaming God, La will offer up the heart of this
defiler of the temple. Where is the sacred knife? Who took it from him?”

But no one had seen it and each was positive in his assurance that the
sacrificial weapon had not been upon Tarzan’s person when they captured
him. The ape-man looked upon the menacing creatures which surrounded him and
snarled his defiance. He looked upon La and smiled. In the face of death he was
unafraid.

“Where is the knife?” La asked him.

“I do not know,” replied Tarzan. “The man took it with him
when he slipped away during the night. Since you are so desirous for its return
I would look for him and get it back for you, did you not hold me prisoner; but
now that I am to die I cannot get it back. Of what good was your knife, anyway?
You can make another. Did you follow us all this way for nothing more than a
knife? Let me go and find him and I will bring it back to you.”

La laughed a bitter laugh, for in her heart she knew that Tarzan’s sin
was greater than the purloining of the sacrificial knife of Opar; yet as she
looked at him lying bound and helpless before her, tears rose to her eyes so
that she had to turn away to hide them; but she remained inflexible in her
determination to make him pay in frightful suffering and in eventual death for
daring to spurn the love of La.

When the shelter was completed La had Tarzan transferred to it. “All
night I shall torture him,” she muttered to her priests, “and at
the first streak of dawn you may prepare the flaming altar upon which his heart
shall be offered up to the Flaming God. Gather wood well filled with pitch, lay
it in the form and size of the altar at Opar in the center of the clearing that
the Flaming God may look down upon our handiwork and be pleased.”

During the balance of the day the priests of Opar were busy erecting an altar
in the center of the clearing, and while they worked they chanted weird hymns
in the ancient tongue of that lost continent that lies at the bottom of the
Atlantic. They knew not the meanings of the words they mouthed; they but
repeated the ritual that had been handed down from preceptor to neophyte since
that long-gone day when the ancestors of the Piltdown man still swung by their
tails in the humid jungles that are England now.

And in the shelter of the hut, La paced to and fro beside the stoic ape-man.
Resigned to his fate was Tarzan. No hope of succor gleamed through the dead
black of the death sentence hanging over him. He knew that his giant muscles
could not part the many strands that bound his wrists and ankles, for he had
strained often, but ineffectually for release. He had no hope of outside help
and only enemies surrounded him within the camp, and yet he smiled at La as she
paced nervously back and forth the length of the shelter.

And La? She fingered her knife and looked down upon her captive. She glared and
muttered but she did not strike. “Tonight!” she thought.
“Tonight, when it is dark I will torture him.” She looked upon his
perfect, godlike figure and upon his handsome, smiling face and then she
steeled her heart again by thoughts of her love spurned; by religious thoughts
that damned the infidel who had desecrated the holy of holies; who had taken
from the blood-stained altar of Opar the offering to the Flaming God—and
not once but thrice. Three times had Tarzan cheated the god of her fathers. At
the thought La paused and knelt at his side. In her hand was a sharp knife. She
placed its point against the ape-man’s side and pressed upon the hilt;
but Tarzan only smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

How beautiful he was! La bent low over him, looking into his eyes. How perfect
was his figure. She compared it with those of the knurled and knotted men from
whom she must choose a mate, and La shuddered at the thought. Dusk came and
after dusk came night. A great fire blazed within the little thorn boma about
the camp. The flames played upon the new altar erected in the center of the
clearing, arousing in the mind of the High Priestess of the Flaming God a
picture of the event of the coming dawn. She saw this giant and perfect form
writhing amid the flames of the burning pyre. She saw those smiling lips,
burned and blackened, falling away from the strong, white teeth. She saw the
shock of black hair tousled upon Tarzan’s well-shaped head disappear in a
spurt of flame. She saw these and many other frightful pictures as she stood
with closed eyes and clenched fists above the object of her hate—ah! was
it hate that La of Opar felt?

The darkness of the jungle night had settled down upon the camp, relieved only
by the fitful flarings of the fire that was kept up to warn off the man-eaters.
Tarzan lay quietly in his bonds. He suffered from thirst and from the cutting
of the tight strands about his wrists and ankles; but he made no complaint. A
jungle beast was Tarzan with the stoicism of the beast and the intelligence of
man. He knew that his doom was sealed—that no supplications would avail
to temper the severity of his end and so he wasted no breath in pleadings; but
waited patiently in the firm conviction that his sufferings could not endure
forever.

In the darkness La stooped above him. In her hand was a sharp knife and in her
mind the determination to initiate his torture without further delay. The knife
was pressed against his side and La’s face was close to his when a sudden
burst of flame from new branches thrown upon the fire without, lighted up the
interior of the shelter. Close beneath her lips La saw the perfect features of
the forest god and into her woman’s heart welled all the great love she
had felt for Tarzan since first she had seen him, and all the accumulated
passion of the years that she had dreamed of him.

Dagger in hand, La, the High Priestess, towered above the helpless creature
that had dared to violate the sanctuary of her deity. There should be no
torture—there should be instant death. No longer should the defiler of
the temple pollute the sight of the lord god almighty. A single stroke of the
heavy blade and then the corpse to the flaming pyre without. The knife arm
stiffened ready for the downward plunge, and then La, the woman, collapsed
weakly upon the body of the man she loved.

She ran her hands in mute caress over his naked flesh; she covered his
forehead, his eyes, his lips with hot kisses; she covered him with her body as
though to protect him from the hideous fate she had ordained for him, and in
trembling, piteous tones she begged him for his love. For hours the frenzy of
her passion possessed the burning hand-maiden of the Flaming God, until at last
sleep overpowered her and she lapsed into unconsciousness beside the man she
had sworn to torture and to slay. And Tarzan, untroubled by thoughts of the
future, slept peacefully in La’s embrace.

At the first hint of dawn the chanting of the priests of Opar brought Tarzan to
wakefulness. Initiated in low and subdued tones, the sound soon rose in volume
to the open diapason of barbaric blood lust. La stirred. Her perfect arm
pressed Tarzan closer to her—a smile parted her lips and then she awoke,
and slowly the smile faded and her eyes went wide in horror as the significance
of the death chant impinged upon her understanding.

“Love me, Tarzan!” she cried. “Love me, and you shall be
saved.”

Tarzan’s bonds hurt him. He was suffering the tortures of long-restricted
circulation. With an angry growl he rolled over with his back toward La. That
was her answer! The High Priestess leaped to her feet. A hot flush of shame
mantled her cheek and then she went dead white and stepped to the
shelter’s entrance.

“Come, Priests of the Flaming God!” she cried, “and make
ready the sacrifice.”

The warped things advanced and entered the shelter. They laid hands upon Tarzan
and bore him forth, and as they chanted they kept time with their crooked
bodies, swaying to and fro to the rhythm of their song of blood and death.
Behind them came La, swaying too; but not in unison with the chanted cadence.
White and drawn was the face of the High Priestess—white and drawn with
unrequited love and hideous terror of the moments to come. Yet stern in her
resolve was La. The infidel should die! The scorner of her love should pay the
price upon the fiery altar. She saw them lay the perfect body there upon the
rough branches. She saw the High Priest, he to whom custom would unite
her—bent, crooked, gnarled, stunted, hideous—advance with the
flaming torch and stand awaiting her command to apply it to the faggots
surrounding the sacrificial pyre. His hairy, bestial face was distorted in a
yellow-fanged grin of anticipatory enjoyment. His hands were cupped to receive
the life blood of the victim—the red nectar that at Opar would have
filled the golden sacrificial goblets.

La approached with upraised knife, her face turned toward the rising sun and
upon her lips a prayer to the burning deity of her people. The High Priest
looked questioningly toward her—the brand was burning close to his hand
and the faggots lay temptingly near. Tarzan closed his eyes and awaited the
end. He knew that he would suffer, for he recalled the faint memories of past
burns. He knew that he would suffer and die; but he did not flinch. Death is no
great adventure to the jungle bred who walk hand-in-hand with the grim specter
by day and lie down at his side by night through all the years of their lives.
It is doubtful that the ape-man even speculated upon what came after death. As
a matter of fact as his end approached, his mind was occupied by thoughts of
the pretty pebbles he had lost, yet his every faculty still was open to what
passed around him.

He felt La lean over him and he opened his eyes. He saw her white, drawn face
and he saw tears blinding her eyes. “Tarzan, my Tarzan!” she
moaned, “tell me that you love me—that you will return to Opar with
me—and you shall live. Even in the face of the anger of my people I will
save you. This last chance I give you. What is your answer?”

At the last moment the woman in La had triumphed over the High Priestess of a
cruel cult. She saw upon the altar the only creature that ever had aroused the
fires of love within her virgin breast; she saw the beast-faced fanatic who
would one day be her mate, unless she found another less repulsive, standing
with the burning torch ready to ignite the pyre; yet with all her mad passion
for the ape-man she would give the word to apply the flame if Tarzan’s
final answer was unsatisfactory. With heaving bosom she leaned close above him.
“Yes or no?” she whispered.

Through the jungle, out of the distance, came faintly a sound that brought a
sudden light of hope to Tarzan’s eyes. He raised his voice in a weird
scream that sent La back from him a step or two. The impatient priest grumbled
and switched the torch from one hand to the other at the same time holding it
closer to the tinder at the base of the pyre.

“Your answer!” insisted La. “What is your answer to the love
of La of Opar?”

Closer came the sound that had attracted Tarzan’s attention and now the
others heard it—the shrill trumpeting of an elephant. As La looked
wide-eyed into Tarzan’s face, there to read her fate for happiness or
heartbreak, she saw an expression of concern shadow his features. Now, for the
first time, she guessed the meaning of Tarzan’s shrill scream—he
had summoned Tantor, the elephant, to his rescue! La’s brows contracted
in a savage scowl. “You refuse La!” she cried. “Then die! The
torch!” she commanded, turning toward the priest.

Tarzan looked up into her face. “Tantor is coming,” he said.
“I thought that he would rescue me; but I know now from his voice that he
will slay me and you and all that fall in his path, searching out with the
cunning of Sheeta, the panther, those who would hide from him, for Tantor is
mad with the madness of love.”

La knew only too well the insane ferocity of a bull elephant in must.
She knew that Tarzan had not exaggerated. She knew that the devil in the
cunning, cruel brain of the great beast might send it hither and thither
hunting through the forest for those who escaped its first charge, or the beast
might pass on without returning—no one might guess which.

“I cannot love you, La,” said Tarzan in a low voice. “I do
not know why, for you are very beautiful. I could not go back and live in
Opar—I who have the whole broad jungle for my range. No, I cannot love
you but I cannot see you die beneath the goring tusks of mad Tantor. Cut my
bonds before it is too late. Already he is almost upon us. Cut them and I may
yet save you.”

A little spiral of curling smoke rose from one corner of the pyre—the
flames licked upward, crackling. La stood there like a beautiful statue of
despair gazing at Tarzan and at the spreading flames. In a moment they would
reach out and grasp him. From the tangled forest came the sound of cracking
limbs and crashing trunks—Tantor was coming down upon them, a huge
Juggernaut of the jungle. The priests were becoming uneasy. They cast
apprehensive glances in the direction of the approaching elephant and then back
at La.

“Fly!” she commanded them and then she stooped and cut the bonds
securing her prisoner’s feet and hands. In an instant Tarzan was upon the
ground. The priests screamed out their rage and disappointment. He with the
torch took a menacing step toward La and the ape-man. “Traitor!” He
shrieked at the woman. “For this you too shall die!” Raising his
bludgeon he rushed upon the High Priestess; but Tarzan was there before her.
Leaping in to close quarters the ape-man seized the upraised weapon and
wrenched it from the hands of the frenzied fanatic and then the priest closed
upon him with tooth and nail. Seizing the stocky, stunted body in his mighty
hands Tarzan raised the creature high above his head, hurling him at his
fellows who were now gathered ready to bear down upon their erstwhile captive.
La stood proudly with ready knife behind the ape-man. No faint sign of fear
marked her perfect brow—only haughty disdain for her priests and
admiration for the man she loved so hopelessly filled her thoughts.

Suddenly upon this scene burst the mad bull—a huge tusker, his little
eyes inflamed with insane rage. The priests stood for an instant paralyzed with
terror; but Tarzan turned and gathering La in his arms raced for the nearest
tree. Tantor bore down upon him trumpeting shrilly. La clung with both white
arms about the ape-man’s neck. She felt him leap into the air and
marveled at his strength and his ability as, burdened with her weight, he swung
nimbly into the lower branches of a large tree and quickly bore her upward
beyond reach of the sinuous trunk of the pachyderm.

Momentarily baffled here, the huge elephant wheeled and bore down upon the
hapless priests who had now scattered, terror-stricken, in every direction. The
nearest he gored and threw high among the branches of a tree. One he seized in
the coils of his trunk and broke upon a huge bole, dropping the mangled pulp to
charge, trumpeting, after another. Two he trampled beneath his huge feet and by
then the others had disappeared into the jungle. Now Tantor turned his
attention once more to Tarzan for one of the symptoms of madness is a revulsion
of affection—objects of sane love become the objects of insane hatred.
Peculiar in the unwritten annals of the jungle was the proverbial love that had
existed between the ape-man and the tribe of Tantor. No elephant in all the
jungle would harm the Tarmangani—the white-ape; but with the madness of
must upon him the great bull sought to destroy his long-time
play-fellow.

Back to the tree where La and Tarzan perched came Tantor, the elephant. He
reared up with his forefeet against the bole and reached high toward them with
his long trunk; but Tarzan had foreseen this and clambered beyond the
bull’s longest reach. Failure but tended to further enrage the mad
creature. He bellowed and trumpeted and screamed until the earth shook to the
mighty volume of his noise. He put his head against the tree and pushed and the
tree bent before his mighty strength; yet still it held.

The actions of Tarzan were peculiar in the extreme. Had Numa, or Sabor, or
Sheeta, or any other beast of the jungle been seeking to destroy him, the
ape-man would have danced about hurling missiles and invectives at his
assailant. He would have insulted and taunted them, reviling in the jungle
Billingsgate he knew so well; but now he sat silent out of Tantor’s reach
and upon his handsome face was an expression of deep sorrow and pity, for of
all the jungle folk Tarzan loved Tantor the best. Could he have slain him he
would not have thought of doing so. His one idea was to escape, for he knew
that with the passing of the must Tantor would be sane again and that
once more he might stretch at full length upon that mighty back and make
foolish speech into those great, flapping ears.

Finding that the tree would not fall to his pushing, Tantor was but enraged the
more. He looked up at the two perched high above him, his red-rimmed eyes
blazing with insane hatred, and then he wound his trunk about the bole of the
tree, spread his giant feet wide apart and tugged to uproot the jungle giant. A
huge creature was Tantor, an enormous bull in the full prime of all his
stupendous strength. Mightily he strove until presently, to Tarzan’s
consternation, the great tree gave slowly at the roots. The ground rose in
little mounds and ridges about the base of the bole, the tree tilted—in
another moment it would be uprooted and fall.

The ape-man whirled La to his back and just as the tree inclined slowly in its
first movement out of the perpendicular, before the sudden rush of its final
collapse, he swung to the branches of a lesser neighbor. It was a long and
perilous leap. La closed her eyes and shuddered; but when she opened them again
she found herself safe and Tarzan whirling onward through the forest. Behind
them the uprooted tree crashed heavily to the ground, carrying with it the
lesser trees in its path and then Tantor, realizing that his prey had escaped
him, set up once more his hideous trumpeting and followed at a rapid charge
upon their trail.

CHAPTER XIV.
A Priestess But Yet a Woman

At first La closed her eyes and clung to Tarzan in terror, though she made no
outcry; but presently she gained sufficient courage to look about her, to look
down at the ground beneath and even to keep her eyes open during the wide,
perilous swings from tree to tree, and then there came over her a sense of
safety because of her confidence in the perfect physical creature in whose
strength and nerve and agility her fate lay. Once she raised her eyes to the
burning sun and murmured a prayer of thanks to her pagan god that she had not
been permitted to destroy this godlike man, and her long lashes were wet with
tears. A strange anomaly was La of Opar—a creature of circumstance torn
by conflicting emotions. Now the cruel and bloodthirsty creature of a heartless
god and again a melting woman filled with compassion and tenderness. Sometimes
the incarnation of jealousy and revenge and sometimes a sobbing maiden,
generous and forgiving; at once a virgin and a wanton; but always—a
woman. Such was La.

She pressed her cheek close to Tarzan’s shoulder. Slowly she turned her
head until her hot lips were pressed against his flesh. She loved him and would
gladly have died for him; yet within an hour she had been ready to plunge a
knife into his heart and might again within the coming hour.

A hapless priest seeking shelter in the jungle chanced to show himself to
enraged Tantor. The great beast turned to one side, bore down upon the crooked,
little man, snuffed him out and then, diverted from his course, blundered away
toward the south. In a few minutes even the noise of his trumpeting was lost in
the distance.

Tarzan dropped to the ground and La slipped to her feet from his back.
“Call your people together,” said Tarzan.

“They will kill me,” replied La.

“They will not kill you,” contradicted the ape-man. “No one
will kill you while Tarzan of the Apes is here. Call them and we will talk with
them.”

La raised her voice in a weird, flutelike call that carried far into the jungle
on every side. From near and far came answering shouts in the barking tones of
the Oparian priests: “We come! We come!” Again and again, La
repeated her summons until singly and in pairs the greater portion of her
following approached and halted a short distance away from the High Priestess
and her savior. They came with scowling brows and threatening mien. When all
had come Tarzan addressed them.

“Your La is safe,” said the ape-man. “Had she slain me she
would now herself be dead and many more of you; but she spared me that I might
save her. Go your way with her back to Opar, and Tarzan will go his way into
the jungle. Let there be peace always between Tarzan and La. What is your
answer?”

The priests grumbled and shook their heads. They spoke together and La and
Tarzan could see that they were not favorably inclined toward the proposition.
They did not wish to take La back and they did wish to complete the sacrifice
of Tarzan to the Flaming God. At last the ape-man became impatient.

“You will obey the commands of your queen,” he said, “and go
back to Opar with her or Tarzan of the Apes will call together the other
creatures of the jungle and slay you all. La saved me that I might save you and
her. I have served you better alive than I could have dead. If you are not all
fools you will let me go my way in peace and you will return to Opar with La. I
know not where the sacred knife is; but you can fashion another. Had I not
taken it from La you would have slain me and now your god must be glad that I
took it since I have saved his priestess from love-mad Tantor. Will you go back
to Opar with La, promising that no harm shall befall her?”

The priests gathered together in a little knot arguing and discussing. They
pounded upon their breasts with their fists; they raised their hands and eyes
to their fiery god; they growled and barked among themselves until it became
evident to Tarzan that one of their number was preventing the acceptance of his
proposal. This was the High Priest whose heart was filled with jealous rage
because La openly acknowledged her love for the stranger, when by the worldly
customs of their cult she should have belonged to him. Seemingly there was to
be no solution of the problem until another priest stepped forth and, raising
his hand, addressed La.

“Cadj, the High Priest,” he announced, “would sacrifice you
both to the Flaming God; but all of us except Cadj would gladly return to Opar
with our queen.”

“You are many against one,” spoke up Tarzan. “Why should you
not have your will? Go your way with La to Opar and if Cadj interferes slay
him.”

The priests of Opar welcomed this suggestion with loud cries of approval. To
them it appeared nothing short of divine inspiration. The influence of ages of
unquestioning obedience to high priests had made it seem impossible to them to
question his authority; but when they realized that they could force him to
their will they were as happy as children with new toys.

They rushed forward and seized Cadj. They talked in loud menacing tones into
his ear. They threatened him with bludgeon and knife until at last he
acquiesced in their demands, though sullenly, and then Tarzan stepped close
before Cadj.

“Priest,” he said, “La goes back to her temple under the
protection of her priests and the threat of Tarzan of the Apes that whoever
harms her shall die. Tarzan will go again to Opar before the next rains and if
harm has befallen La, woe betide Cadj, the High Priest.”

Sullenly Cadj promised not to harm his queen.

“Protect her,” cried Tarzan to the other Oparians. “Protect
her so that when Tarzan comes again he will find La there to greet him.”

“La will be there to greet thee,” exclaimed the High Priestess,
“and La will wait, longing, always longing, until you come again. Oh,
tell me that you will come!”

“Who knows?” asked the ape-man as he swung quickly into the trees
and raced off toward the east.

For a moment La stood looking after him, then her head drooped, a sigh escaped
her lips and like an old woman she took up the march toward distant Opar.

Through the trees raced Tarzan of the Apes until the darkness of night had
settled upon the jungle, then he lay down and slept, with no thought beyond the
morrow and with even La but the shadow of a memory within his consciousness.

But a few marches to the north Lady Greystoke looked forward to the day when
her mighty lord and master should discover the crime of Achmet Zek, and be
speeding to rescue and avenge, and even as she pictured the coming of John
Clayton, the object of her thoughts squatted almost naked, beside a fallen log,
beneath which he was searching with grimy fingers for a chance beetle or a
luscious grub.

Two days elapsed following the theft of the jewels before Tarzan gave them a
thought. Then, as they chanced to enter his mind, he conceived a desire to play
with them again, and, having nothing better to do than satisfy the first whim
which possessed him, he rose and started across the plain from the forest in
which he had spent the preceding day.

Though no mark showed where the gems had been buried, and though the spot
resembled the balance of an unbroken stretch several miles in length, where the
reeds terminated at the edge of the meadowland, yet the ape-man moved with
unerring precision directly to the place where he had hid his treasure.

With his hunting knife he upturned the loose earth, beneath which the pouch
should be; but, though he excavated to a greater distance than the depth of the
original hole there was no sign of pouch or jewels. Tarzan’s brow clouded
as he discovered that he had been despoiled. Little or no reasoning was
required to convince him of the identity of the guilty party, and with the same
celerity that had marked his decision to unearth the jewels, he set out upon
the trail of the thief.

Though the spoor was two days old, and practically obliterated in many places,
Tarzan followed it with comparative ease. A white man could not have followed
it twenty paces twelve hours after it had been made, a black man would have
lost it within the first mile; but Tarzan of the Apes had been forced in
childhood to develop senses that an ordinary mortal scarce ever uses.

We may note the garlic and whisky on the breath of a fellow strap hanger, or
the cheap perfume emanating from the person of the wondrous lady sitting in
front of us, and deplore the fact of our sensitive noses; but, as a matter of
fact, we cannot smell at all, our olfactory organs are practically atrophied,
by comparison with the development of the sense among the beasts of the wild.

Where a foot is placed an effluvium remains for a considerable time. It is
beyond the range of our sensibilities; but to a creature of the lower orders,
especially to the hunters and the hunted, as interesting and ofttimes more
lucid than is the printed page to us.

Nor was Tarzan dependent alone upon his sense of smell. Vision and hearing had
been brought to a marvelous state of development by the necessities of his
early life, where survival itself depended almost daily upon the exercise of
the keenest vigilance and the constant use of all his faculties.

