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Chapter XI - Finding the Airplane

Tarzan of the Apes, returning from a successful hunt, with the body of Bara, the

deer, across one sleek, brown shoulder, paused in the branches of a great tree at

the edge of a clearing and gazed ruefully at two figures walking from the river to

the boma