And so he followed the old trail of the Belgian through the forest and toward
the north; but because of the age of the trail he was constrained to a far from
rapid progress. The man he followed was two days ahead of him when Tarzan took
up the pursuit, and each day he gained upon the ape-man. The latter, however,
felt not the slightest doubt as to the outcome. Some day he would overhaul his
quarry—he could bide his time in peace until that day dawned. Doggedly he
followed the faint spoor, pausing by day only to kill and eat, and at night
only to sleep and refresh himself.

Occasionally he passed parties of savage warriors; but these he gave a wide
berth, for he was hunting with a purpose that was not to be distracted by the
minor accidents of the trail.

These parties were of the collecting hordes of the Waziri and their allies
which Basuli had scattered his messengers broadcast to summon. They were
marching to a common rendezvous in preparation for an assault upon the
stronghold of Achmet Zek; but to Tarzan they were enemies—he retained no
conscious memory of any friendship for the black men.

It was night when he halted outside the palisaded village of the Arab raider.
Perched in the branches of a great tree he gazed down upon the life within the
enclosure. To this place had the spoor led him. His quarry must be within; but
how was he to find him among so many huts? Tarzan, although cognizant of his
mighty powers, realized also his limitations. He knew that he could not
successfully cope with great numbers in open battle. He must resort to the
stealth and trickery of the wild beast, if he were to succeed.

Sitting in the safety of his tree, munching upon the leg bone of Horta, the
boar, Tarzan waited a favorable opportunity to enter the village. For awhile he
gnawed at the bulging, round ends of the large bone, splintering off small
pieces between his strong jaws, and sucking at the delicious marrow within; but
all the time he cast repeated glances into the village. He saw white-robed
figures, and half-naked blacks; but not once did he see one who resembled the
stealer of the gems.

Patiently he waited until the streets were deserted by all save the sentries at
the gates, then he dropped lightly to the ground, circled to the opposite side
of the village and approached the palisade.

At his side hung a long, rawhide rope—a natural and more dependable
evolution from the grass rope of his childhood. Loosening this, he spread the
noose upon the ground behind him, and with a quick movement of his wrist tossed
the coils over one of the sharpened projections of the summit of the palisade.

Drawing the noose taut, he tested the solidity of its hold. Satisfied, the
ape-man ran nimbly up the vertical wall, aided by the rope which he clutched in
both hands. Once at the top it required but a moment to gather the dangling
rope once more into its coils, make it fast again at his waist, take a quick
glance downward within the palisade, and, assured that no one lurked directly
beneath him, drop softly to the ground.

Now he was within the village. Before him stretched a series of tents and
native huts. The business of exploring each of them would be fraught with
danger; but danger was only a natural factor of each day’s life—it
never appalled Tarzan. The chances appealed to him—the chances of life
and death, with his prowess and his faculties pitted against those of a worthy
antagonist.

It was not necessary that he enter each habitation—through a door, a
window or an open chink, his nose told him whether or not his prey lay within.
For some time he found one disappointment following upon the heels of another
in quick succession. No spoor of the Belgian was discernible. But at last he
came to a tent where the smell of the thief was strong. Tarzan listened, his
ear close to the canvas at the rear, but no sound came from within.

At last he cut one of the pin ropes, raised the bottom of the canvas, and
intruded his head within the interior. All was quiet and dark. Tarzan crawled
cautiously within—the scent of the Belgian was strong; but it was not
live scent. Even before he had examined the interior minutely, Tarzan knew that
no one was within it.

In one corner he found a pile of blankets and clothing scattered about; but no
pouch of pretty pebbles. A careful examination of the balance of the tent
revealed nothing more, at least nothing to indicate the presence of the jewels;
but at the side where the blankets and clothing lay, the ape-man discovered
that the tent wall had been loosened at the bottom, and presently he sensed
that the Belgian had recently passed out of the tent by this avenue.

Tarzan was not long in following the way that his prey had fled. The spoor led
always in the shadow and at the rear of the huts and tents of the
village—it was quite evident to Tarzan that the Belgian had gone alone
and secretly upon his mission. Evidently he feared the inhabitants of the
village, or at least his work had been of such a nature that he dared not risk
detection.

At the back of a native hut the spoor led through a small hole recently cut in
the brush wall and into the dark interior beyond. Fearlessly, Tarzan followed
the trail. On hands and knees, he crawled through the small aperture. Within
the hut his nostrils were assailed by many odors; but clear and distinct among
them was one that half aroused a latent memory of the past—it was the
faint and delicate odor of a woman. With the cognizance of it there rose in the
breast of the ape-man a strange uneasiness—the result of an irresistible
force which he was destined to become acquainted with anew—the instinct
which draws the male to his mate.

In the same hut was the scent spoor of the Belgian, too, and as both these
assailed the nostrils of the ape-man, mingling one with the other, a jealous
rage leaped and burned within him, though his memory held before the mirror of
recollection no image of the she to which he had attached his desire.

Like the tent he had investigated, the hut, too, was empty, and after
satisfying himself that his stolen pouch was secreted nowhere within, he left,
as he had entered, by the hole in the rear wall.

Here he took up the spoor of the Belgian, followed it across the clearing, over
the palisade, and out into the dark jungle beyond.

CHAPTER XV.
The Flight of Werper

After Werper had arranged the dummy in his bed, and sneaked out into the
darkness of the village beneath the rear wall of his tent, he had gone directly
to the hut in which Jane Clayton was held captive.

Before the doorway squatted a black sentry. Werper approached him boldly, spoke
a few words in his ear, handed him a package of tobacco, and passed into the
hut. The black grinned and winked as the European disappeared within the
darkness of the interior.

The Belgian, being one of Achmet Zek’s principal lieutenants, might
naturally go where he wished within or without the village, and so the sentry
had not questioned his right to enter the hut with the white, woman prisoner.

Within, Werper called in French and in a low whisper: “Lady Greystoke! It
is I, M. Frecoult. Where are you?” But there was no response. Hastily the
man felt around the interior, groping blindly through the darkness with
outstretched hands. There was no one within!

Werper’s astonishment surpassed words. He was on the point of stepping
without to question the sentry, when his eyes, becoming accustomed to the dark,
discovered a blotch of lesser blackness near the base of the rear wall of the
hut. Examination revealed the fact that the blotch was an opening cut in the
wall. It was large enough to permit the passage of his body, and assured as he
was that Lady Greystoke had passed out through the aperture in an attempt to
escape the village, he lost no time in availing himself of the same avenue; but
neither did he lose time in a fruitless search for Jane Clayton.

His own life depended upon the chance of his eluding, or outdistancing Achmet
Zek, when that worthy should have discovered that he had escaped. His original
plan had contemplated connivance in the escape of Lady Greystoke for two very
good and sufficient reasons. The first was that by saving her he would win the
gratitude of the English, and thus lessen the chance of his extradition should
his identity and his crime against his superior officer be charged against him.

The second reason was based upon the fact that only one direction of escape was
safely open to him. He could not travel to the west because of the Belgian
possessions which lay between him and the Atlantic. The south was closed to him
by the feared presence of the savage ape-man he had robbed. To the north lay
the friends and allies of Achmet Zek. Only toward the east, through British
East Africa, lay reasonable assurance of freedom.

Accompanied by a titled Englishwoman whom he had rescued from a frightful fate,
and his identity vouched for by her as that of a Frenchman by the name of
Frecoult, he had looked forward, and not without reason, to the active
assistance of the British from the moment that he came in contact with their
first outpost.

But now that Lady Greystoke had disappeared, though he still looked toward the
east for hope, his chances were lessened, and another, subsidiary design
completely dashed. From the moment that he had first laid eyes upon Jane
Clayton he had nursed within his breast a secret passion for the beautiful
American wife of the English lord, and when Achmet Zek’s discovery of the
jewels had necessitated flight, the Belgian had dreamed, in his planning, of a
future in which he might convince Lady Greystoke that her husband was dead, and
by playing upon her gratitude win her for himself.

At that part of the village farthest from the gates, Werper discovered that two
or three long poles, taken from a nearby pile which had been collected for the
construction of huts, had been leaned against the top of the palisade, forming
a precarious, though not impossible avenue of escape.

Rightly, he inferred that thus had Lady Greystoke found the means to scale the
wall, nor did he lose even a moment in following her lead. Once in the jungle
he struck out directly eastward.

A few miles south of him, Jane Clayton lay panting among the branches of a tree
in which she had taken refuge from a prowling and hungry lioness.

Her escape from the village had been much easier than she had anticipated. The
knife which she had used to cut her way through the brush wall of the hut to
freedom she had found sticking in the wall of her prison, doubtless left there
by accident when a former tenant had vacated the premises.

To cross the rear of the village, keeping always in the densest shadows, had
required but a few moments, and the fortunate circumstance of the discovery of
the hut poles lying so near the palisade had solved for her the problem of the
passage of the high wall.

For an hour she had followed the old game trail toward the south, until there
fell upon her trained hearing the stealthy padding of a stalking beast behind
her. The nearest tree gave her instant sanctuary, for she was too wise in the
ways of the jungle to chance her safety for a moment after discovering that she
was being hunted.

Werper, with better success, traveled slowly onward until dawn, when, to his
chagrin, he discovered a mounted Arab upon his trail. It was one of Achmet
Zek’s minions, many of whom were scattered in all directions through the
forest, searching for the fugitive Belgian.

Jane Clayton’s escape had not yet been discovered when Achmet Zek and his
searchers set forth to overhaul Werper. The only man who had seen the Belgian
after his departure from his tent was the black sentry before the doorway of
Lady Greystoke’s prison hut, and he had been silenced by the discovery of
the dead body of the man who had relieved him, the sentry that Mugambi had
dispatched.

The bribe taker naturally inferred that Werper had slain his fellow and dared
not admit that he had permitted him to enter the hut, fearing as he did, the
anger of Achmet Zek. So, as chance directed that he should be the one to
discover the body of the sentry when the first alarm had been given following
Achmet Zek’s discovery that Werper had outwitted him, the crafty black
had dragged the dead body to the interior of a nearby tent, and himself resumed
his station before the doorway of the hut in which he still believed the woman
to be.

With the discovery of the Arab close behind him, the Belgian hid in the foliage
of a leafy bush. Here the trail ran straight for a considerable distance, and
down the shady forest aisle, beneath the overarching branches of the trees,
rode the white-robed figure of the pursuer.

Nearer and nearer he came. Werper crouched closer to the ground behind the
leaves of his hiding place. Across the trail a vine moved. Werper’s eyes
instantly centered upon the spot. There was no wind to stir the foliage in the
depths of the jungle. Again the vine moved. In the mind of the Belgian only the
presence of a sinister and malevolent force could account for the phenomenon.

The man’s eyes bored steadily into the screen of leaves upon the opposite
side of the trail. Gradually a form took shape beyond them—a tawny form,
grim and terrible, with yellow-green eyes glaring fearsomely across the narrow
trail straight into his.

Werper could have screamed in fright, but up the trail was coming the messenger
of another death, equally sure and no less terrible. He remained silent, almost
paralyzed by fear. The Arab approached. Across the trail from Werper the lion
crouched for the spring, when suddenly his attention was attracted toward the
horseman.

The Belgian saw the massive head turn in the direction of the raider and his
heart all but ceased its beating as he awaited the result of this interruption.
At a walk the horseman approached. Would the nervous animal he rode take fright
at the odor of the carnivore, and, bolting, leave Werper still to the mercies
of the king of beasts?

But he seemed unmindful of the near presence of the great cat. On he came, his
neck arched, champing at the bit between his teeth. The Belgian turned his eyes
again toward the lion. The beast’s whole attention now seemed riveted
upon the horseman. They were abreast the lion now, and still the brute did not
spring. Could he be but waiting for them to pass before returning his attention
to the original prey? Werper shuddered and half rose. At the same instant the
lion sprang from his place of concealment, full upon the mounted man. The
horse, with a shrill neigh of terror, shrank sideways almost upon the Belgian,
the lion dragged the helpless Arab from his saddle, and the horse leaped back
into the trail and fled away toward the west.

But he did not flee alone. As the frightened beast had pressed in upon him,
Werper had not been slow to note the quickly emptied saddle and the opportunity
it presented. Scarcely had the lion dragged the Arab down from one side, than
the Belgian, seizing the pommel of the saddle and the horse’s mane,
leaped upon the horse’s back from the other.

A half hour later a naked giant, swinging easily through the lower branches of
the trees, paused, and with raised head, and dilating nostrils sniffed the
morning air. The smell of blood fell strong upon his senses, and mingled with
it was the scent of Numa, the lion. The giant cocked his head upon one side and
listened.

From a short distance up the trail came the unmistakable noises of the greedy
feeding of a lion. The crunching of bones, the gulping of great pieces, the
contented growling, all attested the nearness of the king at table.

Tarzan approached the spot, still keeping to the branches of the trees. He made
no effort to conceal his approach, and presently he had evidence that Numa had
heard him, from the ominous, rumbling warning that broke from a thicket beside
the trail.

Halting upon a low branch just above the lion Tarzan looked down upon the
grisly scene. Could this unrecognizable thing be the man he had been trailing?
The ape-man wondered. From time to time he had descended to the trail and
verified his judgment by the evidence of his scent that the Belgian had
followed this game trail toward the east.

Now he proceeded beyond the lion and his feast, again descended and examined
the ground with his nose. There was no scent spoor here of the man he had been
trailing. Tarzan returned to the tree. With keen eyes he searched the ground
about the mutilated corpse for a sign of the missing pouch of pretty pebbles;
but naught could he see of it.

He scolded Numa and tried to drive the great beast away; but only angry growls
rewarded his efforts. He tore small branches from a nearby limb and hurled them
at his ancient enemy. Numa looked up with bared fangs, grinning hideously, but
he did not rise from his kill.

Then Tarzan fitted an arrow to his bow, and drawing the slim shaft far back let
drive with all the force of the tough wood that only he could bend. As the
arrow sank deeply into his side, Numa leaped to his feet with a roar of mingled
rage and pain. He leaped futilely at the grinning ape-man, tore at the
protruding end of the shaft, and then, springing into the trail, paced back and
forth beneath his tormentor. Again Tarzan loosed a swift bolt. This time the
missile, aimed with care, lodged in the lion’s spine. The great creature
halted in its tracks, and lurched awkwardly forward upon its face, paralyzed.

Tarzan dropped to the trail, ran quickly to the beast’s side, and drove
his spear deep into the fierce heart, then after recovering his arrows turned
his attention to the mutilated remains of the animal’s prey in the nearby
thicket.

The face was gone. The Arab garments aroused no doubt as to the man’s
identity, since he had trailed him into the Arab camp and out again, where he
might easily have acquired the apparel. So sure was Tarzan that the body was
that of he who had robbed him that he made no effort to verify his deductions
by scent among the conglomerate odors of the great carnivore and the fresh
blood of the victim.

He confined his attentions to a careful search for the pouch, but nowhere upon
or about the corpse was any sign of the missing article or its contents. The
ape-man was disappointed—possibly not so much because of the loss of the
colored pebbles as with Numa for robbing him of the pleasures of revenge.

Wondering what could have become of his possessions, the ape-man turned slowly
back along the trail in the direction from which he had come. In his mind he
revolved a plan to enter and search the Arab camp, after darkness had again
fallen. Taking to the trees, he moved directly south in search of prey, that he
might satisfy his hunger before midday, and then lie up for the afternoon in
some spot far from the camp, where he might sleep without fear of discovery
until it came time to prosecute his design.

Scarcely had he quitted the trail when a tall, black warrior, moving at a
dogged trot, passed toward the east. It was Mugambi, searching for his
mistress. He continued along the trail, halting to examine the body of the dead
lion. An expression of puzzlement crossed his features as he bent to search for
the wounds which had caused the death of the jungle lord. Tarzan had removed
his arrows, but to Mugambi the proof of death was as strong as though both the
lighter missiles and the spear still protruded from the carcass.

The black looked furtively about him. The body was still warm, and from this
fact he reasoned that the killer was close at hand, yet no sign of living man
appeared. Mugambi shook his head, and continued along the trail, but with
redoubled caution.

All day he traveled, stopping occasionally to call aloud the single word,
“Lady,” in the hope that at last she might hear and respond; but in
the end his loyal devotion brought him to disaster.

From the northeast, for several months, Abdul Mourak, in command of a
detachment of Abyssinian soldiers, had been assiduously searching for the Arab
raider, Achmet Zek, who, six months previously, had affronted the majesty of
Abdul Mourak’s emperor by conducting a slave raid within the boundaries
of Menelek’s domain.

And now it happened that Abdul Mourak had halted for a short rest at noon upon
this very day and along the same trail that Werper and Mugambi were following
toward the east.

It was shortly after the soldiers had dismounted that the Belgian, unaware of
their presence, rode his tired mount almost into their midst, before he had
discovered them. Instantly he was surrounded, and a volley of questions hurled
at him, as he was pulled from his horse and led toward the presence of the
commander.

Falling back upon his European nationality, Werper assured Abdul Mourak that he
was a Frenchman, hunting in Africa, and that he had been attacked by strangers,
his safari killed or scattered, and himself escaping only by a miracle.

From a chance remark of the Abyssinian, Werper discovered the purpose of the
expedition, and when he realized that these men were the enemies of Achmet Zek,
he took heart, and immediately blamed his predicament upon the Arab.

Lest, however, he might again fall into the hands of the raider, he discouraged
Abdul Mourak in the further prosecution of his pursuit, assuring the Abyssinian
that Achmet Zek commanded a large and dangerous force, and also that he was
marching rapidly toward the south.

Convinced that it would take a long time to overhaul the raider, and that the
chances of engagement made the outcome extremely questionable, Mourak, none too
unwillingly, abandoned his plan and gave the necessary orders for his command
to pitch camp where they were, preparatory to taking up the return march toward
Abyssinia the following morning.

It was late in the afternoon that the attention of the camp was attracted
toward the west by the sound of a powerful voice calling a single word,
repeated several times: “Lady! Lady! Lady!”

True to their instincts of precaution, a number of Abyssinians, acting under
orders from Abdul Mourak, advanced stealthily through the jungle toward the
author of the call.

A half hour later they returned, dragging Mugambi among them. The first person
the big black’s eyes fell upon as he was hustled into the presence of the
Abyssinian officer, was M. Jules Frecoult, the Frenchman who had been the guest
of his master and whom he last had seen entering the village of Achmet Zek
under circumstances which pointed to his familiarity and friendship for the
raiders.

Between the disasters that had befallen his master and his master’s
house, and the Frenchman, Mugambi saw a sinister relationship, which kept him
from recalling to Werper’s attention the identity which the latter
evidently failed to recognize.

Pleading that he was but a harmless hunter from a tribe farther south, Mugambi
begged to be allowed to go upon his way; but Abdul Mourak, admiring the
warrior’s splendid physique, decided to take him back to Adis Abeba and
present him to Menelek. A few moments later Mugambi and Werper were marched
away under guard, and the Belgian learned for the first time, that he too was a
prisoner rather than a guest. In vain he protested against such treatment,
until a strapping soldier struck him across the mouth and threatened to shoot
him if he did not desist.

Mugambi took the matter less to heart, for he had not the slightest doubt but
that during the course of the journey he would find ample opportunity to elude
the vigilance of his guards and make good his escape. With this idea always
uppermost in his mind, he courted the good opinion of the Abyssinians, asked
them many questions about their emperor and their country, and evinced a
growing desire to reach their destination, that he might enjoy all the good
things which they assured him the city of Adis Abeba contained. Thus he
disarmed their suspicions, and each day found a slight relaxation of their
watchfulness over him.

By taking advantage of the fact that he and Werper always were kept together,
Mugambi sought to learn what the other knew of the whereabouts of Tarzan, or
the authorship of the raid upon the bungalow, as well as the fate of Lady
Greystoke; but as he was confined to the accidents of conversation for this
information, not daring to acquaint Werper with his true identity, and as
Werper was equally anxious to conceal from the world his part in the
destruction of his host’s home and happiness, Mugambi learned
nothing—at least in this way.

But there came a time when he learned a very surprising thing, by accident.

The party had camped early in the afternoon of a sultry day, upon the banks of
a clear and beautiful stream. The bottom of the river was gravelly, there was
no indication of crocodiles, those menaces to promiscuous bathing in the rivers
of certain portions of the dark continent, and so the Abyssinians took
advantage of the opportunity to perform long-deferred, and much needed,
ablutions.

As Werper, who, with Mugambi, had been given permission to enter the water,
removed his clothing, the black noted the care with which he unfastened
something which circled his waist, and which he took off with his shirt,
keeping the latter always around and concealing the object of his suspicious
solicitude.

It was this very carefulness which attracted the black’s attention to the
thing, arousing a natural curiosity in the warrior’s mind, and so it
chanced that when the Belgian, in the nervousness of overcaution, fumbled the
hidden article and dropped it, Mugambi saw it as it fell upon the ground,
spilling a portion of its contents on the sward.

Now Mugambi had been to London with his master. He was not the unsophisticated
savage that his apparel proclaimed him. He had mingled with the cosmopolitan
hordes of the greatest city in the world; he had visited museums and inspected
shop windows; and, besides, he was a shrewd and intelligent man.

The instant that the jewels of Opar rolled, scintillating, before his
astonished eyes, he recognized them for what they were; but he recognized
something else, too, that interested him far more deeply than the value of the
stones. A thousand times he had seen the leathern pouch which dangled at his
master’s side, when Tarzan of the Apes had, in a spirit of play and
adventure, elected to return for a few hours to the primitive manners and
customs of his boyhood, and surrounded by his naked warriors hunt the lion and
the leopard, the buffalo and the elephant after the manner he loved best.

Werper saw that Mugambi had seen the pouch and the stones. Hastily he gathered
up the precious gems and returned them to their container, while Mugambi,
assuming an air of indifference, strolled down to the river for his bath.

The following morning Abdul Mourak was enraged and chagrined to discover that
his huge, black prisoner had escaped during the night, while Werper was
terrified for the same reason, until his trembling fingers discovered the pouch
still in its place beneath his shirt, and within it the hard outlines of its
contents.

CHAPTER XVI.
Tarzan Again Leads the Mangani

Achmet Zek with two of his followers had circled far to the south to intercept
the flight of his deserting lieutenant, Werper. Others had spread out in
various directions, so that a vast circle had been formed by them during the
night, and now they were beating in toward the center.

Achmet and the two with him halted for a short rest just before noon. They
squatted beneath the trees upon the southern edge of a clearing. The chief of
the raiders was in ill humor. To have been outwitted by an unbeliever was bad
enough; but to have, at the same time, lost the jewels upon which he had set
his avaricious heart was altogether too much—Allah must, indeed be angry
with his servant.

Well, he still had the woman. She would bring a fair price in the north, and
there was, too, the buried treasure beside the ruins of the Englishman’s
house.

A slight noise in the jungle upon the opposite side of the clearing brought
Achmet Zek to immediate and alert attention. He gathered his rifle in readiness
for instant use, at the same time motioning his followers to silence and
concealment. Crouching behind the bushes the three waited, their eyes fastened
upon the far side of the open space.

Presently the foliage parted and a woman’s face appeared, glancing
fearfully from side to side. A moment later, evidently satisfied that no
immediate danger lurked before her, she stepped out into the clearing in full
view of the Arab.

Achmet Zek caught his breath with a muttered exclamation of incredulity and an
imprecation. The woman was the prisoner he had thought safely guarded at his
camp!

Apparently she was alone, but Achmet Zek waited that he might make sure of it
before seizing her. Slowly Jane Clayton started across the clearing. Twice
already since she had quitted the village of the raiders had she barely escaped
the fangs of carnivora, and once she had almost stumbled into the path of one
of the searchers. Though she was almost despairing of ever reaching safety she
still was determined to fight on, until death or success terminated her
endeavors.

As the Arabs watched her from the safety of their concealment, and Achmet Zek
noted with satisfaction that she was walking directly into his clutches,
another pair of eyes looked down upon the entire scene from the foliage of an
adjacent tree.

Puzzled, troubled eyes they were, for all their gray and savage glint, for
their owner was struggling with an intangible suggestion of the familiarity of
the face and figure of the woman below him.

A sudden crashing of the bushes at the point from which Jane Clayton had
emerged into the clearing brought her to a sudden stop and attracted the
attention of the Arabs and the watcher in the tree to the same point.

The woman wheeled about to see what new danger menaced her from behind, and as
she did so a great, anthropoid ape waddled into view. Behind him came another
and another; but Lady Greystoke did not wait to learn how many more of the
hideous creatures were so close upon her trail.

With a smothered scream she rushed toward the opposite jungle, and as she
reached the bushes there, Achmet Zek and his two henchmen rose up and seized
her. At the same instant a naked, brown giant dropped from the branches of a
tree at the right of the clearing.

Turning toward the astonished apes he gave voice to a short volley of low
gutturals, and without waiting to note the effect of his words upon them,
wheeled and charged for the Arabs.

Achmet Zek was dragging Jane Clayton toward his tethered horse. His two men
were hastily unfastening all three mounts. The woman, struggling to escape the
Arab, turned and saw the ape-man running toward her. A glad light of hope
illuminated her face.

“John!” she cried. “Thank God that you have come in
time.”

Behind Tarzan came the great apes, wondering, but obedient to his summons. The
Arabs saw that they would not have time to mount and make their escape before
the beasts and the man were upon them. Achmet Zek recognized the latter as the
redoubtable enemy of such as he, and he saw, too, in the circumstance an
opportunity to rid himself forever of the menace of the ape-man’s
presence.

Calling to his men to follow his example he raised his rifle and leveled it
upon the charging giant. His followers, acting with no less alacrity than
himself, fired almost simultaneously, and with the reports of the rifles,
Tarzan of the Apes and two of his hairy henchmen pitched forward among the
jungle grasses.

The noise of the rifle shots brought the balance of the apes to a wondering
pause, and, taking advantage of their momentary distraction, Achmet Zek and his
fellows leaped to their horses’ backs and galloped away with the now
hopeless and grief-stricken woman.

Back to the village they rode, and once again Lady Greystoke found herself
incarcerated in the filthy, little hut from which she had thought to have
escaped for good. But this time she was not only guarded by an additional
sentry, but bound as well.

Singly and in twos the searchers who had ridden out with Achmet Zek upon the
trail of the Belgian, returned empty handed. With the report of each the
raider’s rage and chagrin increased, until he was in such a transport of
ferocious anger that none dared approach him. Threatening and cursing, Achmet
Zek paced up and down the floor of his silken tent; but his temper served him
naught—Werper was gone and with him the fortune in scintillating gems
which had aroused the cupidity of his chief and placed the sentence of death
upon the head of the lieutenant.

With the escape of the Arabs the great apes had turned their attention to their
fallen comrades. One was dead, but another and the great white ape still
breathed. The hairy monsters gathered about these two, grumbling and muttering
after the fashion of their kind.

Tarzan was the first to regain consciousness. Sitting up, he looked about him.
Blood was flowing from a wound in his shoulder. The shock had thrown him down
and dazed him; but he was far from dead. Rising slowly to his feet he let his
eyes wander toward the spot where last he had seen the she, who had aroused
within his savage breast such strange emotions.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“The Tarmangani took her away,” replied one of the apes. “Who
are you who speak the language of the Mangani?”

“I am Tarzan,” replied the ape-man; “mighty hunter, greatest
of fighters. When I roar, the jungle is silent and trembles with terror. I am
Tarzan of the Apes. I have been away; but now I have come back to my
people.”

“Yes,” spoke up an old ape, “he is Tarzan. I know him. It is
well that he has come back. Now we shall have good hunting.”

The other apes came closer and sniffed at the ape-man. Tarzan stood very still,
his fangs half bared, and his muscles tense and ready for action; but there was
none there to question his right to be with them, and presently, the inspection
satisfactorily concluded, the apes again returned their attention to the other
survivor.

He too was but slightly wounded, a bullet, grazing his skull, having stunned
him, so that when he regained consciousness he was apparently as fit as ever.

The apes told Tarzan that they had been traveling toward the east when the
scent spoor of the she had attracted them and they had stalked her. Now they
wished to continue upon their interrupted march; but Tarzan preferred to follow
the Arabs and take the woman from them. After a considerable argument it was
decided that they should first hunt toward the east for a few days and then
return and search for the Arabs, and as time is of little moment to the ape
folk, Tarzan acceded to their demands, he, himself, having reverted to a mental
state but little superior to their own.

Another circumstance which decided him to postpone pursuit of the Arabs was the
painfulness of his wound. It would be better to wait until that had healed
before he pitted himself again against the guns of the Tarmangani.

And so, as Jane Clayton was pushed into her prison hut and her hands and feet
securely bound, her natural protector roamed off toward the east in company
with a score of hairy monsters, with whom he rubbed shoulders as familiarly as
a few months before he had mingled with his immaculate fellow-members of one of
London’s most select and exclusive clubs.

But all the time there lurked in the back of his injured brain a troublesome
conviction that he had no business where he was—that he should be, for
some unaccountable reason, elsewhere and among another sort of creature. Also,
there was the compelling urge to be upon the scent of the Arabs, undertaking
the rescue of the woman who had appealed so strongly to his savage sentiments;
though the thought-word which naturally occurred to him in the contemplation of
the venture, was “capture,” rather than “rescue.”

To him she was as any other jungle she, and he had set his heart upon her as
his mate. For an instant, as he had approached closer to her in the clearing
where the Arabs had seized her, the subtle aroma which had first aroused his
desires in the hut that had imprisoned her had fallen upon his nostrils, and
told him that he had found the creature for whom he had developed so sudden and
inexplicable a passion.

The matter of the pouch of jewels also occupied his thoughts to some extent, so
that he found a double urge for his return to the camp of the raiders. He would
obtain possession of both his pretty pebbles and the she. Then he would return
to the great apes with his new mate and his baubles, and leading his hairy
companions into a far wilderness beyond the ken of man, live out his life,
hunting and battling among the lower orders after the only manner which he now
recollected.

He spoke to his fellow-apes upon the matter, in an attempt to persuade them to
accompany him; but all except Taglat and Chulk refused. The latter was young
and strong, endowed with a greater intelligence than his fellows, and therefore
the possessor of better developed powers of imagination. To him the expedition
savored of adventure, and so appealed, strongly. With Taglat there was another
incentive—a secret and sinister incentive, which, had Tarzan of the Apes
had knowledge of it, would have sent him at the other’s throat in jealous
rage.

Taglat was no longer young; but he was still a formidable beast, mightily
muscled, cruel, and, because of his greater experience, crafty and cunning.
Too, he was of giant proportions, the very weight of his huge bulk serving
ofttimes to discount in his favor the superior agility of a younger antagonist.

He was of a morose and sullen disposition that marked him even among his
frowning fellows, where such characteristics are the rule rather than the
exception, and, though Tarzan did not guess it, he hated the ape-man with a
ferocity that he was able to hide only because the dominant spirit of the
nobler creature had inspired within him a species of dread which was as
powerful as it was inexplicable to him.

These two, then, were to be Tarzan’s companions upon his return to the
village of Achmet Zek. As they set off, the balance of the tribe vouchsafed
them but a parting stare, and then resumed the serious business of feeding.

Tarzan found difficulty in keeping the minds of his fellows set upon the
purpose of their adventure, for the mind of an ape lacks the power of
long-sustained concentration. To set out upon a long journey, with a definite
destination in view, is one thing, to remember that purpose and keep it
uppermost in one’s mind continually is quite another. There are so many
things to distract one’s attention along the way.

Chulk was, at first, for rushing rapidly ahead as though the village of the
raiders lay but an hour’s march before them instead of several days; but
within a few minutes a fallen tree attracted his attention with its suggestion
of rich and succulent forage beneath, and when Tarzan, missing him, returned in
search, he found Chulk squatting beside the rotting bole, from beneath which he
was assiduously engaged in digging out the grubs and beetles, whose kind form a
considerable proportion of the diet of the apes.

Unless Tarzan desired to fight there was nothing to do but wait until Chulk had
exhausted the storehouse, and this he did, only to discover that Taglat was now
missing. After a considerable search, he found that worthy gentleman
contemplating the sufferings of an injured rodent he had pounced upon. He would
sit in apparent indifference, gazing in another direction, while the crippled
creature wriggled slowly and painfully away from him, and then, just as his
victim felt assured of escape, he would reach out a giant palm and slam it down
upon the fugitive. Again and again he repeated this operation, until, tiring of
the sport, he ended the sufferings of his plaything by devouring it.

Such were the exasperating causes of delay which retarded Tarzan’s return
journey toward the village of Achmet Zek; but the ape-man was patient, for in
his mind was a plan which necessitated the presence of Chulk and Taglat when he
should have arrived at his destination.

It was not always an easy thing to maintain in the vacillating minds of the
anthropoids a sustained interest in their venture. Chulk was wearying of the
continued marching and the infrequency and short duration of the rests. He
would gladly have abandoned this search for adventure had not Tarzan
continually filled his mind with alluring pictures of the great stores of food
which were to be found in the village of Tarmangani.

Taglat nursed his secret purpose to better advantage than might have been
expected of an ape, yet there were times when he, too, would have abandoned the
adventure had not Tarzan cajoled him on.

It was mid-afternoon of a sultry, tropical day when the keen senses of the
three warned them of the proximity of the Arab camp. Stealthily they
approached, keeping to the dense tangle of growing things which made
concealment easy to their uncanny jungle craft.

First came the giant ape-man, his smooth, brown skin glistening with the sweat
of exertion in the close, hot confines of the jungle. Behind him crept Chulk
and Taglat, grotesque and shaggy caricatures of their godlike leader.

Silently they made their way to the edge of the clearing which surrounded the
palisade, and here they clambered into the lower branches of a large tree
overlooking the village occupied by the enemy, the better to spy upon his
goings and comings.

A horseman, white burnoosed, rode out through the gateway of the village.
Tarzan, whispering to Chulk and Taglat to remain where they were, swung,
monkey-like, through the trees in the direction of the trail the Arab was
riding. From one jungle giant to the next he sped with the rapidity of a
squirrel and the silence of a ghost.

The Arab rode slowly onward, unconscious of the danger hovering in the trees
behind him. The ape-man made a slight detour and increased his speed until he
had reached a point upon the trail in advance of the horseman. Here he halted
upon a leafy bough which overhung the narrow, jungle trail. On came the victim,
humming a wild air of the great desert land of the north. Above him poised the
savage brute that was today bent upon the destruction of a human life—the
same creature who a few months before, had occupied his seat in the House of
Lords at London, a respected and distinguished member of that august body.

The Arab passed beneath the overhanging bough, there was a slight rustling of
the leaves above, the horse snorted and plunged as a brown-skinned creature
dropped upon its rump. A pair of mighty arms encircled the Arab and he was
dragged from his saddle to the trail.

Ten minutes later the ape-man, carrying the outer garments of an Arab bundled
beneath an arm, rejoined his companions. He exhibited his trophies to them,
explaining in low gutturals the details of his exploit. Chulk and Taglat
fingered the fabrics, smelled of them, and, placing them to their ears, tried
to listen to them.

Then Tarzan led them back through the jungle to the trail, where the three hid
themselves and waited. Nor had they long to wait before two of Achmet
Zek’s blacks, clothed in habiliments similar to their master’s,
came down the trail on foot, returning to the camp.

One moment they were laughing and talking together—the next they lay
stretched in death upon the trail, three mighty engines of destruction bending
over them. Tarzan removed their outer garments as he had removed those of his
first victim, and again retired with Chulk and Taglat to the greater seclusion
of the tree they had first selected.

Here the ape-man arranged the garments upon his shaggy fellows and himself,
until, at a distance, it might have appeared that three white-robed Arabs
squatted silently among the branches of the forest.

Until dark they remained where they were, for from his point of vantage, Tarzan
could view the enclosure within the palisade. He marked the position of the hut
in which he had first discovered the scent spoor of the she he sought. He saw
the two sentries standing before its doorway, and he located the habitation of
Achmet Zek, where something told him he would most likely find the missing
pouch and pebbles.

Chulk and Taglat were, at first, greatly interested in their wonderful raiment.
They fingered the fabric, smelled of it, and regarded each other intently with
every mark of satisfaction and pride. Chulk, a humorist in his way, stretched
forth a long and hairy arm, and grasping the hood of Taglat’s burnoose
pulled it down over the latter’s eyes, extinguishing him, snuffer-like,
as it were.

The older ape, pessimistic by nature, recognized no such thing as humor.
Creatures laid their paws upon him for but two things—to search for fleas
and to attack. The pulling of the Tarmangani-scented thing about his head and
eyes could not be for the performance of the former act; therefore it must be
the latter. He was attacked! Chulk had attacked him.

With a snarl he was at the other’s throat, not even waiting to lift the
woolen veil which obscured his vision. Tarzan leaped upon the two, and swaying
and toppling upon their insecure perch the three great beasts tussled and
snapped at one another until the ape-man finally succeeded in separating the
enraged anthropoids.

As apology is unknown to these savage progenitors of man, and explanation a
laborious and usually futile process, Tarzan bridged the dangerous gulf by
distracting their attention from their altercation to a consideration of their
plans for the immediate future. Accustomed to frequent arguments in which more
hair than blood is wasted, the apes speedily forget such trivial encounters,
and presently Chulk and Taglat were again squatting in close proximity to each
other and peaceful repose, awaiting the moment when the ape-man should lead
them into the village of the Tarmangani.

It was long after darkness had fallen, that Tarzan led his companions from
their hiding place in the tree to the ground and around the palisade to the far
side of the village.

Gathering the skirts of his burnoose, beneath one arm, that his legs might have
free action, the ape-man took a short running start, and scrambled to the top
of the barrier. Fearing lest the apes should rend their garments to shreds in a
similar attempt, he had directed them to wait below for him, and himself
securely perched upon the summit of the palisade he unslung his spear and
lowered one end of it to Chulk.

The ape seized it, and while Tarzan held tightly to the upper end, the
anthropoid climbed quickly up the shaft until with one paw he grasped the top
of the wall. To scramble then to Tarzan’s side was the work of but an
instant. In like manner Taglat was conducted to their sides, and a moment later
the three dropped silently within the enclosure.

Tarzan led them first to the rear of the hut in which Jane Clayton was
confined, where, through the roughly repaired aperture in the wall, he sought
with his sensitive nostrils for proof that the she he had come for was within.

Chulk and Taglat, their hairy faces pressed close to that of the patrician,
sniffed with him. Each caught the scent spoor of the woman within, and each
reacted according to his temperament and his habits of thought.

It left Chulk indifferent. The she was for Tarzan—all that he desired was
to bury his snout in the foodstuffs of the Tarmangani. He had come to eat his
fill without labor—Tarzan had told him that that should be his reward,
and he was satisfied.

But Taglat’s wicked, bloodshot eyes, narrowed to the realization of the
nearing fulfillment of his carefully nursed plan. It is true that sometimes
during the several days that had elapsed since they had set out upon their
expedition it had been difficult for Taglat to hold his idea uppermost in his
mind, and on several occasions he had completely forgotten it, until Tarzan, by
a chance word, had recalled it to him, but, for an ape, Taglat had done well.

Now, he licked his chops, and he made a sickening, sucking noise with his
flabby lips as he drew in his breath.

Satisfied that the she was where he had hoped to find her, Tarzan led his apes
toward the tent of Achmet Zek. A passing Arab and two slaves saw them, but the
night was dark and the white burnooses hid the hairy limbs of the apes and the
giant figure of their leader, so that the three, by squatting down as though in
conversation, were passed by, unsuspected. To the rear of the tent they made
their way. Within, Achmet Zek conversed with several of his lieutenants.
Without, Tarzan listened.

CHAPTER XVII.
The Deadly Peril of Jane Clayton

Lieutenant Albert Werper, terrified by contemplation of the fate which might
await him at Adis Abeba, cast about for some scheme of escape, but after the
black Mugambi had eluded their vigilance the Abyssinians redoubled their
precautions to prevent Werper following the lead of the Negro.

For some time Werper entertained the idea of bribing Abdul Mourak with a
portion of the contents of the pouch; but fearing that the man would demand all
the gems as the price of liberty, the Belgian, influenced by avarice, sought
another avenue from his dilemma.

It was then that there dawned upon him the possibility of the success of a
different course which would still leave him in possession of the jewels, while
at the same time satisfying the greed of the Abyssinian with the conviction
that he had obtained all that Werper had to offer.

And so it was that a day or so after Mugambi had disappeared, Werper asked for
an audience with Abdul Mourak. As the Belgian entered the presence of his
captor the scowl upon the features of the latter boded ill for any hope which
Werper might entertain, still he fortified himself by recalling the common
weakness of mankind, which permits the most inflexible of natures to bend to
the consuming desire for wealth.

Abdul Mourak eyed him, frowningly. “What do you want now?” he
asked.

“My liberty,” replied Werper.

The Abyssinian sneered. “And you disturbed me thus to tell me what any
fool might know,” he said.

“I can pay for it,” said Werper.

Abdul Mourak laughed loudly. “Pay for it?” he cried. “What
with—the rags that you have upon your back? Or, perhaps you are
concealing beneath your coat a thousand pounds of ivory. Get out! You are a
fool. Do not bother me again or I shall have you whipped.”

But Werper persisted. His liberty and perhaps his life depended upon his
success.

“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “If I can give you as much gold
as ten men may carry will you promise that I shall be conducted in safety to
the nearest English commissioner?”

“As much gold as ten men may carry!” repeated Abdul Mourak.
“You are crazy. Where have you so much gold as that?”

“I know where it is hid,” said Werper. “Promise, and I will
lead you to it—if ten loads is enough?”

Abdul Mourak had ceased to laugh. He was eyeing the Belgian intently. The
fellow seemed sane enough—yet ten loads of gold! It was preposterous. The
Abyssinian thought in silence for a moment.

“Well, and if I promise,” he said. “How far is this
gold?”

“A long week’s march to the south,” replied Werper.

“And if we do not find it where you say it is, do you realize what your
punishment will be?”

“If it is not there I will forfeit my life,” replied the Belgian.
“I know it is there, for I saw it buried with my own eyes. And
more—there are not only ten loads, but as many as fifty men may carry. It
is all yours if you will promise to see me safely delivered into the protection
of the English.”

“You will stake your life against the finding of the gold?” asked
Abdul.

Werper assented with a nod.

“Very well,” said the Abyssinian, “I promise, and even if
there be but five loads you shall have your freedom; but until the gold is in
my possession you remain a prisoner.”

“I am satisfied,” said Werper. “Tomorrow we start?”

Abdul Mourak nodded, and the Belgian returned to his guards. The following day
the Abyssinian soldiers were surprised to receive an order which turned their
faces from the northeast to the south. And so it happened that upon the very
night that Tarzan and the two apes entered the village of the raiders, the
Abyssinians camped but a few miles to the east of the same spot.

While Werper dreamed of freedom and the unmolested enjoyment of the fortune in
his stolen pouch, and Abdul Mourak lay awake in greedy contemplation of the
fifty loads of gold which lay but a few days farther to the south of him,
Achmet Zek gave orders to his lieutenants that they should prepare a force of
fighting men and carriers to proceed to the ruins of the Englishman’s
DOUAR on the morrow and bring back the fabulous fortune which his renegade
lieutenant had told him was buried there.

And as he delivered his instructions to those within, a silent listener
crouched without his tent, waiting for the time when he might enter in safety
and prosecute his search for the missing pouch and the pretty pebbles that had
caught his fancy.

At last the swarthy companions of Achmet Zek quitted his tent, and the leader
went with them to smoke a pipe with one of their number, leaving his own silken
habitation unguarded. Scarcely had they left the interior when a knife blade
was thrust through the fabric of the rear wall, some six feet above the ground,
and a swift downward stroke opened an entrance to those who waited beyond.

Through the opening stepped the ape-man, and close behind him came the huge
Chulk; but Taglat did not follow them. Instead he turned and slunk through the
darkness toward the hut where the she who had arrested his brutish interest lay
securely bound. Before the doorway the sentries sat upon their haunches,
conversing in monotones. Within, the young woman lay upon a filthy sleeping
mat, resigned, through utter hopelessness to whatever fate lay in store for her
until the opportunity arrived which would permit her to free herself by the
only means which now seemed even remotely possible—the hitherto detested
act of self-destruction.

Creeping silently toward the sentries, a white-burnoosed figure approached the
shadows at one end of the hut. The meager intellect of the creature denied it
the advantage it might have taken of its disguise. Where it could have walked
boldly to the very sides of the sentries, it chose rather to sneak upon them,
unseen, from the rear.

It came to the corner of the hut and peered around. The sentries were but a few
paces away; but the ape did not dare expose himself, even for an instant, to
those feared and hated thunder-sticks which the Tarmangani knew so well how to
use, if there were another and safer method of attack.

Taglat wished that there was a tree nearby from the over-hanging branches of
which he might spring upon his unsuspecting prey; but, though there was no
tree, the idea gave birth to a plan. The eaves of the hut were just above the
heads of the sentries—from them he could leap upon the Tarmangani,
unseen. A quick snap of those mighty jaws would dispose of one of them before
the other realized that they were attacked, and the second would fall an easy
prey to the strength, agility and ferocity of a second quick charge.

Taglat withdrew a few paces to the rear of the hut, gathered himself for the
effort, ran quickly forward and leaped high into the air. He struck the roof
directly above the rear wall of the hut, and the structure, reinforced by the
wall beneath, held his enormous weight for an instant, then he moved forward a
step, the roof sagged, the thatching parted and the great anthropoid shot
through into the interior.

The sentries, hearing the crashing of the roof poles, leaped to their feet and
rushed into the hut. Jane Clayton tried to roll aside as the great form lit
upon the floor so close to her that one foot pinned her clothing to the ground.

The ape, feeling the movement beside him, reached down and gathered the girl in
the hollow of one mighty arm. The burnoose covered the hairy body so that Jane
Clayton believed that a human arm supported her, and from the extremity of
hopelessness a great hope sprang into her breast that at last she was in the
keeping of a rescuer.

The two sentries were now within the hut, but hesitating because of doubt as to
the nature of the cause of the disturbance. Their eyes, not yet accustomed to
the darkness of the interior, told them nothing, nor did they hear any sound,
for the ape stood silently awaiting their attack.

Seeing that they stood without advancing, and realizing that, handicapped as he
was by the weight of the she, he could put up but a poor battle, Taglat elected
to risk a sudden break for liberty. Lowering his head, he charged straight for
the two sentries who blocked the doorway. The impact of his mighty shoulders
bowled them over upon their backs, and before they could scramble to their
feet, the ape was gone, darting in the shadows of the huts toward the palisade
at the far end of the village.

The speed and strength of her rescuer filled Jane Clayton with wonder. Could it
be that Tarzan had survived the bullet of the Arab? Who else in all the jungle
could bear the weight of a grown woman as lightly as he who held her? She spoke
his name; but there was no response. Still she did not give up hope.

At the palisade the beast did not even hesitate. A single mighty leap carried
it to the top, where it poised but for an instant before dropping to the ground
upon the opposite side. Now the girl was almost positive that she was safe in
the arms of her husband, and when the ape took to the trees and bore her
swiftly into the jungle, as Tarzan had done at other times in the past, belief
became conviction.

In a little moonlit glade, a mile or so from the camp of the raiders, her
rescuer halted and dropped her to the ground. His roughness surprised her, but
still she had no doubts. Again she called him by name, and at the same instant
the ape, fretting under the restraints of the unaccustomed garments of the
Tarmangani, tore the burnoose from him, revealing to the eyes of the
horror-struck woman the hideous face and hairy form of a giant anthropoid.

With a piteous wail of terror, Jane Clayton swooned, while, from the
concealment of a nearby bush, Numa, the lion, eyed the pair hungrily and licked
his chops.

Tarzan, entering the tent of Achmet Zek, searched the interior thoroughly. He
tore the bed to pieces and scattered the contents of box and bag about the
floor. He investigated whatever his eyes discovered, nor did those keen organs
overlook a single article within the habitation of the raider chief; but no
pouch or pretty pebbles rewarded his thoroughness.

Satisfied at last that his belongings were not in the possession of Achmet Zek,
unless they were on the person of the chief himself, Tarzan decided to secure
the person of the she before further prosecuting his search for the pouch.

Motioning for Chulk to follow him, he passed out of the tent by the same way
that he had entered it, and walking boldly through the village, made directly
for the hut where Jane Clayton had been imprisoned.

He noted with surprise the absence of Taglat, whom he had expected to find
awaiting him outside the tent of Achmet Zek; but, accustomed as he was to the
unreliability of apes, he gave no serious attention to the present defection of
his surly companion. So long as Taglat did not cause interference with his
plans, Tarzan was indifferent to his absence.

As he approached the hut, the ape-man noticed that a crowd had collected about
the entrance. He could see that the men who composed it were much excited, and
fearing lest Chulk’s disguise should prove inadequate to the concealment
of his true identity in the face of so many observers, he commanded the ape to
betake himself to the far end of the village, and there await him.

As Chulk waddled off, keeping to the shadows, Tarzan advanced boldly toward the
excited group before the doorway of the hut. He mingled with the blacks and the
Arabs in an endeavor to learn the cause of the commotion, in his interest
forgetting that he alone of the assemblage carried a spear, a bow and arrows,
and thus might become an object of suspicious attention.

Shouldering his way through the crowd he approached the doorway, and had almost
reached it when one of the Arabs laid a hand upon his shoulder, crying:
“Who is this?” at the same time snatching back the hood from the
ape-man’s face.

Tarzan of the Apes in all his savage life had never been accustomed to pause in
argument with an antagonist. The primitive instinct of self-preservation
acknowledges many arts and wiles; but argument is not one of them, nor did he
now waste precious time in an attempt to convince the raiders that he was not a
wolf in sheep’s clothing. Instead he had his unmasker by the throat ere
the man’s words had scarce quitted his lips, and hurling him from side to
side brushed away those who would have swarmed upon him.

Using the Arab as a weapon, Tarzan forced his way quickly to the doorway, and a
moment later was within the hut. A hasty examination revealed the fact that it
was empty, and his sense of smell discovered, too, the scent spoor of Taglat,
the ape. Tarzan uttered a low, ominous growl. Those who were pressing forward
at the doorway to seize him, fell back as the savage notes of the bestial
challenge smote upon their ears. They looked at one another in surprise and
consternation. A man had entered the hut alone, and yet with their own ears
they had heard the voice of a wild beast within. What could it mean? Had a lion
or a leopard sought sanctuary in the interior, unbeknown to the sentries?

Tarzan’s quick eyes discovered the opening in the roof, through which
Taglat had fallen. He guessed that the ape had either come or gone by way of
the break, and while the Arabs hesitated without, he sprang, catlike, for the
opening, grasped the top of the wall and clambered out upon the roof, dropping
instantly to the ground at the rear of the hut.

When the Arabs finally mustered courage to enter the hut, after firing several
volleys through the walls, they found the interior deserted. At the same time
Tarzan, at the far end of the village, sought for Chulk; but the ape was
nowhere to be found.

Robbed of his she, deserted by his companions, and as much in ignorance as ever
as to the whereabouts of his pouch and pebbles, it was an angry Tarzan who
climbed the palisade and vanished into the darkness of the jungle.

For the present he must give up the search for his pouch, since it would be
paramount to self-destruction to enter the Arab camp now while all its
inhabitants were aroused and upon the alert.

In his escape from the village, the ape-man had lost the spoor of the fleeing
Taglat, and now he circled widely through the forest in an endeavor to again
pick it up.

Chulk had remained at his post until the cries and shots of the Arabs had
filled his simple soul with terror, for above all things the ape folk fear the
thunder-sticks of the Tarmangani; then he had clambered nimbly over the
palisade, tearing his burnoose in the effort, and fled into the depths of the
jungle, grumbling and scolding as he went.

Tarzan, roaming the jungle in search of the trail of Taglat and the she,
traveled swiftly. In a little moonlit glade ahead of him the great ape was
bending over the prostrate form of the woman Tarzan sought. The beast was
tearing at the bonds that confined her ankles and wrists, pulling and gnawing
upon the cords.

The course the ape-man was taking would carry him but a short distance to the
right of them, and though he could not have seen them the wind was bearing down
from them to him, carrying their scent spoor strongly toward him.

A moment more and Jane Clayton’s safety might have been assured, even
though Numa, the lion, was already gathering himself in preparation for a
charge; but Fate, already all too cruel, now outdid herself—the wind
veered suddenly for a few moments, the scent spoor that would have led the
ape-man to the girl’s side was wafted in the opposite direction; Tarzan
passed within fifty yards of the tragedy that was being enacted in the glade,
and the opportunity was gone beyond recall.

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Fight For the Treasure

It was morning before Tarzan could bring himself to a realization of the
possibility of failure of his quest, and even then he would only admit that
success was but delayed. He would eat and sleep, and then set forth again. The
jungle was wide; but wide too were the experience and cunning of Tarzan. Taglat
might travel far; but Tarzan would find him in the end, though he had to search
every tree in the mighty forest.

Soliloquizing thus, the ape-man followed the spoor of Bara, the deer, the
unfortunate upon which he had decided to satisfy his hunger. For half an hour
the trail led the ape-man toward the east along a well-marked game path, when
suddenly, to the stalker’s astonishment, the quarry broke into sight,
racing madly back along the narrow way straight toward the hunter.

Tarzan, who had been following along the trail, leaped so quickly to the
concealing verdure at the side that the deer was still unaware of the presence
of an enemy in this direction, and while the animal was still some distance
away, the ape-man swung into the lower branches of the tree which overhung the
trail. There he crouched, a savage beast of prey, awaiting the coming of its
victim.

What had frightened the deer into so frantic a retreat, Tarzan did not
know—Numa, the lion, perhaps, or Sheeta, the panther; but whatsoever it
was mattered little to Tarzan of the Apes—he was ready and willing to
defend his kill against any other denizen of the jungle. If he were unable to
do it by means of physical prowess, he had at his command another and a greater
power—his shrewd intelligence.

And so, on came the running deer, straight into the jaws of death. The ape-man
turned so that his back was toward the approaching animal. He poised with bent
knees upon the gently swaying limb above the trail, timing with keen ears the
nearing hoof beats of frightened Bara.

In a moment the victim flashed beneath the limb and at the same instant the
ape-man above sprang out and down upon its back. The weight of the man’s
body carried the deer to the ground. It stumbled forward once in a futile
effort to rise, and then mighty muscles dragged its head far back, gave the
neck a vicious wrench, and Bara was dead.

Quick had been the killing, and equally quick were the ape-man’s
subsequent actions, for who might know what manner of killer pursued Bara, or
how close at hand he might be? Scarce had the neck of the victim snapped than
the carcass was hanging over one of Tarzan’s broad shoulders, and an
instant later the ape-man was perched once more among the lower branches of a
tree above the trail, his keen, gray eyes scanning the pathway down which the
deer had fled.

Nor was it long before the cause of Bara’s fright became evident to
Tarzan, for presently came the unmistakable sounds of approaching horsemen.
Dragging his kill after him the ape-man ascended to the middle terrace, and
settling himself comfortably in the crotch of a tree where he could still view
the trail beneath, cut a juicy steak from the deer’s loin, and burying
his strong, white teeth in the hot flesh proceeded to enjoy the fruits of his
prowess and his cunning.

Nor did he neglect the trail beneath while he satisfied his hunger. His sharp
eyes saw the muzzle of the leading horse as it came into view around a bend in
the tortuous trail, and one by one they scrutinized the riders as they passed
beneath him in single file.

Among them came one whom Tarzan recognized, but so schooled was the ape-man in
the control of his emotions that no slightest change of expression, much less
any hysterical demonstration that might have revealed his presence, betrayed
the fact of his inward excitement.

Beneath him, as unconscious of his presence as were the Abyssinians before and
behind him, rode Albert Werper, while the ape-man scrutinized the Belgian for
some sign of the pouch which he had stolen.

As the Abyssinians rode toward the south, a giant figure hovered ever upon
their trail—a huge, almost naked white man, who carried the bloody
carcass of a deer upon his shoulders, for Tarzan knew that he might not have
another opportunity to hunt for some time if he were to follow the Belgian.

To endeavor to snatch him from the midst of the armed horsemen, not even Tarzan
would attempt other than in the last extremity, for the way of the wild is the
way of caution and cunning, unless they be aroused to rashness by pain or
anger.

So the Abyssinians and the Belgian marched southward and Tarzan of the Apes
swung silently after them through the swaying branches of the middle terrace.

A two days’ march brought them to a level plain beyond which lay
mountains—a plain which Tarzan remembered and which aroused within him
vague half memories and strange longings. Out upon the plain the horsemen rode,
and at a safe distance behind them crept the ape-man, taking advantage of such
cover as the ground afforded.

Beside a charred pile of timbers the Abyssinians halted, and Tarzan, sneaking
close and concealing himself in nearby shrubbery, watched them in wonderment.
He saw them digging up the earth, and he wondered if they had hidden meat there
in the past and now had come for it. Then he recalled how he had buried his
pretty pebbles, and the suggestion that had caused him to do it. They were
digging for the things the blacks had buried here!

Presently he saw them uncover a dirty, yellow object, and he witnessed the joy
of Werper and of Abdul Mourak as the grimy object was exposed to view. One by
one they unearthed many similar pieces, all of the same uniform, dirty yellow,
until a pile of them lay upon the ground, a pile which Abdul Mourak fondled and
petted in an ecstasy of greed.

Something stirred in the ape-man’s mind as he looked long upon the golden
ingots. Where had he seen such before? What were they? Why did these Tarmangani
covet them so greatly? To whom did they belong?

He recalled the black men who had buried them. The things must be theirs.
Werper was stealing them as he had stolen Tarzan’s pouch of pebbles. The
ape-man’s eyes blazed in anger. He would like to find the black men and
lead them against these thieves. He wondered where their village might be.

As all these things ran through the active mind, a party of men moved out of
the forest at the edge of the plain and advanced toward the ruins of the burned
bungalow.

Abdul Mourak, always watchful, was the first to see them, but already they were
halfway across the open. He called to his men to mount and hold themselves in
readiness, for in the heart of Africa who may know whether a strange host be
friend or foe?

Werper, swinging into his saddle, fastened his eyes upon the newcomers, then,
white and trembling he turned toward Abdul Mourak.

“It is Achmet Zek and his raiders,” he whispered. “They are
come for the gold.”

It must have been at about the same instant that Achmet Zek discovered the pile
of yellow ingots and realized the actuality of what he had already feared since
first his eyes had alighted upon the party beside the ruins of the
Englishman’s bungalow. Someone had forestalled him—another had come
for the treasure ahead of him.

The Arab was crazed by rage. Recently everything had gone against him. He had
lost the jewels, the Belgian, and for the second time he had lost the
Englishwoman. Now some one had come to rob him of this treasure which he had
thought as safe from disturbance here as though it never had been mined.

He cared not whom the thieves might be. They would not give up the gold without
a battle, of that he was certain, and with a wild whoop and a command to his
followers, Achmet Zek put spurs to his horse and dashed down upon the
Abyssinians, and after him, waving their long guns above their heads, yelling
and cursing, came his motley horde of cut-throat followers.

The men of Abdul Mourak met them with a volley which emptied a few saddles, and
then the raiders were among them, and sword, pistol and musket, each was doing
its most hideous and bloody work.

Achmet Zek, spying Werper at the first charge, bore down upon the Belgian, and
the latter, terrified by contemplation of the fate he deserved, turned his
horse’s head and dashed madly away in an effort to escape. Shouting to a
lieutenant to take command, and urging him upon pain of death to dispatch the
Abyssinians and bring the gold back to his camp, Achmet Zek set off across the
plain in pursuit of the Belgian, his wicked nature unable to forego the
pleasures of revenge, even at the risk of sacrificing the treasure.

As the pursued and the pursuer raced madly toward the distant forest the battle
behind them raged with bloody savageness. No quarter was asked or given by
either the ferocious Abyssinians or the murderous cut-throats of Achmet Zek.

From the concealment of the shrubbery Tarzan watched the sanguinary conflict
which so effectually surrounded him that he found no loop-hole through which he
might escape to follow Werper and the Arab chief.

The Abyssinians were formed in a circle which included Tarzan’s position,
and around and into them galloped the yelling raiders, now darting away, now
charging in to deliver thrusts and cuts with their curved swords.

Numerically the men of Achmet Zek were superior, and slowly but surely the
soldiers of Menelek were being exterminated. To Tarzan the result was
immaterial. He watched with but a single purpose—to escape the ring of
blood-mad fighters and be away after the Belgian and his pouch.

When he had first discovered Werper upon the trail where he had slain Bara, he
had thought that his eyes must be playing him false, so certain had he been
that the thief had been slain and devoured by Numa; but after following the
detachment for two days, with his keen eyes always upon the Belgian, he no
longer doubted the identity of the man, though he was put to it to explain the
identity of the mutilated corpse he had supposed was the man he sought.

As he crouched in hiding among the unkempt shrubbery which so short a while
since had been the delight and pride of the wife he no longer recalled, an Arab
and an Abyssinian wheeled their mounts close to his position as they slashed at
each other with their swords.

Step by step the Arab beat back his adversary until the latter’s horse
all but trod upon the ape-man, and then a vicious cut clove the black
warrior’s skull, and the corpse toppled backward almost upon Tarzan.

As the Abyssinian tumbled from his saddle the possibility of escape which was
represented by the riderless horse electrified the ape-man to instant action.
Before the frightened beast could gather himself for flight a naked giant was
astride his back. A strong hand had grasped his bridle rein, and the surprised
Arab discovered a new foe in the saddle of him, whom he had slain.

But this enemy wielded no sword, and his spear and bow remained upon his back.
The Arab, recovered from his first surprise, dashed in with raised sword to
annihilate this presumptuous stranger. He aimed a mighty blow at the
ape-man’s head, a blow which swung harmlessly through thin air as Tarzan
ducked from its path, and then the Arab felt the other’s horse brushing
his leg, a great arm shot out and encircled his waist, and before he could
recover himself he was dragged from his saddle, and forming a shield for his
antagonist was borne at a mad run straight through the encircling ranks of his
fellows.

Just beyond them he was tossed aside upon the ground, and the last he saw of
his strange foeman the latter was galloping off across the plain in the
direction of the forest at its farther edge.

For another hour the battle raged nor did it cease until the last of the
Abyssinians lay dead upon the ground, or had galloped off toward the north in
flight. But a handful of men escaped, among them Abdul Mourak.

The victorious raiders collected about the pile of golden ingots which the
Abyssinians had uncovered, and there awaited the return of their leader. Their
exultation was slightly tempered by the glimpse they had had of the strange
apparition of the naked white man galloping away upon the horse of one of their
foemen and carrying a companion who was now among them expatiating upon the
superhuman strength of the ape-man. None of them there but was familiar with
the name and fame of Tarzan of the Apes, and the fact that they had recognized
the white giant as the ferocious enemy of the wrongdoers of the jungle, added
to their terror, for they had been assured that Tarzan was dead.

Naturally superstitious, they fully believed that they had seen the disembodied
spirit of the dead man, and now they cast fearful glances about them in
expectation of the ghost’s early return to the scene of the ruin they had
inflicted upon him during their recent raid upon his home, and discussed in
affrighted whispers the probable nature of the vengeance which the spirit would
inflict upon them should he return to find them in possession of his gold.

As they conversed their terror grew, while from the concealment of the reeds
along the river below them a small party of naked, black warriors watched their
every move. From the heights beyond the river these black men had heard the
noise of the conflict, and creeping warily down to the stream had forded it and
advanced through the reeds until they were in a position to watch every move of
the combatants.

For a half hour the raiders awaited Achmet Zek’s return, their fear of
the earlier return of the ghost of Tarzan constantly undermining their loyalty
to and fear of their chief. Finally one among them voiced the desires of all
when he announced that he intended riding forth toward the forest in search of
Achmet Zek. Instantly every man of them sprang to his mount.

“The gold will be safe here,” cried one. “We have killed the
Abyssinians and there are no others to carry it away. Let us ride in search of
Achmet Zek!”

And a moment later, amidst a cloud of dust, the raiders were galloping madly
across the plain, and out from the concealment of the reeds along the river,
crept a party of black warriors toward the spot where the golden ingots of Opar
lay piled on the ground.

Werper had still been in advance of Achmet Zek when he reached the forest; but
the latter, better mounted, was gaining upon him. Riding with the reckless
courage of desperation the Belgian urged his mount to greater speed even within
the narrow confines of the winding, game trail that the beast was following.

Behind him he could hear the voice of Achmet Zek crying to him to halt; but
Werper only dug the spurs deeper into the bleeding sides of his panting mount.
Two hundred yards within the forest a broken branch lay across the trail. It
was a small thing that a horse might ordinarily take in his natural stride
without noticing its presence; but Werper’s horse was jaded, his feet
were heavy with weariness, and as the branch caught between his front legs he
stumbled, was unable to recover himself, and went down, sprawling in the trail.

Werper, going over his head, rolled a few yards farther on, scrambled to his
feet and ran back. Seizing the reins he tugged to drag the beast to his feet;
but the animal would not or could not rise, and as the Belgian cursed and
struck at him, Achmet Zek appeared in view.

Instantly the Belgian ceased his efforts with the dying animal at his feet, and
seizing his rifle, dropped behind the horse and fired at the oncoming Arab.

His bullet, going low, struck Achmet Zek’s horse in the breast, bringing
him down a hundred yards from where Werper lay preparing to fire a second shot.

The Arab, who had gone down with his mount, was standing astride him, and
seeing the Belgian’s strategic position behind his fallen horse, lost no
time in taking up a similar one behind his own.

And there the two lay, alternately firing at and cursing each other, while from
behind the Arab, Tarzan of the Apes approached to the edge of the forest. Here
he heard the occasional shots of the duelists, and choosing the safer and
swifter avenue of the forest branches to the uncertain transportation afforded
by a half-broken Abyssinian pony, took to the trees.

Keeping to one side of the trail, the ape-man came presently to a point where
he could look down in comparative safety upon the fighters. First one and then
the other would partially raise himself above his breastwork of horseflesh,
fire his weapon and immediately drop flat behind his shelter, where he would
reload and repeat the act a moment later.

Werper had but little ammunition, having been hastily armed by Abdul Mourak
from the body of one of the first of the Abyssinians who had fallen in the
fight about the pile of ingots, and now he realized that soon he would have
used his last bullet, and be at the mercy of the Arab—a mercy with which
he was well acquainted.

Facing both death and despoilment of his treasure, the Belgian cast about for
some plan of escape, and the only one that appealed to him as containing even a
remote possibility of success hinged upon the chance of bribing Achmet Zek.

Werper had fired all but a single cartridge, when, during a lull in the
fighting, he called aloud to his opponent.

“Achmet Zek,” he cried, “Allah alone knows which one of us
may leave our bones to rot where he lies upon this trail today if we keep up
our foolish battle. You wish the contents of the pouch I wear about my waist,
and I wish my life and my liberty even more than I do the jewels. Let us each,
then, take that which he most desires and go our separate ways in peace. I will
lay the pouch upon the carcass of my horse, where you may see it, and you, in
turn, will lay your gun upon your horse, with butt toward me. Then I will go
away, leaving the pouch to you, and you will let me go in safety. I want only
my life, and my freedom.”

The Arab thought in silence for a moment. Then he spoke. His reply was
influenced by the fact that he had expended his last shot.

“Go your way, then,” he growled, “leaving the pouch in plain
sight behind you. See, I lay my gun thus, with the butt toward you. Go.”

Werper removed the pouch from about his waist. Sorrowfully and affectionately
he let his fingers press the hard outlines of the contents. Ah, if he could
extract a little handful of the precious stones! But Achmet Zek was standing
now, his eagle eyes commanding a plain view of the Belgian and his every act.

Regretfully Werper laid the pouch, its contents undisturbed, upon the body of
his horse, rose, and taking his rifle with him, backed slowly down the trail
until a turn hid him from the view of the watchful Arab.

Even then Achmet Zek did not advance, fearful as he was of some such treachery
as he himself might have been guilty of under like circumstances; nor were his
suspicions groundless, for the Belgian, no sooner had he passed out of the
range of the Arab’s vision, halted behind the bole of a tree, where he
still commanded an unobstructed view of his dead horse and the pouch, and
raising his rifle covered the spot where the other’s body must appear
when he came forward to seize the treasure.

But Achmet Zek was no fool to expose himself to the blackened honor of a thief
and a murderer. Taking his long gun with him, he left the trail, entering the
rank and tangled vegetation which walled it, and crawling slowly forward on
hands and knees he paralleled the trail; but never for an instant was his body
exposed to the rifle of the hidden assassin.

Thus Achmet Zek advanced until he had come opposite the dead horse of his
enemy. The pouch lay there in full view, while a short distance along the
trail, Werper waited in growing impatience and nervousness, wondering why the
Arab did not come to claim his reward.

Presently he saw the muzzle of a rifle appear suddenly and mysteriously a few
inches above the pouch, and before he could realize the cunning trick that the
Arab had played upon him the sight of the weapon was adroitly hooked into the
rawhide thong which formed the carrying strap of the pouch, and the latter was
drawn quickly from his view into the dense foliage at the trail’s side.

Not for an instant had the raider exposed a square inch of his body, and Werper
dared not fire his one remaining shot unless every chance of a successful hit
was in his favor.

Chuckling to himself, Achmet Zek withdrew a few paces farther into the jungle,
for he was as positive that Werper was waiting nearby for a chance to pot him
as though his eyes had penetrated the jungle trees to the figure of the hiding
Belgian, fingering his rifle behind the bole of the buttressed giant.

Werper did not dare advance—his cupidity would not permit him to depart,
and so he stood there, his rifle ready in his hands, his eyes watching the
trail before him with catlike intensity.

But there was another who had seen the pouch and recognized it, who did advance
with Achmet Zek, hovering above him, as silent and as sure as death itself, and
as the Arab, finding a little spot less overgrown with bushes than he had yet
encountered, prepared to gloat his eyes upon the contents of the pouch, Tarzan
paused directly above him, intent upon the same object.

Wetting his thin lips with his tongue, Achmet Zek loosened the tie strings
which closed the mouth of the pouch, and cupping one claw-like hand poured
forth a portion of the contents into his palm.

A single look he took at the stones lying in his hand. His eyes narrowed, a
curse broke from his lips, and he hurled the small objects upon the ground,
disdainfully. Quickly he emptied the balance of the contents until he had
scanned each separate stone, and as he dumped them all upon the ground and
stamped upon them his rage grew until the muscles of his face worked in
demon-like fury, and his fingers clenched until his nails bit into the flesh.

Above, Tarzan watched in wonderment. He had been curious to discover what all
the pow-wow about his pouch had meant. He wanted to see what the Arab would do
after the other had gone away, leaving the pouch behind him, and, having
satisfied his curiosity, he would then have pounced upon Achmet Zek and taken
the pouch and his pretty pebbles away from him, for did they not belong to
Tarzan?

He saw the Arab now throw aside the empty pouch, and grasping his long gun by
the barrel, clublike, sneak stealthily through the jungle beside the trail
along which Werper had gone.

As the man disappeared from his view, Tarzan dropped to the ground and
commenced gathering up the spilled contents of the pouch, and the moment that
he obtained his first near view of the scattered pebbles he understood the rage
of the Arab, for instead of the glittering and scintillating gems which had
first caught and held the attention of the ape-man, the pouch now contained but
a collection of ordinary river pebbles.

CHAPTER XIX.
Jane Clayton and the Beasts of the Jungle

Mugambi, after his successful break for liberty, had fallen upon hard times.
His way had led him through a country with which he was unfamiliar, a jungle
country in which he could find no water, and but little food, so that after
several days of wandering he found himself so reduced in strength that he could
barely drag himself along.

It was with growing difficulty that he found the strength necessary to
construct a shelter by night wherein he might be reasonably safe from the large
carnivora, and by day he still further exhausted his strength in digging for
edible roots, and searching for water.

A few stagnant pools at considerable distances apart saved him from death by
thirst; but his was a pitiable state when finally he stumbled by accident upon
a large river in a country where fruit was abundant, and small game which he
might bag by means of a combination of stealth, cunning, and a crude knob-stick
which he had fashioned from a fallen limb.

Realizing that he still had a long march ahead of him before he could reach
even the outskirts of the Waziri country, Mugambi wisely decided to remain
where he was until he had recuperated his strength and health. A few
days’ rest would accomplish wonders for him, he knew, and he could ill
afford to sacrifice his chances for a safe return by setting forth handicapped
by weakness.

And so it was that he constructed a substantial thorn boma, and rigged a
thatched shelter within it, where he might sleep by night in security, and from
which he sallied forth by day to hunt the flesh which alone could return to his
giant thews their normal prowess.

One day, as he hunted, a pair of savage eyes discovered him from the
concealment of the branches of a great tree beneath which the black warrior
passed. Bloodshot, wicked eyes they were, set in a fierce and hairy face.

They watched Mugambi make his little kill of a small rodent, and they followed
him as he returned to his hut, their owner moving quietly through the trees
upon the trail of the Negro.

The creature was Chulk, and he looked down upon the unconscious man more in
curiosity than in hate. The wearing of the Arab burnoose which Tarzan had
placed upon his person had aroused in the mind of the anthropoid a desire for
similar mimicry of the Tarmangani. The burnoose, though, had obstructed his
movements and proven such a nuisance that the ape had long since torn it from
him and thrown it away.

Now, however, he saw a Gomangani arrayed in less cumbersome apparel—a
loin cloth, a few copper ornaments and a feather headdress. These were more in
line with Chulk’s desires than a flowing robe which was constantly
getting between one’s legs, and catching upon every limb and bush along
the leafy trail.

Chulk eyed the pouch, which, suspended over Mugambi’s shoulder, swung
beside his black hip. This took his fancy, for it was ornamented with feathers
and a fringe, and so the ape hung about Mugambi’s boma, waiting an
opportunity to seize either by stealth or might some object of the
black’s apparel.

Nor was it long before the opportunity came. Feeling safe within his thorny
enclosure, Mugambi was wont to stretch himself in the shade of his shelter
during the heat of the day, and sleep in peaceful security until the declining
sun carried with it the enervating temperature of midday.

Watching from above, Chulk saw the black warrior stretched thus in the
unconsciousness of sleep one sultry afternoon. Creeping out upon an overhanging
branch the anthropoid dropped to the ground within the boma. He approached the
sleeper upon padded feet which gave forth no sound, and with an uncanny
woodcraft that rustled not a leaf or a grass blade.

Pausing beside the man, the ape bent over and examined his belongings. Great as
was the strength of Chulk there lay in the back of his little brain a something
which deterred him from arousing the man to combat—a sense that is
inherent in all the lower orders, a strange fear of man, that rules even the
most powerful of the jungle creatures at times.

To remove Mugambi’s loin cloth without awakening him would be impossible,
and the only detachable things were the knob-stick and the pouch, which had
fallen from the black’s shoulder as he rolled in sleep.

Seizing these two articles, as better than nothing at all, Chulk retreated with
haste, and every indication of nervous terror, to the safety of the tree from
which he had dropped, and, still haunted by that indefinable terror which the
close proximity of man awakened in his breast, fled precipitately through the
jungle. Aroused by attack, or supported by the presence of another of his kind,
Chulk could have braved the presence of a score of human beings, but
alone—ah, that was a different matter—alone, and unenraged.

It was some time after Mugambi awoke that he missed the pouch. Instantly he was
all excitement. What could have become of it? It had been at his side when he
lay down to sleep—of that he was certain, for had he not pushed it from
beneath him when its bulging bulk, pressing against his ribs, caused him
discomfort? Yes, it had been there when he lay down to sleep. How then had it
vanished?

Mugambi’s savage imagination was filled with visions of the spirits of
departed friends and enemies, for only to the machinations of such as these
could he attribute the disappearance of his pouch and knob-stick in the first
excitement of the discovery of their loss; but later and more careful
investigation, such as his woodcraft made possible, revealed indisputable
evidence of a more material explanation than his excited fancy and superstition
had at first led him to accept.

In the trampled turf beside him was the faint impress of huge, manlike feet.
Mugambi raised his brows as the truth dawned upon him. Hastily leaving the boma
he searched in all directions about the enclosure for some further sign of the
tell-tale spoor. He climbed trees and sought for evidence of the direction of
the thief’s flight; but the faint signs left by a wary ape who elects to
travel through the trees eluded the woodcraft of Mugambi. Tarzan might have
followed them; but no ordinary mortal could perceive them, or perceiving,
translate.

The black, now strengthened and refreshed by his rest, felt ready to set out
again for Waziri, and finding himself another knob-stick, turned his back upon
the river and plunged into the mazes of the jungle.

As Taglat struggled with the bonds which secured the ankles and wrists of his
captive, the great lion that eyed the two from behind a nearby clump of bushes
wormed closer to his intended prey.

The ape’s back was toward the lion. He did not see the broad head,
fringed by its rough mane, protruding through the leafy wall. He could not know
that the powerful hind paws were gathering close beneath the tawny belly
preparatory to a sudden spring, and his first intimation of impending danger
was the thunderous and triumphant roar which the charging lion could no longer
suppress.

Scarce pausing for a backward glance, Taglat abandoned the unconscious woman
and fled in the opposite direction from the horrid sound which had broken in so
unexpected and terrifying a manner upon his startled ears; but the warning had
come too late to save him, and the lion, in his second bound, alighted full
upon the broad shoulders of the anthropoid.

As the great bull went down there was awakened in him to the full all the
cunning, all the ferocity, all the physical prowess which obey the mightiest of
the fundamental laws of nature, the law of self-preservation, and turning upon
his back he closed with the carnivore in a death struggle so fearless and
abandoned, that for a moment the great Numa himself may have trembled for the
outcome.

Seizing the lion by the mane, Taglat buried his yellowed fangs deep in the
monster’s throat, growling hideously through the muffled gag of blood and
hair. Mixed with the ape’s voice the lion’s roars of rage and pain
reverberated through the jungle, till the lesser creatures of the wild,
startled from their peaceful pursuits, scurried fearfully away.

Rolling over and over upon the turf the two battled with demoniac fury, until
the colossal cat, by doubling his hind paws far up beneath his belly sank his
talons deep into Taglat’s chest, then, ripping downward with all his
strength, Numa accomplished his design, and the disemboweled anthropoid, with a
last spasmodic struggle, relaxed in limp and bloody dissolution beneath his
titanic adversary.

Scrambling to his feet, Numa looked about quickly in all directions, as though
seeking to detect the possible presence of other foes; but only the still and
unconscious form of the girl, lying a few paces from him met his gaze, and with
an angry growl he placed a forepaw upon the body of his kill and raising his
head gave voice to his savage victory cry.

For another moment he stood with fierce eyes roving to and fro about the
clearing. At last they halted for a second time upon the girl. A low growl
rumbled from the lion’s throat. His lower jaw rose and fell, and the
slaver drooled and dripped upon the dead face of Taglat.

Like two yellow-green augurs, wide and unblinking, the terrible eyes remained
fixed upon Jane Clayton. The erect and majestic pose of the great frame shrank
suddenly into a sinister crouch as, slowly and gently as one who treads on
eggs, the devil-faced cat crept forward toward the girl.

Beneficent Fate maintained her in happy unconsciousness of the dread presence
sneaking stealthily upon her. She did not know when the lion paused at her
side. She did not hear the sniffing of his nostrils as he smelled about her.
She did not feel the heat of the fetid breath upon her face, nor the dripping
of the saliva from the frightful jaws half opened so close above her.

Finally the lion lifted a forepaw and turned the body of the girl half over,
then he stood again eyeing her as though still undetermined whether life was
extinct or not. Some noise or odor from the nearby jungle attracted his
attention for a moment. His eyes did not again return to Jane Clayton, and
presently he left her, walked over to the remains of Taglat, and crouching down
upon his kill with his back toward the girl, proceeded to devour the ape.

It was upon this scene that Jane Clayton at last opened her eyes. Inured to
danger, she maintained her self-possession in the face of the startling
surprise which her new-found consciousness revealed to her. She neither cried
out nor moved a muscle, until she had taken in every detail of the scene which
lay within the range of her vision.

She saw that the lion had killed the ape, and that he was devouring his prey
less than fifty feet from where she lay; but what could she do? Her hands and
feet were bound. She must wait then, in what patience she could command, until
Numa had eaten and digested the ape, when, without doubt, he would return to
feast upon her, unless, in the meantime, the dread hyenas should discover her,
or some other of the numerous prowling carnivora of the jungle.

As she lay tormented by these frightful thoughts, she suddenly became conscious
that the bonds at her wrists and ankles no longer hurt her, and then of the
fact that her hands were separated, one lying upon either side of her, instead
of both being confined at her back.

Wonderingly she moved a hand. What miracle had been performed? It was not
bound! Stealthily and noiselessly she moved her other limbs, only to discover
that she was free. She could not know how the thing had happened, that Taglat,
gnawing upon them for sinister purposes of his own, had cut them through but an
instant before Numa had frightened him from his victim.

For a moment Jane Clayton was overwhelmed with joy and thanksgiving; but only
for a moment. What good was her new-found liberty in the face of the frightful
beast crouching so close beside her? If she could have had this chance under
different conditions, how happily she would have taken advantage of it; but now
it was given to her when escape was practically impossible.

The nearest tree was a hundred feet away, the lion less than fifty. To rise and
attempt to reach the safety of those tantalizing branches would be but to
invite instant destruction, for Numa would doubtless be too jealous of this
future meal to permit it to escape with ease. And yet, too, there was another
possibility—a chance which hinged entirely upon the unknown temper of the
great beast.

His belly already partially filled, he might watch with indifference the
departure of the girl; yet could she afford to chance so improbable a
contingency? She doubted it. Upon the other hand she was no more minded to
allow this frail opportunity for life to entirely elude her without taking or
attempting to take some advantage from it.

She watched the lion narrowly. He could not see her without turning his head
more than halfway around. She would attempt a ruse. Silently she rolled over in
the direction of the nearest tree, and away from the lion, until she lay again
in the same position in which Numa had left her, but a few feet farther from
him.

Here she lay breathless watching the lion; but the beast gave no indication
that he had heard aught to arouse his suspicions. Again she rolled over,
gaining a few more feet and again she lay in rigid contemplation of the
beast’s back.

During what seemed hours to her tense nerves, Jane Clayton continued these
tactics, and still the lion fed on in apparent unconsciousness that his second
prey was escaping him. Already the girl was but a few paces from the
tree—a moment more and she would be close enough to chance springing to
her feet, throwing caution aside and making a sudden, bold dash for safety. She
was halfway over in her turn, her face away from the lion, when he suddenly
turned his great head and fastened his eyes upon her. He saw her roll over upon
her side away from him, and then her eyes were turned again toward him, and the
cold sweat broke from the girl’s every pore as she realized that with
life almost within her grasp, death had found her out.

For a long time neither the girl nor the lion moved. The beast lay motionless,
his head turned upon his shoulders and his glaring eyes fixed upon the rigid
victim, now nearly fifty yards away. The girl stared back straight into those
cruel orbs, daring not to move even a muscle.

The strain upon her nerves was becoming so unbearable that she could scarcely
restrain a growing desire to scream, when Numa deliberately turned back to the
business of feeding; but his back-layed ears attested a sinister regard for the
actions of the girl behind him.

Realizing that she could not again turn without attracting his immediate and
perhaps fatal attention, Jane Clayton resolved to risk all in one last attempt
to reach the tree and clamber to the lower branches.

Gathering herself stealthily for the effort, she leaped suddenly to her feet,
but almost simultaneously the lion sprang up, wheeled and with wide-distended
jaws and terrific roars, charged swiftly down upon her.

Those who have spent lifetimes hunting the big game of Africa will tell you
that scarcely any other creature in the world attains the speed of a charging
lion. For the short distance that the great cat can maintain it, it resembles
nothing more closely than the onrushing of a giant locomotive under full speed,
and so, though the distance that Jane Clayton must cover was relatively small,
the terrific speed of the lion rendered her hopes of escape almost negligible.

Yet fear can work wonders, and though the upward spring of the lion as he
neared the tree into which she was scrambling brought his talons in contact
with her boots she eluded his raking grasp, and as he hurtled against the bole
of her sanctuary, the girl drew herself into the safety of the branches above
his reach.

For some time the lion paced, growling and moaning, beneath the tree in which
Jane Clayton crouched, panting and trembling. The girl was a prey to the
nervous reaction from the frightful ordeal through which she had so recently
passed, and in her overwrought state it seemed that never again should she dare
descend to the ground among the fearsome dangers which infested the broad
stretch of jungle that she knew must lie between herself and the nearest
village of her faithful Waziri.

It was almost dark before the lion finally quit the clearing, and even had his
place beside the remnants of the mangled ape not been immediately usurped by a
pack of hyenas, Jane Clayton would scarcely have dared venture from her refuge
in the face of impending night, and so she composed herself as best she could
for the long and tiresome wait, until daylight might offer some means of escape
from the dread vicinity in which she had witnessed such terrifying adventures.

Tired nature at last overcame even her fears, and she dropped into a deep
slumber, cradled in a comparatively safe, though rather uncomfortable, position
against the bole of the tree, and supported by two large branches which grew
outward, almost horizontally, but a few inches apart.

The sun was high in the heavens when she at last awoke, and beneath her was no
sign either of Numa or the hyenas. Only the clean-picked bones of the ape,
scattered about the ground, attested the fact of what had transpired in this
seemingly peaceful spot but a few hours before.

Both hunger and thirst assailed her now, and realizing that she must descend or
die of starvation, she at last summoned courage to undertake the ordeal of
continuing her journey through the jungle.

Descending from the tree, she set out in a southerly direction, toward the
point where she believed the plains of Waziri lay, and though she knew that
only ruin and desolation marked the spot where once her happy home had stood,
she hoped that by coming to the broad plain she might eventually reach one of
the numerous Waziri villages that were scattered over the surrounding country,
or chance upon a roving band of these indefatigable huntsmen.

The day was half spent when there broke unexpectedly upon her startled ears the
sound of a rifle shot not far ahead of her. As she paused to listen, this first
shot was followed by another and another and another. What could it mean? The
first explanation which sprung to her mind attributed the firing to an
encounter between the Arab raiders and a party of Waziri; but as she did not
know upon which side victory might rest, or whether she were behind friend or
foe, she dared not advance nearer on the chance of revealing herself to an
enemy.

After listening for several minutes she became convinced that no more than two
or three rifles were engaged in the fight, since nothing approximating the
sound of a volley reached her ears; but still she hesitated to approach, and at
last, determining to take no chance, she climbed into the concealing foliage of
a tree beside the trail she had been following and there fearfully awaited
whatever might reveal itself.

As the firing became less rapid she caught the sound of men’s voices,
though she could distinguish no words, and at last the reports of the guns
ceased, and she heard two men calling to each other in loud tones. Then there
was a long silence which was finally broken by the stealthy padding of
footfalls on the trail ahead of her, and in another moment a man appeared in
view backing toward her, a rifle ready in his hands, and his eyes directed in
careful watchfulness along the way that he had come.

Almost instantly Jane Clayton recognized the man as M. Jules Frecoult, who so
recently had been a guest in her home. She was upon the point of calling to him
in glad relief when she saw him leap quickly to one side and hide himself in
the thick verdure at the trail’s side. It was evident that he was being
followed by an enemy, and so Jane Clayton kept silent, lest she distract
Frecoult’s attention, or guide his foe to his hiding place.

Scarcely had Frecoult hidden himself than the figure of a white-robed Arab
crept silently along the trail in pursuit. From her hiding place, Jane Clayton
could see both men plainly. She recognized Achmet Zek as the leader of the band
of ruffians who had raided her home and made her a prisoner, and as she saw
Frecoult, the supposed friend and ally, raise his gun and take careful aim at
the Arab, her heart stood still and every power of her soul was directed upon a
fervent prayer for the accuracy of his aim.

Achmet Zek paused in the middle of the trail. His keen eyes scanned every bush
and tree within the radius of his vision. His tall figure presented a perfect
target to the perfidious assassin. There was a sharp report, and a little puff
of smoke arose from the bush that hid the Belgian, as Achmet Zek stumbled
forward and pitched, face down, upon the trail.

As Werper stepped back into the trail, he was startled by the sound of a glad
cry from above him, and as he wheeled about to discover the author of this
unexpected interruption, he saw Jane Clayton drop lightly from a nearby tree
and run forward with outstretched hands to congratulate him upon his victory.

CHAPTER XX.
Jane Clayton Again a Prisoner

Though her clothes were torn and her hair disheveled, Albert Werper realized
that he never before had looked upon such a vision of loveliness as that which
Lady Greystoke presented in the relief and joy which she felt in coming so
unexpectedly upon a friend and rescuer when hope had seemed so far away.

If the Belgian had entertained any doubts as to the woman’s knowledge of
his part in the perfidious attack upon her home and herself, it was quickly
dissipated by the genuine friendliness of her greeting. She told him quickly of
all that had befallen her since he had departed from her home, and as she spoke
of the death of her husband her eyes were veiled by the tears which she could
not repress.

“I am shocked,” said Werper, in well-simulated sympathy; “but
I am not surprised. That devil there,” and he pointed toward the body of
Achmet Zek, “has terrorized the entire country. Your Waziri are either
exterminated, or have been driven out of their country, far to the south. The
men of Achmet Zek occupy the plain about your former home—there is
neither sanctuary nor escape in that direction. Our only hope lies in traveling
northward as rapidly as we may, of coming to the camp of the raiders before the
knowledge of Achmet Zek’s death reaches those who were left there, and of
obtaining, through some ruse, an escort toward the north.

“I think that the thing can be accomplished, for I was a guest of the
raider’s before I knew the nature of the man, and those at the camp are
not aware that I turned against him when I discovered his villainy.

“Come! We will make all possible haste to reach the camp before those who
accompanied Achmet Zek upon his last raid have found his body and carried the
news of his death to the cut-throats who remained behind. It is our only hope,
Lady Greystoke, and you must place your entire faith in me if I am to succeed.
Wait for me here a moment while I take from the Arab’s body the wallet
that he stole from me,” and Werper stepped quickly to the dead
man’s side, and, kneeling, sought with quick fingers the pouch of jewels.
To his consternation, there was no sign of them in the garments of Achmet Zek.
Rising, he walked back along the trail, searching for some trace of the missing
pouch or its contents; but he found nothing, even though he searched carefully
the vicinity of his dead horse, and for a few paces into the jungle on either
side. Puzzled, disappointed and angry, he at last returned to the girl.
“The wallet is gone,” he explained, crisply, “and I dare not
delay longer in search of it. We must reach the camp before the returning
raiders.”

Unsuspicious of the man’s true character, Jane Clayton saw nothing
peculiar in his plans, or in his specious explanation of his former friendship
for the raider, and so she grasped with alacrity the seeming hope for safety
which he proffered her, and turning about she set out with Albert Werper toward
the hostile camp in which she so lately had been a prisoner.

It was late in the afternoon of the second day before they reached their
destination, and as they paused upon the edge of the clearing before the gates
of the walled village, Werper cautioned the girl to accede to whatever he might
suggest by his conversation with the raiders.

“I shall tell them,” he said, “that I apprehended you after
you escaped from the camp, that I took you to Achmet Zek, and that as he was
engaged in a stubborn battle with the Waziri, he directed me to return to camp
with you, to obtain here a sufficient guard, and to ride north with you as
rapidly as possible and dispose of you at the most advantageous terms to a
certain slave broker whose name he gave me.”

Again the girl was deceived by the apparent frankness of the Belgian. She
realized that desperate situations required desperate handling, and though she
trembled inwardly at the thought of again entering the vile and hideous village
of the raiders she saw no better course than that which her companion had
suggested.

Calling aloud to those who tended the gates, Werper, grasping Jane Clayton by
the arm, walked boldly across the clearing. Those who opened the gates to him
permitted their surprise to show clearly in their expressions. That the
discredited and hunted lieutenant should be thus returning fearlessly of his
own volition, seemed to disarm them quite as effectually as his manner toward
Lady Greystoke had deceived her.

The sentries at the gate returned Werper’s salutations, and viewed with
astonishment the prisoner whom he brought into the village with him.

Immediately the Belgian sought the Arab who had been left in charge of the camp
during Achmet Zek’s absence, and again his boldness disarmed suspicion
and won the acceptance of his false explanation of his return. The fact that he
had brought back with him the woman prisoner who had escaped, added strength to
his claims, and Mohammed Beyd soon found himself fraternizing good-naturedly
with the very man whom he would have slain without compunction had he
discovered him alone in the jungle a half hour before.

Jane Clayton was again confined to the prison hut she had formerly occupied,
but as she realized that this was but a part of the deception which she and
Frecoult were playing upon the credulous raiders, it was with quite a different
sensation that she again entered the vile and filthy interior, from that which
she had previously experienced, when hope was so far away.

Once more she was bound and sentries placed before the door of her prison; but
before Werper left her he whispered words of cheer into her ear. Then he left,
and made his way back to the tent of Mohammed Beyd. He had been wondering how
long it would be before the raiders who had ridden out with Achmet Zek would
return with the murdered body of their chief, and the more he thought upon the
matter the greater his fears became, that without accomplices his plan would
fail.

What, even, if he got away from the camp in safety before any returned with the
true story of his guilt—of what value would this advantage be other than
to protract for a few days his mental torture and his life? These hard riders,
familiar with every trail and bypath, would get him long before he could hope
to reach the coast.

As these thoughts passed through his mind he entered the tent where Mohammed
Beyd sat cross-legged upon a rug, smoking. The Arab looked up as the European
came into his presence.

“Greetings, O Brother!” he said.

“Greetings!” replied Werper.

For a while neither spoke further. The Arab was the first to break the silence.

“And my master, Achmet Zek, was well when last you saw him?” he
asked.

“Never was he safer from the sins and dangers of mortality,”
replied the Belgian.

“It is well,” said Mohammed Beyd, blowing a little puff of blue
smoke straight out before him.

Again there was silence for several minutes.

“And if he were dead?” asked the Belgian, determined to lead up to
the truth, and attempt to bribe Mohammed Beyd into his service.

The Arab’s eyes narrowed and he leaned forward, his gaze boring straight
into the eyes of the Belgian.

“I have been thinking much, Werper, since you returned so unexpectedly to
the camp of the man whom you had deceived, and who sought you with death in his
heart. I have been with Achmet Zek for many years—his own mother never
knew him so well as I. He never forgives—much less would he again trust a
man who had once betrayed him; that I know.

“I have thought much, as I said, and the result of my thinking has
assured me that Achmet Zek is dead—for otherwise you would never have
dared return to his camp, unless you be either a braver man or a bigger fool
than I have imagined. And, if this evidence of my judgment is not sufficient, I
have but just now received from your own lips even more confirmatory
witness—for did you not say that Achmet Zek was never more safe from the
sins and dangers of mortality?

“Achmet Zek is dead—you need not deny it. I was not his mother, or
his mistress, so do not fear that my wailings shall disturb you. Tell me why
you have come back here. Tell me what you want, and, Werper, if you still
possess the jewels of which Achmet Zek told me, there is no reason why you and
I should not ride north together and divide the ransom of the white woman and
the contents of the pouch you wear about your person. Eh?”

The evil eyes narrowed, a vicious, thin-lipped smile tortured the villainous
face, as Mohammed Beyd grinned knowingly into the face of the Belgian.

Werper was both relieved and disturbed by the Arab’s attitude. The
complacency with which he accepted the death of his chief lifted a considerable
burden of apprehension from the shoulders of Achmet Zek’s assassin; but
his demand for a share of the jewels boded ill for Werper when Mohammed Beyd
should have learned that the precious stones were no longer in the
Belgian’s possession.

To acknowledge that he had lost the jewels might be to arouse the wrath or
suspicion of the Arab to such an extent as would jeopardize his new-found
chances of escape. His one hope seemed, then, to lie in fostering Mohammed
Beyd’s belief that the jewels were still in his possession, and depend
upon the accidents of the future to open an avenue of escape.

Could he contrive to tent with the Arab upon the march north, he might find
opportunity in plenty to remove this menace to his life and liberty—it
was worth trying, and, further, there seemed no other way out of his
difficulty.

“Yes,” he said, “Achmet Zek is dead. He fell in battle with a
company of Abyssinian cavalry that held me captive. During the fighting I
escaped; but I doubt if any of Achmet Zek’s men live, and the gold they
sought is in the possession of the Abyssinians. Even now they are doubtless
marching on this camp, for they were sent by Menelek to punish Achmet Zek and
his followers for a raid upon an Abyssinian village. There are many of them,
and if we do not make haste to escape we shall all suffer the same fate as
Achmet Zek.”

Mohammed Beyd listened in silence. How much of the unbeliever’s story he
might safely believe he did not know; but as it afforded him an excuse for
deserting the village and making for the north he was not inclined to
cross-question the Belgian too minutely.

“And if I ride north with you,” he asked, “half the jewels
and half the ransom of the woman shall be mine?”

“Yes,” replied Werper.

“Good,” said Mohammed Beyd. “I go now to give the order for
the breaking of camp early on the morrow,” and he rose to leave the tent.

Werper laid a detaining hand upon his arm.

“Wait,” he said, “let us determine how many shall accompany
us. It is not well that we be burdened by the women and children, for then
indeed we might be overtaken by the Abyssinians. It would be far better to
select a small guard of your bravest men, and leave word behind that we are
riding WEST. Then, when the Abyssinians come they will be put upon the wrong
trail should they have it in their hearts to pursue us, and if they do not they
will at least ride north with less rapidity than as though they thought that we
were ahead of them.”

“The serpent is less wise than thou, Werper,” said Mohammed Beyd
with a smile. “It shall be done as you say. Twenty men shall accompany
us, and we shall ride west—when we leave the village.”

“Good,” cried the Belgian, and so it was arranged.

Early the next morning Jane Clayton, after an almost sleepless night, was
aroused by the sound of voices outside her prison, and a moment later, M.
Frecoult, and two Arabs entered. The latter unbound her ankles and lifted her
to her feet. Then her wrists were loosed, she was given a handful of dry bread,
and led out into the faint light of dawn.

She looked questioningly at Frecoult, and at a moment that the Arab’s
attention was attracted in another direction the man leaned toward her and
whispered that all was working out as he had planned. Thus assured, the young
woman felt a renewal of the hope which the long and miserable night of bondage
had almost expunged.

Shortly after, she was lifted to the back of a horse, and surrounded by Arabs,
was escorted through the gateway of the village and off into the jungle toward
the west. Half an hour later the party turned north, and northerly was their
direction for the balance of the march.

M. Frecoult spoke with her but seldom, and she understood that in carrying out
his deception he must maintain the semblance of her captor, rather than
protector, and so she suspected nothing though she saw the friendly relations
which seemed to exist between the European and the Arab leader of the band.

If Werper succeeded in keeping himself from conversation with the young woman,
he failed signally to expel her from his thoughts. A hundred times a day he
found his eyes wandering in her direction and feasting themselves upon her
charms of face and figure. Each hour his infatuation for her grew, until his
desire to possess her gained almost the proportions of madness.

If either the girl or Mohammed Beyd could have guessed what passed in the mind
of the man which each thought a friend and ally, the apparent harmony of the
little company would have been rudely disturbed.

Werper had not succeeded in arranging to tent with Mohammed Beyd, and so he
revolved many plans for the assassination of the Arab that would have been
greatly simplified had he been permitted to share the other’s nightly
shelter.

Upon the second day out Mohammed Beyd reined his horse to the side of the
animal on which the captive was mounted. It was, apparently, the first notice
which the Arab had taken of the girl; but many times during these two days had
his cunning eyes peered greedily from beneath the hood of his burnoose to gloat
upon the beauties of the prisoner.

Nor was this hidden infatuation of any recent origin. He had conceived it when
first the wife of the Englishman had fallen into the hands of Achmet Zek; but
while that austere chieftain lived, Mohammed Beyd had not even dared hope for a
realization of his imaginings.

Now, though, it was different—only a despised dog of a Christian stood
between himself and possession of the girl. How easy it would be to slay the
unbeliever, and take unto himself both the woman and the jewels! With the
latter in his possession, the ransom which might be obtained for the captive
would form no great inducement to her relinquishment in the face of the
pleasures of sole ownership of her. Yes, he would kill Werper, retain all the
jewels and keep the Englishwoman.

He turned his eyes upon her as she rode along at his side. How beautiful she
was! His fingers opened and closed—skinny, brown talons itching to feel
the soft flesh of the victim in their remorseless clutch.

“Do you know,” he asked leaning toward her, “where this man
would take you?”

Jane Clayton nodded affirmatively.

“And you are willing to become the plaything of a black sultan?”

The girl drew herself up to her full height, and turned her head away; but she
did not reply. She feared lest her knowledge of the ruse that M. Frecoult was
playing upon the Arab might cause her to betray herself through an insufficient
display of terror and aversion.

“You can escape this fate,” continued the Arab; “Mohammed
Beyd will save you,” and he reached out a brown hand and seized the
fingers of her right hand in a grasp so sudden and so fierce that his brutal
passion was revealed as clearly in the act as though his lips had confessed it
in words. Jane Clayton wrenched herself from his grasp.

“You beast!” she cried. “Leave me or I shall call M.
Frecoult.”

Mohammed Beyd drew back with a scowl. His thin, upper lip curled upward,
revealing his smooth, white teeth.

“M. Frecoult?” he jeered. “There is no such person. The
man’s name is Werper. He is a liar, a thief, and a murderer. He killed
his captain in the Congo country and fled to the protection of Achmet Zek. He
led Achmet Zek to the plunder of your home. He followed your husband, and
planned to steal his gold from him. He has told me that you think him your
protector, and he has played upon this to win your confidence that it might be
easier to carry you north and sell you into some black sultan’s harem.
Mohammed Beyd is your only hope,” and with this assertion to provide the
captive with food for thought, the Arab spurred forward toward the head of the
column.

Jane Clayton could not know how much of Mohammed Beyd’s indictment might
be true, or how much false; but at least it had the effect of dampening her
hopes and causing her to review with suspicion every past act of the man upon
whom she had been looking as her sole protector in the midst of a world of
enemies and dangers.

On the march a separate tent had been provided for the captive, and at night it
was pitched between those of Mohammed Beyd and Werper. A sentry was posted at
the front and another at the back, and with these precautions it had not been
thought necessary to confine the prisoner to bonds. The evening following her
interview with Mohammed Beyd, Jane Clayton sat for some time at the opening of
her tent watching the rough activities of the camp. She had eaten the meal that
had been brought her by Mohammed Beyd’s Negro slave—a meal of
cassava cakes and a nondescript stew in which a new-killed monkey, a couple of
squirrels and the remains of a zebra, slain the previous day, were impartially
and unsavorily combined; but the one-time Baltimore belle had long since
submerged in the stern battle for existence, an estheticism which formerly
revolted at much slighter provocation.

As the girl’s eyes wandered across the trampled jungle clearing, already
squalid from the presence of man, she no longer apprehended either the nearer
objects of the foreground, the uncouth men laughing or quarreling among
themselves, or the jungle beyond, which circumscribed the extreme range of her
material vision. Her gaze passed through all these, unseeing, to center itself
upon a distant bungalow and scenes of happy security which brought to her eyes
tears of mingled joy and sorrow. She saw a tall, broad-shouldered man riding in
from distant fields; she saw herself waiting to greet him with an armful of
fresh-cut roses from the bushes which flanked the little rustic gate before
her. All this was gone, vanished into the past, wiped out by the torches and
bullets and hatred of these hideous and degenerate men. With a stifled sob, and
a little shudder, Jane Clayton turned back into her tent and sought the pile of
unclean blankets which were her bed. Throwing herself face downward upon them
she sobbed forth her misery until kindly sleep brought her, at least temporary,
relief.

And while she slept a figure stole from the tent that stood to the right of
hers. It approached the sentry before the doorway and whispered a few words in
the man’s ear. The latter nodded, and strode off through the darkness in
the direction of his own blankets. The figure passed to the rear of Jane
Clayton’s tent and spoke again to the sentry there, and this man also
left, following in the trail of the first.

Then he who had sent them away stole silently to the tent flap and untying the
fastenings entered with the noiselessness of a disembodied spirit.

CHAPTER XXI.
The Flight to the Jungle

Sleepless upon his blankets, Albert Werper let his evil mind dwell upon the
charms of the woman in the nearby tent. He had noted Mohammed Beyd’s
sudden interest in the girl, and judging the man by his own standards, had
guessed at the basis of the Arab’s sudden change of attitude toward the
prisoner.

And as he let his imaginings run riot they aroused within him a bestial
jealousy of Mohammed Beyd, and a great fear that the other might encompass his
base designs upon the defenseless girl. By a strange process of reasoning,
Werper, whose designs were identical with the Arab’s, pictured himself as
Jane Clayton’s protector, and presently convinced himself that the
attentions which might seem hideous to her if proffered by Mohammed Beyd, would
be welcomed from Albert Werper.

Her husband was dead, and Werper fancied that he could replace in the
girl’s heart the position which had been vacated by the act of the grim
reaper. He could offer Jane Clayton marriage—a thing which Mohammed Beyd
would not offer, and which the girl would spurn from him with as deep disgust
as she would his unholy lust.

It was not long before the Belgian had succeeded in convincing himself that the
captive not only had every reason for having conceived sentiments of love for
him; but that she had by various feminine methods acknowledged her new-born
affection.

And then a sudden resolution possessed him. He threw the blankets from him and
rose to his feet. Pulling on his boots and buckling his cartridge belt and
revolver about his hips he stepped to the flap of his tent and looked out.
There was no sentry before the entrance to the prisoner’s tent! What
could it mean? Fate was indeed playing into his hands.

Stepping outside he passed to the rear of the girl’s tent. There was no
sentry there, either! And now, boldly, he walked to the entrance and stepped
within.

Dimly the moonlight illumined the interior. Across the tent a figure bent above
the blankets of a bed. There was a whispered word, and another figure rose from
the blankets to a sitting position. Slowly Albert Werper’s eyes were
becoming accustomed to the half darkness of the tent. He saw that the figure
leaning over the bed was that of a man, and he guessed at the truth of the
nocturnal visitor’s identity.

A sullen, jealous rage enveloped him. He took a step in the direction of the
two. He heard a frightened cry break from the girl’s lips as she
recognized the features of the man above her, and he saw Mohammed Beyd seize
her by the throat and bear her back upon the blankets.

Cheated passion cast a red blur before the eyes of the Belgian. No! The man
should not have her. She was for him and him alone. He would not be robbed of
his rights.

Quickly he ran across the tent and threw himself upon the back of Mohammed
Beyd. The latter, though surprised by this sudden and unexpected attack, was
not one to give up without a battle. The Belgian’s fingers were feeling
for his throat, but the Arab tore them away, and rising wheeled upon his
adversary. As they faced each other Werper struck the Arab a heavy blow in the
face, sending him staggering backward. If he had followed up his advantage he
would have had Mohammed Beyd at his mercy in another moment; but instead he
tugged at his revolver to draw it from its holster, and Fate ordained that at
that particular moment the weapon should stick in its leather scabbard.

Before he could disengage it, Mohammed Beyd had recovered himself and was
dashing upon him. Again Werper struck the other in the face, and the Arab
returned the blow. Striking at each other and ceaselessly attempting to clinch,
the two battled about the small interior of the tent, while the girl, wide-eyed
in terror and astonishment, watched the duel in frozen silence.

Again and again Werper struggled to draw his weapon. Mohammed Beyd,
anticipating no such opposition to his base desires, had come to the tent
unarmed, except for a long knife which he now drew as he stood panting during
the first brief rest of the encounter.

“Dog of a Christian,” he whispered, “look upon this knife in
the hands of Mohammed Beyd! Look well, unbeliever, for it is the last thing in
life that you shall see or feel. With it Mohammed Beyd will cut out your black
heart. If you have a God pray to him now—in a minute more you shall be
dead,” and with that he rushed viciously upon the Belgian, his knife
raised high above his head.

Werper was still dragging futilely at his weapon. The Arab was almost upon him.
In desperation the European waited until Mohammed Beyd was all but against him,
then he threw himself to one side to the floor of the tent, leaving a leg
extended in the path of the Arab.

The trick succeeded. Mohammed Beyd, carried on by the momentum of his charge,
stumbled over the projecting obstacle and crashed to the ground. Instantly he
was up again and wheeling to renew the battle; but Werper was on foot ahead of
him, and now his revolver, loosened from its holster, flashed in his hand.

The Arab dove headfirst to grapple with him, there was a sharp report, a lurid
gleam of flame in the darkness, and Mohammed Beyd rolled over and over upon the
floor to come to a final rest beside the bed of the woman he had sought to
dishonor.

Almost immediately following the report came the sound of excited voices in the
camp without. Men were calling back and forth to one another asking the meaning
of the shot. Werper could hear them running hither and thither, investigating.

Jane Clayton had risen to her feet as the Arab died, and now she came forward
with outstretched hands toward Werper.

“How can I ever thank you, my friend?” she asked. “And to
think that only today I had almost believed the infamous story which this beast
told me of your perfidy and of your past. Forgive me, M. Frecoult. I might have
known that a white man and a gentleman could be naught else than the protector
of a woman of his own race amid the dangers of this savage land.”

Werper’s hands dropped limply at his sides. He stood looking at the girl;
but he could find no words to reply to her. Her innocent arraignment of his
true purposes was unanswerable.

Outside, the Arabs were searching for the author of the disturbing shot. The
two sentries who had been relieved and sent to their blankets by Mohammed Beyd
were the first to suggest going to the tent of the prisoner. It occurred to
them that possibly the woman had successfully defended herself against their
leader.

Werper heard the men approaching. To be apprehended as the slayer of Mohammed
Beyd would be equivalent to a sentence of immediate death. The fierce and
brutal raiders would tear to pieces a Christian who had dared spill the blood
of their leader. He must find some excuse to delay the finding of Mohammed
Beyd’s dead body.

Returning his revolver to its holster, he walked quickly to the entrance of the
tent. Parting the flaps he stepped out and confronted the men, who were rapidly
approaching. Somehow he found within him the necessary bravado to force a smile
to his lips, as he held up his hand to bar their farther progress.

“The woman resisted,” he said, “and Mohammed Beyd was forced
to shoot her. She is not dead—only slightly wounded. You may go back to
your blankets. Mohammed Beyd and I will look after the prisoner;” then he
turned and re-entered the tent, and the raiders, satisfied by this explanation,
gladly returned to their broken slumbers.

As he again faced Jane Clayton, Werper found himself animated by quite
different intentions than those which had lured him from his blankets but a few
minutes before. The excitement of his encounter with Mohammed Beyd, as well as
the dangers which he now faced at the hands of the raiders when morning must
inevitably reveal the truth of what had occurred in the tent of the prisoner
that night, had naturally cooled the hot passion which had dominated him when
he entered the tent.

But another and stronger force was exerting itself in the girl’s favor.
However low a man may sink, honor and chivalry, has he ever possessed them, are
never entirely eradicated from his character, and though Albert Werper had long
since ceased to evidence the slightest claim to either the one or the other,
the spontaneous acknowledgment of them which the girl’s speech had
presumed had reawakened them both within him.

For the first time he realized the almost hopeless and frightful position of
the fair captive, and the depths of ignominy to which he had sunk, that had
made it possible for him, a well-born, European gentleman, to have entertained
even for a moment the part that he had taken in the ruin of her home,
happiness, and herself.

Too much of baseness already lay at the threshold of his conscience for him
ever to hope entirely to redeem himself; but in the first, sudden burst of
contrition the man conceived an honest intention to undo, in so far as lay
within his power, the evil that his criminal avarice had brought upon this
sweet and unoffending woman.

As he stood apparently listening to the retreating footsteps—Jane Clayton
approached him.

“What are we to do now?” she asked. “Morning will bring
discovery of this,” and she pointed to the still body of Mohammed Beyd.
“They will kill you when they find him.”

For a time Werper did not reply, then he turned suddenly toward the woman.

“I have a plan,” he cried. “It will require nerve and courage
on your part; but you have already shown that you possess both. Can you endure
still more?”

“I can endure anything,” she replied with a brave smile,
“that may offer us even a slight chance for escape.”

“You must simulate death,” he explained, “while I carry you
from the camp. I will explain to the sentries that Mohammed Beyd has ordered me
to take your body into the jungle. This seemingly unnecessary act I shall
explain upon the grounds that Mohammed Beyd had conceived a violent passion for
you and that he so regretted the act by which he had become your slayer that he
could not endure the silent reproach of your lifeless body.”

The girl held up her hand to stop. A smile touched her lips.

“Are you quite mad?” she asked. “Do you imagine that the
sentries will credit any such ridiculous tale?”

“You do not know them,” he replied. “Beneath their rough
exteriors, despite their calloused and criminal natures, there exists in each a
well-defined strain of romantic emotionalism—you will find it among such
as these throughout the world. It is romance which lures men to lead wild lives
of outlawry and crime. The ruse will succeed—never fear.”

Jane Clayton shrugged. “We can but try it—and then what?”

“I shall hide you in the jungle,” continued the Belgian,
“coming for you alone and with two horses in the morning.”

“But how will you explain Mohammed Beyd’s death?” she asked.
“It will be discovered before ever you can escape the camp in the
morning.”

“I shall not explain it,” replied Werper. “Mohammed Beyd
shall explain it himself—we must leave that to him. Are you ready for the
venture?”

“Yes.”

“But wait, I must get you a weapon and ammunition,” and Werper
walked quickly from the tent.

Very shortly he returned with an extra revolver and ammunition belt strapped
about his waist.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Quite ready,” replied the girl.

“Then come and throw yourself limply across my left shoulder,” and
Werper knelt to receive her.

“There,” he said, as he rose to his feet. “Now, let your
arms, your legs and your head hang limply. Remember that you are dead.”

A moment later the man walked out into the camp, the body of the woman across
his shoulder.

A thorn boma had been thrown up about the camp, to discourage the bolder of the
hungry carnivora. A couple of sentries paced to and fro in the light of a fire
which they kept burning brightly. The nearer of these looked up in surprise as
he saw Werper approaching.

“Who are you?” he cried. “What have you there?”

Werper raised the hood of his burnoose that the fellow might see his face.

“This is the body of the woman,” he explained. “Mohammed Beyd
has asked me to take it into the jungle, for he cannot bear to look upon the
face of her whom he loved, and whom necessity compelled him to slay. He suffers
greatly—he is inconsolable. It was with difficulty that I prevented him
taking his own life.”

Across the speaker’s shoulder, limp and frightened, the girl waited for
the Arab’s reply. He would laugh at this preposterous story; of that she
was sure. In an instant he would unmask the deception that M. Frecoult was
attempting to practice upon him, and they would both be lost. She tried to plan
how best she might aid her would-be rescuer in the fight which must most
certainly follow within a moment or two.

Then she heard the voice of the Arab as he replied to M. Frecoult.

“Are you going alone, or do you wish me to awaken someone to accompany
you?” he asked, and his tone denoted not the least surprise that Mohammed
Beyd had suddenly discovered such remarkably sensitive characteristics.

“I shall go alone,” replied Werper, and he passed on and out
through the narrow opening in the boma, by which the sentry stood.

A moment later he had entered among the boles of the trees with his burden, and
when safely hidden from the sentry’s view lowered the girl to her feet,
with a low, “sh-sh,” when she would have spoken.

Then he led her a little farther into the forest, halted beneath a large tree
with spreading branches, buckled a cartridge belt and revolver about her waist,
and assisted her to clamber into the lower branches.

“Tomorrow,” he whispered, “as soon as I can elude them, I
will return for you. Be brave, Lady Greystoke—we may yet escape.”

“Thank you,” she replied in a low tone. “You have been very
kind, and very brave.”

Werper did not reply, and the darkness of the night hid the scarlet flush of
shame which swept upward across his face. Quickly he turned and made his way
back to camp. The sentry, from his post, saw him enter his own tent; but he did
not see him crawl under the canvas at the rear and sneak cautiously to the tent
which the prisoner had occupied, where now lay the dead body of Mohammed Beyd.

Raising the lower edge of the rear wall, Werper crept within and approached the
corpse. Without an instant’s hesitation he seized the dead wrists and
dragged the body upon its back to the point where he had just entered. On hands
and knees he backed out as he had come in, drawing the corpse after him. Once
outside the Belgian crept to the side of the tent and surveyed as much of the
camp as lay within his vision—no one was watching.

Returning to the body, he lifted it to his shoulder, and risking all on a quick
sally, ran swiftly across the narrow opening which separated the
prisoner’s tent from that of the dead man. Behind the silken wall he
halted and lowered his burden to the ground, and there he remained motionless
for several minutes, listening.

Satisfied, at last, that no one had seen him, he stooped and raised the bottom
of the tent wall, backed in and dragged the thing that had been Mohammed Beyd
after him. To the sleeping rugs of the dead raider he drew the corpse, then he
fumbled about in the darkness until he had found Mohammed Beyd’s
revolver. With the weapon in his hand he returned to the side of the dead man,
kneeled beside the bedding, and inserted his right hand with the weapon beneath
the rugs, piled a number of thicknesses of the closely woven fabric over and
about the revolver with his left hand. Then he pulled the trigger, and at the
same time he coughed.

The muffled report could not have been heard above the sound of his cough by
one directly outside the tent. Werper was satisfied. A grim smile touched his
lips as he withdrew the weapon from the rugs and placed it carefully in the
right hand of the dead man, fixing three of the fingers around the grip and the
index finger inside the trigger guard.

A moment longer he tarried to rearrange the disordered rugs, and then he left
as he had entered, fastening down the rear wall of the tent as it had been
before he had raised it.

Going to the tent of the prisoner he removed there also the evidence that
someone might have come or gone beneath the rear wall. Then he returned to his
own tent, entered, fastened down the canvas, and crawled into his blankets.

The following morning he was awakened by the excited voice of Mohammed
Beyd’s slave calling to him at the entrance of his tent.

“Quick! Quick!” cried the black in a frightened tone. “Come!
Mohammed Beyd is dead in his tent—dead by his own hand.”

Werper sat up quickly in his blankets at the first alarm, a startled expression
upon his countenance; but at the last words of the black a sigh of relief
escaped his lips and a slight smile replaced the tense lines upon his face.

“I come,” he called to the slave, and drawing on his boots, rose
and went out of his tent.

Excited Arabs and blacks were running from all parts of the camp toward the
silken tent of Mohammed Beyd, and when Werper entered he found a number of the
raiders crowded about the corpse, now cold and stiff.

Shouldering his way among them, the Belgian halted beside the dead body of the
raider. He looked down in silence for a moment upon the still face, then he
wheeled upon the Arabs.

“Who has done this thing?” he cried. His tone was both menacing and
accusing. “Who has murdered Mohammed Beyd?”

A sudden chorus of voices arose in tumultuous protest.

“Mohammed Beyd was not murdered,” they cried. “He died by his
own hand. This, and Allah, are our witnesses,” and they pointed to a
revolver in the dead man’s hand.

For a time Werper pretended to be skeptical; but at last permitted himself to
be convinced that Mohammed Beyd had indeed killed himself in remorse for the
death of the white woman he had, all unknown to his followers, loved so
devotedly.

Werper himself wrapped the blankets of the dead man about the corpse, taking
care to fold inward the scorched and bullet-torn fabric that had muffled the
report of the weapon he had fired the night before. Then six husky blacks
carried the body out into the clearing where the camp stood, and deposited it
in a shallow grave. As the loose earth fell upon the silent form beneath the
tell-tale blankets, Albert Werper heaved another sigh of relief—his plan
had worked out even better than he had dared hope.

With Achmet Zek and Mohammed Beyd both dead, the raiders were without a leader,
and after a brief conference they decided to return into the north on visits to
the various tribes to which they belonged. Werper, after learning the direction
they intended taking, announced that for his part, he was going east to the
coast, and as they knew of nothing he possessed which any of them coveted, they
signified their willingness that he should go his way.

As they rode off, he sat his horse in the center of the clearing watching them
disappear one by one into the jungle, and thanked his God that he had at last
escaped their villainous clutches.

When he could no longer hear any sound of them, he turned to the right and rode
into the forest toward the tree where he had hidden Lady Greystoke, and drawing
rein beneath it, called up in a gay and hopeful voice a pleasant, “Good
morning!”

There was no reply, and though his eyes searched the thick foliage above him,
he could see no sign of the girl. Dismounting, he quickly climbed into the
tree, where he could obtain a view of all its branches. The tree was
empty—Jane Clayton had vanished during the silent watches of the jungle
night.

CHAPTER XXII.
Tarzan Recovers His Reason

As Tarzan let the pebbles from the recovered pouch run through his fingers, his
thoughts returned to the pile of yellow ingots about which the Arabs and the
Abyssinians had waged their relentless battle.

What was there in common between that pile of dirty metal and the beautiful,
sparkling pebbles that had formerly been in his pouch? What was the metal? From
whence had it come? What was that tantalizing half-conviction which seemed to
demand the recognition of his memory that the yellow pile for which these men
had fought and died had been intimately connected with his past—that it
had been his?

What had been his past? He shook his head. Vaguely the memory of his apish
childhood passed slowly in review—then came a strangely tangled mass of
faces, figures and events which seemed to have no relation to Tarzan of the
Apes, and yet which were, even in their fragmentary form, familiar.

Slowly and painfully, recollection was attempting to reassert itself, the hurt
brain was mending, as the cause of its recent failure to function was being
slowly absorbed or removed by the healing processes of perfect circulation.

The people who now passed before his mind’s eye for the first time in
weeks wore familiar faces; but yet he could neither place them in the niches
they had once filled in his past life, nor call them by name. One was a fair
she, and it was her face which most often moved through the tangled
recollections of his convalescing brain. Who was she? What had she been to
Tarzan of the Apes? He seemed to see her about the very spot upon which the
pile of gold had been unearthed by the Abyssinians; but the surroundings were
vastly different from those which now obtained.

There was a building—there were many buildings—and there were
hedges, fences, and flowers. Tarzan puckered his brow in puzzled study of the
wonderful problem. For an instant he seemed to grasp the whole of a true
explanation, and then, just as success was within his grasp, the picture faded
into a jungle scene where a naked, white youth danced in company with a band of
hairy, primordial ape-things.

Tarzan shook his head and sighed. Why was it that he could not recollect? At
least he was sure that in some way the pile of gold, the place where it lay,
the subtle aroma of the elusive she he had been pursuing, the memory figure of
the white woman, and he himself, were inextricably connected by the ties of a
forgotten past.

If the woman belonged there, what better place to search or await her than the
very spot which his broken recollections seemed to assign to her? It was worth
trying. Tarzan slipped the thong of the empty pouch over his shoulder and
started off through the trees in the direction of the plain.

At the outskirts of the forest he met the Arabs returning in search of Achmet
Zek. Hiding, he let them pass, and then resumed his way toward the charred
ruins of the home he had been almost upon the point of recalling to his memory.

His journey across the plain was interrupted by the discovery of a small herd
of antelope in a little swale, where the cover and the wind were well combined
to make stalking easy. A fat yearling rewarded a half hour of stealthy creeping
and a sudden, savage rush, and it was late in the afternoon when the ape-man
settled himself upon his haunches beside his kill to enjoy the fruits of his
skill, his cunning, and his prowess.

His hunger satisfied, thirst next claimed his attention. The river lured him by
the shortest path toward its refreshing waters, and when he had drunk, night
already had fallen and he was some half mile or more down stream from the point
where he had seen the pile of yellow ingots, and where he hoped to meet the
memory woman, or find some clew to her whereabouts or her identity.

To the jungle bred, time is usually a matter of small moment, and haste, except
when engendered by terror, by rage, or by hunger, is distasteful. Today was
gone. Therefore tomorrow, of which there was an infinite procession, would
answer admirably for Tarzan’s further quest. And, besides, the ape-man
was tired and would sleep.

A tree afforded him the safety, seclusion and comforts of a well-appointed
bedchamber, and to the chorus of the hunters and the hunted of the wild river
bank he soon dropped off into deep slumber.

Morning found him both hungry and thirsty again, and dropping from his tree he
made his way to the drinking place at the river’s edge. There he found
Numa, the lion, ahead of him. The big fellow was lapping the water greedily,
and at the approach of Tarzan along the trail in his rear, he raised his head,
and turning his gaze backward across his maned shoulders glared at the
intruder. A low growl of warning rumbled from his throat; but Tarzan, guessing
that the beast had but just quitted his kill and was well filled, merely made a
slight detour and continued to the river, where he stopped a few yards above
the tawny cat, and dropping upon his hands and knees plunged his face into the
cool water. For a moment the lion continued to eye the man; then he resumed his
drinking, and man and beast quenched their thirst side by side each apparently
oblivious of the other’s presence.

Numa was the first to finish. Raising his head, he gazed across the river for a
few minutes with that stony fixity of attention which is a characteristic of
his kind. But for the ruffling of his black mane to the touch of the passing
breeze he might have been wrought from golden bronze, so motionless, so
statuesque his pose.

A deep sigh from the cavernous lungs dispelled the illusion. The mighty head
swung slowly around until the yellow eyes rested upon the man. The bristled lip
curved upward, exposing yellow fangs. Another warning growl vibrated the heavy
jowls, and the king of beasts turned majestically about and paced slowly up the
trail into the dense reeds.

Tarzan of the Apes drank on, but from the corners of his gray eyes he watched
the great brute’s every move until he had disappeared from view, and,
after, his keen ears marked the movements of the carnivore.

A plunge in the river was followed by a scant breakfast of eggs which chance
discovered to him, and then he set off up river toward the ruins of the
bungalow where the golden ingots had marked the center of yesterday’s
battle.

And when he came upon the spot, great was his surprise and consternation, for
the yellow metal had disappeared. The earth, trampled by the feet of horses and
men, gave no clew. It was as though the ingots had evaporated into thin air.

The ape-man was at a loss to know where to turn or what next to do. There was
no sign of any spoor which might denote that the she had been here. The metal
was gone, and if there was any connection between the she and the metal it
seemed useless to wait for her now that the latter had been removed elsewhere.

Everything seemed to elude him—the pretty pebbles, the yellow metal, the
she, his memory. Tarzan was disgusted. He would go back into the jungle and
look for Chulk, and so he turned his steps once more toward the forest. He
moved rapidly, swinging across the plain in a long, easy trot, and at the edge
of the forest, taking to the trees with the agility and speed of a small
monkey.

His direction was aimless—he merely raced on and on through the jungle,
the joy of unfettered action his principal urge, with the hope of stumbling
upon some clew to Chulk or the she, a secondary incentive.

For two days he roamed about, killing, eating, drinking and sleeping wherever
inclination and the means to indulge it occurred simultaneously. It was upon
the morning of the third day that the scent spoor of horse and man were wafted
faintly to his nostrils. Instantly he altered his course to glide silently
through the branches in the direction from which the scent came.

It was not long before he came upon a solitary horseman riding toward the east.
Instantly his eyes confirmed what his nose had previously suspected—the
rider was he who had stolen his pretty pebbles. The light of rage flared
suddenly in the gray eyes as the ape-man dropped lower among the branches until
he moved almost directly above the unconscious Werper.

There was a quick leap, and the Belgian felt a heavy body hurtle onto the rump
of his terror-stricken mount. The horse, snorting, leaped forward. Giant arms
encircled the rider, and in the twinkling of an eye he was dragged from his
saddle to find himself lying in the narrow trail with a naked, white giant
kneeling upon his breast.

Recognition came to Werper with the first glance at his captor’s face,
and a pallor of fear overspread his features. Strong fingers were at his
throat, fingers of steel. He tried to cry out, to plead for his life; but the
cruel fingers denied him speech, as they were as surely denying him life.

“The pretty pebbles?” cried the man upon his breast. “What
did you with the pretty pebbles—with Tarzan’s pretty
pebbles?”

The fingers relaxed to permit a reply. For some time Werper could only choke
and cough—at last he regained the powers of speech.

“Achmet Zek, the Arab, stole them from me,” he cried; “he
made me give up the pouch and the pebbles.”

“I saw all that,” replied Tarzan; “but the pebbles in the
pouch were not the pebbles of Tarzan—they were only such pebbles as fill
the bottoms of the rivers, and the shelving banks beside them. Even the Arab
would not have them, for he threw them away in anger when he had looked upon
them. It is my pretty pebbles that I want—where are they?”

“I do not know, I do not know,” cried Werper. “I gave them to
Achmet Zek or he would have killed me. A few minutes later he followed me along
the trail to slay me, although he had promised to molest me no further, and I
shot and killed him; but the pouch was not upon his person and though I
searched about the jungle for some time I could not find it.”

“I found it, I tell you,” growled Tarzan, “and I also found
the pebbles which Achmet Zek had thrown away in disgust. They were not
Tarzan’s pebbles. You have hidden them! Tell me where they are or I will
kill you,” and the brown fingers of the ape-man closed a little tighter
upon the throat of his victim.

Werper struggled to free himself. “My God, Lord Greystoke,” he
managed to scream, “would you commit murder for a handful of
stones?”

The fingers at his throat relaxed, a puzzled, far-away expression softened the
gray eyes.

“Lord Greystoke!” repeated the ape-man. “Lord Greystoke! Who
is Lord Greystoke? Where have I heard that name before?”

“Why man, you are Lord Greystoke,” cried the Belgian. “You
were injured by a falling rock when the earthquake shattered the passage to the
underground chamber to which you and your black Waziri had come to fetch golden
ingots back to your bungalow. The blow shattered your memory. You are John
Clayton, Lord Greystoke—don’t you remember?”

“John Clayton, Lord Greystoke!” repeated Tarzan. Then for a moment
he was silent. Presently his hand went falteringly to his forehead, an
expression of wonderment filled his eyes—of wonderment and sudden
understanding. The forgotten name had reawakened the returning memory that had
been struggling to reassert itself. The ape-man relinquished his grasp upon the
throat of the Belgian, and leaped to his feet.

“God!” he cried, and then, “Jane!” Suddenly he turned
toward Werper. “My wife?” he asked. “What has become of her?
The farm is in ruins. You know. You have had something to do with all this. You
followed me to Opar, you stole the jewels which I thought but pretty pebbles.
You are a crook! Do not try to tell me that you are not.”

“He is worse than a crook,” said a quiet voice close behind them.

Tarzan turned in astonishment to see a tall man in uniform standing in the
trail a few paces from him. Back of the man were a number of black soldiers in
the uniform of the Congo Free State.

“He is a murderer, Monsieur,” continued the officer. “I have
followed him for a long time to take him back to stand trial for the killing of
his superior officer.”

Werper was upon his feet now, gazing, white and trembling, at the fate which
had overtaken him even in the fastness of the labyrinthine jungle.
Instinctively he turned to flee; but Tarzan of the Apes reached out a strong
hand and grasped him by the shoulder.

“Wait!” said the ape-man to his captive. “This gentleman
wishes you, and so do I. When I am through with you, he may have you. Tell me
what has become of my wife.”

The Belgian officer eyed the almost naked, white giant with curiosity. He noted
the strange contrast of primitive weapons and apparel, and the easy, fluent
French which the man spoke. The former denoted the lowest, the latter the
highest type of culture. He could not quite determine the social status of this
strange creature; but he knew that he did not relish the easy assurance with
which the fellow presumed to dictate when he might take possession of the
prisoner.

“Pardon me,” he said, stepping forward and placing his hand on
Werper’s other shoulder; “but this gentleman is my prisoner. He
must come with me.”

“When I am through with him,” replied Tarzan, quietly.

The officer turned and beckoned to the soldiers standing in the trail behind
him. A company of uniformed blacks stepped quickly forward and pushing past the
three, surrounded the ape-man and his captive.

“Both the law and the power to enforce it are upon my side,”
announced the officer. “Let us have no trouble. If you have a grievance
against this man you may return with me and enter your charge regularly before
an authorized tribunal.”

“Your legal rights are not above suspicion, my friend,” replied
Tarzan, “and your power to enforce your commands are only
apparent—not real. You have presumed to enter British territory with an
armed force. Where is your authority for this invasion? Where are the
extradition papers which warrant the arrest of this man? And what assurance
have you that I cannot bring an armed force about you that will prevent your
return to the Congo Free State?”

The Belgian lost his temper. “I have no disposition to argue with a naked
savage,” he cried. “Unless you wish to be hurt you will not
interfere with me. Take the prisoner, Sergeant!”

Werper raised his lips close to Tarzan’s ear. “Keep me from them,
and I can show you the very spot where I saw your wife last night,” he
whispered. “She cannot be far from here at this very minute.”

The soldiers, following the signal from their sergeant, closed in to seize
Werper. Tarzan grabbed the Belgian about the waist, and bearing him beneath his
arm as he might have borne a sack of flour, leaped forward in an attempt to
break through the cordon. His right fist caught the nearest soldier upon the
jaw and sent him hurtling backward upon his fellows. Clubbed rifles were torn
from the hands of those who barred his way, and right and left the black
soldiers stumbled aside in the face of the ape-man’s savage break for
liberty.

So completely did the blacks surround the two that they dared not fire for fear
of hitting one of their own number, and Tarzan was already through them and
upon the point of dodging into the concealing mazes of the jungle when one who
had sneaked upon him from behind struck him a heavy blow upon the head with a
rifle.

In an instant the ape-man was down and a dozen black soldiers were upon his
back. When he regained consciousness he found himself securely bound, as was
Werper also. The Belgian officer, success having crowned his efforts, was in
good humor, and inclined to chaff his prisoners about the ease with which they
had been captured; but from Tarzan of the Apes he elicited no response. Werper,
however, was voluble in his protests. He explained that Tarzan was an English
lord; but the officer only laughed at the assertion, and advised his prisoner
to save his breath for his defense in court.

As soon as Tarzan regained his senses and it was found that he was not
seriously injured, the prisoners were hastened into line and the return march
toward the Congo Free State boundary commenced.

Toward evening the column halted beside a stream, made camp and prepared the
evening meal. From the thick foliage of the nearby jungle a pair of fierce eyes
watched the activities of the uniformed blacks with silent intensity and
curiosity. From beneath beetling brows the creature saw the boma constructed,
the fires built, and the supper prepared.

Tarzan and Werper had been lying bound behind a small pile of knapsacks from
the time that the company had halted; but with the preparation of the meal
completed, their guard ordered them to rise and come forward to one of the
fires where their hands would be unfettered that they might eat.

As the giant ape-man rose, a startled expression of recognition entered the
eyes of the watcher in the jungle, and a low guttural broke from the savage
lips. Instantly Tarzan was alert, but the answering growl died upon his lips,
suppressed by the fear that it might arouse the suspicions of the soldiers.

Suddenly an inspiration came to him. He turned toward Werper.

“I am going to speak to you in a loud voice and in a tongue which you do
not understand. Appear to listen intently to what I say, and occasionally
mumble something as though replying in the same language—our escape may
hinge upon the success of your efforts.”

Werper nodded in assent and understanding, and immediately there broke from the
lips of his companion a strange jargon which might have been compared with
equal propriety to the barking and growling of a dog and the chattering of
monkeys.

The nearer soldiers looked in surprise at the ape-man. Some of them laughed,
while others drew away in evident superstitious fear. The officer approached
the prisoners while Tarzan was still jabbering, and halted behind them,
listening in perplexed interest. When Werper mumbled some ridiculous jargon in
reply his curiosity broke bounds, and he stepped forward, demanding to know
what language it was that they spoke.

Tarzan had gauged the measure of the man’s culture from the nature and
quality of his conversation during the march, and he rested the success of his
reply upon the estimate he had made.

“Greek,” he explained.

“Oh, I thought it was Greek,” replied the officer; “but it
has been so many years since I studied it that I was not sure. In future,
however, I will thank you to speak in a language which I am more familiar
with.”

Werper turned his head to hide a grin, whispering to Tarzan: “It was
Greek to him all right—and to me, too.”

But one of the black soldiers mumbled in a low voice to a companion: “I
have heard those sounds before—once at night when I was lost in the
jungle, I heard the hairy men of the trees talking among themselves, and their
words were like the words of this white man. I wish that we had not found him.
He is not a man at all—he is a bad spirit, and we shall have bad luck if
we do not let him go,” and the fellow rolled his eyes fearfully toward
the jungle.

His companion laughed nervously, and moved away, to repeat the conversation,
with variations and exaggerations, to others of the black soldiery, so that it
was not long before a frightful tale of black magic and sudden death was woven
about the giant prisoner, and had gone the rounds of the camp.

And deep in the gloomy jungle amidst the darkening shadows of the falling night
a hairy, manlike creature swung swiftly southward upon some secret mission of
his own.

CHAPTER XXIII.
A Night of Terror

To Jane Clayton, waiting in the tree where Werper had placed her, it seemed
that the long night would never end, yet end it did at last, and within an hour
of the coming of dawn her spirits leaped with renewed hope at sight of a
solitary horseman approaching along the trail.

The flowing burnoose, with its loose hood, hid both the face and the figure of
the rider; but that it was M. Frecoult the girl well knew, since he had been
garbed as an Arab, and he alone might be expected to seek her hiding place.

That which she saw relieved the strain of the long night vigil; but there was
much that she did not see. She did not see the black face beneath the white
hood, nor the file of ebon horsemen beyond the trail’s bend riding slowly
in the wake of their leader. These things she did not see at first, and so she
leaned downward toward the approaching rider, a cry of welcome forming in her
throat.

At the first word the man looked up, reining in in surprise, and as she saw the
black face of Abdul Mourak, the Abyssinian, she shrank back in terror among the
branches; but it was too late. The man had seen her, and now he called to her
to descend. At first she refused; but when a dozen black cavalrymen drew up
behind their leader, and at Abdul Mourak’s command one of them started to
climb the tree after her she realized that resistance was futile, and came
slowly down to stand upon the ground before this new captor and plead her cause
in the name of justice and humanity.

Angered by recent defeat, and by the loss of the gold, the jewels, and his
prisoners, Abdul Mourak was in no mood to be influenced by any appeal to those
softer sentiments to which, as a matter of fact, he was almost a stranger even
under the most favourable conditions.

He looked for degradation and possible death in punishment for his failures and
his misfortunes when he should have returned to his native land and made his
report to Menelek; but an acceptable gift might temper the wrath of the
emperor, and surely this fair flower of another race should be gratefully
received by the black ruler!

When Jane Clayton had concluded her appeal, Abdul Mourak replied briefly that
he would promise her protection; but that he must take her to his emperor. The
girl did not need ask him why, and once again hope died within her breast.
Resignedly she permitted herself to be lifted to a seat behind one of the
troopers, and again, under new masters, her journey was resumed toward what she
now began to believe was her inevitable fate.

Abdul Mourak, bereft of his guides by the battle he had waged against the
raiders, and himself unfamiliar with the country, had wandered far from the
trail he should have followed, and as a result had made but little progress
toward the north since the beginning of his flight. Today he was beating toward
the west in the hope of coming upon a village where he might obtain guides; but
night found him still as far from a realization of his hopes as had the rising
sun.

It was a dispirited company which went into camp, waterless and hungry, in the
dense jungle. Attracted by the horses, lions roared about the boma, and to
their hideous din was added the shrill neighs of the terror-stricken beasts
they hunted. There was little sleep for man or beast, and the sentries were
doubled that there might be enough on duty both to guard against the sudden
charge of an overbold, or overhungry lion, and to keep the fire blazing which
was an even more effectual barrier against them than the thorny boma.

It was well past midnight, and as yet Jane Clayton, notwithstanding that she
had passed a sleepless night the night before, had scarcely more than dozed. A
sense of impending danger seemed to hang like a black pall over the camp. The
veteran troopers of the black emperor were nervous and ill at ease. Abdul
Mourak left his blankets a dozen times to pace restlessly back and forth
between the tethered horses and the crackling fire. The girl could see his
great frame silhouetted against the lurid glare of the flames, and she guessed
from the quick, nervous movements of the man that he was afraid.

The roaring of the lions rose in sudden fury until the earth trembled to the
hideous chorus. The horses shrilled their neighs of terror as they lay back
upon their halter ropes in their mad endeavors to break loose. A trooper,
braver than his fellows, leaped among the kicking, plunging, fear-maddened
beasts in a futile attempt to quiet them. A lion, large, and fierce, and
courageous, leaped almost to the boma, full in the bright light from the fire.
A sentry raised his piece and fired, and the little leaden pellet unstoppered
the vials of hell upon the terror-stricken camp.

The shot ploughed a deep and painful furrow in the lion’s side, arousing
all the bestial fury of the little brain; but abating not a whit the power and
vigor of the great body.

Unwounded, the boma and the flames might have turned him back; but now the pain
and the rage wiped caution from his mind, and with a loud, and angry roar he
topped the barrier with an easy leap and was among the horses.

What had been pandemonium before became now an indescribable tumult of hideous
sound. The stricken horse upon which the lion leaped shrieked out its terror
and its agony. Several about it broke their tethers and plunged madly about the
camp. Men leaped from their blankets and with guns ready ran toward the picket
line, and then from the jungle beyond the boma a dozen lions, emboldened by the
example of their fellow charged fearlessly upon the camp.

Singly and in twos and threes they leaped the boma, until the little enclosure
was filled with cursing men and screaming horses battling for their lives with
the green-eyed devils of the jungle.

With the charge of the first lion, Jane Clayton had scrambled to her feet, and
now she stood horror-struck at the scene of savage slaughter that swirled and
eddied about her. Once a bolting horse knocked her down, and a moment later a
lion, leaping in pursuit of another terror-stricken animal, brushed her so
closely that she was again thrown from her feet.

Amidst the cracking of the rifles and the growls of the carnivora rose the
death screams of stricken men and horses as they were dragged down by the
blood-mad cats. The leaping carnivora and the plunging horses, prevented any
concerted action by the Abyssinians—it was every man for
himself—and in the melee, the defenseless woman was either forgotten or
ignored by her black captors. A score of times was her life menaced by charging
lions, by plunging horses, or by the wildly fired bullets of the frightened
troopers, yet there was no chance of escape, for now with the fiendish cunning
of their kind, the tawny hunters commenced to circle about their prey, hemming
them within a ring of mighty, yellow fangs, and sharp, long talons. Again and
again an individual lion would dash suddenly among the frightened men and
horses, and occasionally a horse, goaded to frenzy by pain or terror, succeeded
in racing safely through the circling lions, leaping the boma, and escaping
into the jungle; but for the men and the woman no such escape was possible.

A horse, struck by a stray bullet, fell beside Jane Clayton, a lion leaped
across the expiring beast full upon the breast of a black trooper just beyond.
The man clubbed his rifle and struck futilely at the broad head, and then he
was down and the carnivore was standing above him.

Shrieking out his terror, the soldier clawed with puny fingers at the shaggy
breast in vain endeavor to push away the grinning jaws. The lion lowered his
head, the gaping fangs closed with a single sickening crunch upon the
fear-distorted face, and turning strode back across the body of the dead horse
dragging his limp and bloody burden with him.

Wide-eyed the girl stood watching. She saw the carnivore step upon the corpse,
stumblingly, as the grisly thing swung between its forepaws, and her eyes
remained fixed in fascination while the beast passed within a few paces of her.

The interference of the body seemed to enrage the lion. He shook the inanimate
clay venomously. He growled and roared hideously at the dead, insensate thing,
and then he dropped it and raised his head to look about in search of some
living victim upon which to wreak his ill temper. His yellow eyes fastened
themselves balefully upon the figure of the girl, the bristling lips raised,
disclosing the grinning fangs. A terrific roar broke from the savage throat,
and the great beast crouched to spring upon this new and helpless victim.

Quiet had fallen early upon the camp where Tarzan and Werper lay securely
bound. Two nervous sentries paced their beats, their eyes rolling often toward
the impenetrable shadows of the gloomy jungle. The others slept or tried to
sleep—all but the ape-man. Silently and powerfully he strained at the
bonds which fettered his wrists.

The muscles knotted beneath the smooth, brown skin of his arms and shoulders,
the veins stood out upon his temples from the force of his exertions—a
strand parted, another and another, and one hand was free. Then from the jungle
came a low guttural, and the ape-man became suddenly a silent, rigid statue,
with ears and nostrils straining to span the black void where his eyesight
could not reach.

Again came the uncanny sound from the thick verdure beyond the camp. A sentry
halted abruptly, straining his eyes into the gloom. The kinky wool upon his
head stiffened and raised. He called to his comrade in a hoarse whisper.

“Did you hear it?” he asked.

The other came closer, trembling.

“Hear what?”

Again was the weird sound repeated, followed almost immediately by a similar
and answering sound from the camp. The sentries drew close together, watching
the black spot from which the voice seemed to come.

Trees overhung the boma at this point which was upon the opposite side of the
camp from them. They dared not approach. Their terror even prevented them from
arousing their fellows—they could only stand in frozen fear and watch for
the fearsome apparition they momentarily expected to see leap from the jungle.

Nor had they long to wait. A dim, bulky form dropped lightly from the branches
of a tree into the camp. At sight of it one of the sentries recovered command
of his muscles and his voice. Screaming loudly to awaken the sleeping camp, he
leaped toward the flickering watch fire and threw a mass of brush upon it.

The white officer and the black soldiers sprang from their blankets. The flames
leaped high upon the rejuvenated fire, lighting the entire camp, and the
awakened men shrank back in superstitious terror from the sight that met their
frightened and astonished vision.

A dozen huge and hairy forms loomed large beneath the trees at the far side of
the enclosure. The white giant, one hand freed, had struggled to his knees and
was calling to the frightful, nocturnal visitors in a hideous medley of bestial
gutturals, barkings and growlings.

Werper had managed to sit up. He, too, saw the savage faces of the approaching
anthropoids and scarcely knew whether to be relieved or terror-stricken.

Growling, the great apes leaped forward toward Tarzan and Werper. Chulk led
them. The Belgian officer called to his men to fire upon the intruders; but the
Negroes held back, filled as they were with superstitious terror of the hairy
treemen, and with the conviction that the white giant who could thus summon the
beasts of the jungle to his aid was more than human.

Drawing his own weapon, the officer fired, and Tarzan fearing the effect of the
noise upon his really timid friends called to them to hasten and fulfill his
commands.

A couple of the apes turned and fled at the sound of the firearm; but Chulk and
a half dozen others waddled rapidly forward, and, following the ape-man’s
directions, seized both him and Werper and bore them off toward the jungle.

By dint of threats, reproaches and profanity the Belgian officer succeeded in
persuading his trembling command to fire a volley after the retreating apes. A
ragged, straggling volley it was, but at least one of its bullets found a mark,
for as the jungle closed about the hairy rescuers, Chulk, who bore Werper
across one broad shoulder, staggered and fell.

In an instant he was up again; but the Belgian guessed from his unsteady gait
that he was hard hit. He lagged far behind the others, and it was several
minutes after they had halted at Tarzan’s command before he came slowly
up to them, reeling from side to side, and at last falling again beneath the
weight of his burden and the shock of his wound.

As Chulk went down he dropped Werper, so that the latter fell face downward
with the body of the ape lying half across him. In this position the Belgian
felt something resting against his hands, which were still bound at his
back—something that was not a part of the hairy body of the ape.

Mechanically the man’s fingers felt of the object resting almost in their
grasp—it was a soft pouch, filled with small, hard particles. Werper
gasped in wonderment as recognition filtered through the incredulity of his
mind. It was impossible, and yet—it was true!

Feverishly he strove to remove the pouch from the ape and transfer it to his
own possession; but the restricted radius to which his bonds held his hands
prevented this, though he did succeed in tucking the pouch with its precious
contents inside the waist band of his trousers.

Tarzan, sitting at a short distance, was busy with the remaining knots of the
cords which bound him. Presently he flung aside the last of them and rose to
his feet. Approaching Werper he knelt beside him. For a moment he examined the
ape.

“Quite dead,” he announced. “It is too bad—he was a
splendid creature,” and then he turned to the work of liberating the
Belgian.

He freed his hands first, and then commenced upon the knots at his ankles.

“I can do the rest,” said the Belgian. “I have a small
pocketknife which they overlooked when they searched me,” and in this way
he succeeded in ridding himself of the ape-man’s attentions that he might
find and open his little knife and cut the thong which fastened the pouch about
Chulk’s shoulder, and transfer it from his waist band to the breast of
his shirt. Then he rose and approached Tarzan.

Once again had avarice claimed him. Forgotten were the good intentions which
the confidence of Jane Clayton in his honor had awakened. What she had done,
the little pouch had undone. How it had come upon the person of the great ape,
Werper could not imagine, unless it had been that the anthropoid had witnessed
his fight with Achmet Zek, seen the Arab with the pouch and taken it away from
him; but that this pouch contained the jewels of Opar, Werper was positive, and
that was all that interested him greatly.

“Now,” said the ape-man, “keep your promise to me. Lead me to
the spot where you last saw my wife.”

It was slow work pushing through the jungle in the dead of night behind the
slow-moving Belgian. The ape-man chafed at the delay, but the European could
not swing through the trees as could his more agile and muscular companions,
and so the speed of all was limited to that of the slowest.

The apes trailed out behind the two white men for a matter of a few miles; but
presently their interest lagged, the foremost of them halted in a little glade
and the others stopped at his side. There they sat peering from beneath their
shaggy brows at the figures of the two men forging steadily ahead, until the
latter disappeared in the leafy trail beyond the clearing. Then an ape sought a
comfortable couch beneath a tree, and one by one the others followed his
example, so that Werper and Tarzan continued their journey alone; nor was the
latter either surprised or concerned.

The two had gone but a short distance beyond the glade where the apes had
deserted them, when the roaring of distant lions fell upon their ears. The
ape-man paid no attention to the familiar sounds until the crack of a rifle
came faintly from the same direction, and when this was followed by the shrill
neighing of horses, and an almost continuous fusillade of shots intermingled
with increased and savage roaring of a large troop of lions, he became
immediately concerned.

“Someone is having trouble over there,” he said, turning toward
Werper. “I’ll have to go to them—they may be friends.”

“Your wife might be among them,” suggested the Belgian, for since
he had again come into possession of the pouch he had become fearful and
suspicious of the ape-man, and in his mind had constantly revolved many plans
for eluding this giant Englishman, who was at once his savior and his captor.

At the suggestion Tarzan started as though struck with a whip.

“God!” he cried, “she might be, and the lions are attacking
them—they are in the camp. I can tell from the screams of the
horses—and there! that was the cry of a man in his death agonies. Stay
here man—I will come back for you. I must go first to them,” and
swinging into a tree the lithe figure swung rapidly off into the night with the
speed and silence of a disembodied spirit.

For a moment Werper stood where the ape-man had left him. Then a cunning smile
crossed his lips. “Stay here?” he asked himself. “Stay here
and wait until you return to find and take these jewels from me? Not I, my
friend, not I,” and turning abruptly eastward Albert Werper passed
through the foliage of a hanging vine and out of the sight of his
fellow-man—forever.

CHAPTER XXIV.
Home

As Tarzan of the Apes hurtled through the trees the discordant sounds of the
battle between the Abyssinians and the lions smote more and more distinctly
upon his sensitive ears, redoubling his assurance that the plight of the human
element of the conflict was critical indeed.

At last the glare of the camp fire shone plainly through the intervening trees,
and a moment later the giant figure of the ape-man paused upon an overhanging
bough to look down upon the bloody scene of carnage below.

His quick eye took in the whole scene with a single comprehending glance and
stopped upon the figure of a woman standing facing a great lion across the
carcass of a horse.

The carnivore was crouching to spring as Tarzan discovered the tragic tableau.
Numa was almost beneath the branch upon which the ape-man stood, naked and
unarmed. There was not even an instant’s hesitation upon the part of the
latter—it was as though he had not even paused in his swift progress
through the trees, so lightning-like his survey and comprehension of the scene
below him—so instantaneous his consequent action.

So hopeless had seemed her situation to her that Jane Clayton but stood in
lethargic apathy awaiting the impact of the huge body that would hurl her to
the ground—awaiting the momentary agony that cruel talons and grisly
fangs may inflict before the coming of the merciful oblivion which would end
her sorrow and her suffering.

What use to attempt escape? As well face the hideous end as to be dragged down
from behind in futile flight. She did not even close her eyes to shut out the
frightful aspect of that snarling face, and so it was that as she saw the lion
preparing to charge she saw, too, a bronzed and mighty figure leap from an
overhanging tree at the instant that Numa rose in his spring.

Wide went her eyes in wonder and incredulity, as she beheld this seeming
apparition risen from the dead. The lion was forgotten—her own
peril—everything save the wondrous miracle of this strange recrudescence.
With parted lips, with palms tight pressed against her heaving bosom, the girl
leaned forward, large-eyed, enthralled by the vision of her dead mate.

She saw the sinewy form leap to the shoulder of the lion, hurtling against the
leaping beast like a huge, animate battering ram. She saw the carnivore brushed
aside as he was almost upon her, and in the instant she realized that no
substanceless wraith could thus turn the charge of a maddened lion with brute
force greater than the brute’s.

Tarzan, her Tarzan, lived! A cry of unspeakable gladness broke from her lips,
only to die in terror as she saw the utter defenselessness of her mate, and
realized that the lion had recovered himself and was turning upon Tarzan in mad
lust for vengeance.

At the ape-man’s feet lay the discarded rifle of the dead Abyssinian
whose mutilated corpse sprawled where Numa had abandoned it. The quick glance
which had swept the ground for some weapon of defense discovered it, and as the
lion reared upon his hind legs to seize the rash man-thing who had dared
interpose its puny strength between Numa and his prey, the heavy stock whirred
through the air and splintered upon the broad forehead.

Not as an ordinary mortal might strike a blow did Tarzan of the Apes strike;
but with the maddened frenzy of a wild beast backed by the steel thews which
his wild, arboreal boyhood had bequeathed him. When the blow ended the
splintered stock was driven through the splintered skull into the savage brain,
and the heavy iron barrel was bent into a rude V.

In the instant that the lion sank, lifeless, to the ground, Jane Clayton threw
herself into the eager arms of her husband. For a brief instant he strained her
dear form to his breast, and then a glance about him awakened the ape-man to
the dangers which still surrounded them.

Upon every hand the lions were still leaping upon new victims. Fear-maddened
horses still menaced them with their erratic bolting from one side of the
enclosure to the other. Bullets from the guns of the defenders who remained
alive but added to the perils of their situation.

To remain was to court death. Tarzan seized Jane Clayton and lifted her to a
broad shoulder. The blacks who had witnessed his advent looked on in amazement
as they saw the naked giant leap easily into the branches of the tree from
whence he had dropped so uncannily upon the scene, and vanish as he had come,
bearing away their prisoner with him.

They were too well occupied in self-defense to attempt to halt him, nor could
they have done so other than by the wasting of a precious bullet which might be
needed the next instant to turn the charge of a savage foe.

And so, unmolested, Tarzan passed from the camp of the Abyssinians, from which
the din of conflict followed him deep into the jungle until distance gradually
obliterated it entirely.

Back to the spot where he had left Werper went the ape-man, joy in his heart
now, where fear and sorrow had so recently reigned; and in his mind a
determination to forgive the Belgian and aid him in making good his escape. But
when he came to the place, Werper was gone, and though Tarzan called aloud many
times he received no reply. Convinced that the man had purposely eluded him for
reasons of his own, John Clayton felt that he was under no obligations to
expose his wife to further danger and discomfort in the prosecution of a more
thorough search for the missing Belgian.

“He has acknowledged his guilt by his flight, Jane,” he said.
“We will let him go to lie in the bed that he has made for
himself.”

Straight as homing pigeons, the two made their way toward the ruin and
desolation that had once been the center of their happy lives, and which was
soon to be restored by the willing black hands of laughing laborers, made happy
again by the return of the master and mistress whom they had mourned as dead.

Past the village of Achmet Zek their way led them, and there they found but the
charred remains of the palisade and the native huts, still smoking, as mute
evidence of the wrath and vengeance of a powerful enemy.

“The Waziri,” commented Tarzan with a grim smile.

“God bless them!” cried Jane Clayton.

“They cannot be far ahead of us,” said Tarzan, “Basuli and
the others. The gold is gone and the jewels of Opar, Jane; but we have each
other and the Waziri—and we have love and loyalty and friendship. And
what are gold and jewels to these?”

“If only poor Mugambi lived,” she replied, “and those other
brave fellows who sacrificed their lives in vain endeavor to protect me!”

In the silence of mingled joy and sorrow they passed along through the familiar
jungle, and as the afternoon was waning there came faintly to the ears of the
ape-man the murmuring cadence of distant voices.

“We are nearing the Waziri, Jane,” he said. “I can hear them
ahead of us. They are going into camp for the night, I imagine.”

A half hour later the two came upon a horde of ebon warriors which Basuli had
collected for his war of vengeance upon the raiders. With them were the
captured women of the tribe whom they had found in the village of Achmet Zek,
and tall, even among the giant Waziri, loomed a familiar black form at the side
of Basuli. It was Mugambi, whom Jane had thought dead amidst the charred ruins
of the bungalow.

Ah, such a reunion! Long into the night the dancing and the singing and the
laughter awoke the echoes of the somber wood. Again and again were the stories
of their various adventures retold. Again and once again they fought their
battles with savage beast and savage man, and dawn was already breaking when
Basuli, for the fortieth time, narrated how he and a handful of his warriors
had watched the battle for the golden ingots which the Abyssinians of Abdul
Mourak had waged against the Arab raiders of Achmet Zek, and how, when the
victors had ridden away they had sneaked out of the river reeds and stolen away
with the precious ingots to hide them where no robber eye ever could discover
them.

Pieced out from the fragments of their various experiences with the Belgian the
truth concerning the malign activities of Albert Werper became apparent. Only
Lady Greystoke found aught to praise in the conduct of the man, and it was
difficult even for her to reconcile his many heinous acts with this one
evidence of chivalry and honor.

“Deep in the soul of every man,” said Tarzan, “must lurk the
germ of righteousness. It was your own virtue, Jane, rather even than your
helplessness which awakened for an instant the latent decency of this degraded
man. In that one act he retrieved himself, and when he is called to face his
Maker may it outweigh in the balance, all the sins he has committed.”

And Jane Clayton breathed a fervent, “Amen!”

Months had passed. The labor of the Waziri and the gold of Opar had rebuilt and
refurnished the wasted homestead of the Greystokes. Once more the simple life
of the great African farm went on as it had before the coming of the Belgian
and the Arab. Forgotten were the sorrows and dangers of yesterday.

For the first time in months Lord Greystoke felt that he might indulge in a
holiday, and so a great hunt was organized that the faithful laborers might
feast in celebration of the completion of their work.

In itself the hunt was a success, and ten days after its inauguration, a
well-laden safari took up its return march toward the Waziri plain. Lord and
Lady Greystoke with Basuli and Mugambi rode together at the head of the column,
laughing and talking together in that easy familiarity which common interests
and mutual respect breed between honest and intelligent men of any races.

Jane Clayton’s horse shied suddenly at an object half hidden in the long
grasses of an open space in the jungle. Tarzan’s keen eyes sought quickly
for an explanation of the animal’s action.

“What have we here?” he cried, swinging from his saddle, and a
moment later the four were grouped about a human skull and a little litter of
whitened human bones.

Tarzan stooped and lifted a leathern pouch from the grisly relics of a man. The
hard outlines of the contents brought an exclamation of surprise to his lips.

“The jewels of Opar!” he cried, holding the pouch aloft,
“and,” pointing to the bones at his feet, “all that remains
of Werper, the Belgian.”

Mugambi laughed. “Look within, Bwana,” he cried, “and you
will see what are the jewels of Opar—you will see what the Belgian gave
his life for,” and the black laughed aloud.

“Why do you laugh?” asked Tarzan.

“Because,” replied Mugambi, “I filled the Belgian’s
pouch with river gravel before I escaped the camp of the Abyssinians whose
prisoners we were. I left the Belgian only worthless stones, while I brought
away with me the jewels he had stolen from you. That they were afterward stolen
from me while I slept in the jungle is my shame and my disgrace; but at least
the Belgian lost them—open his pouch and you will see.”

Tarzan untied the thong which held the mouth of the leathern bag closed, and
permitted the contents to trickle slowly forth into his open palm.
Mugambi’s eyes went wide at the sight, and the others uttered
exclamations of surprise and incredulity, for from the rusty and weatherworn
pouch ran a stream of brilliant, scintillating gems.

“The jewels of Opar!” cried Tarzan. “But how did Werper come
by them again?”

None could answer, for both Chulk and Werper were dead, and no other knew.

“Poor devil!” said the ape-man, as he swung back into his saddle.
“Even in death he has made restitution—let his sins lie with his
bones.”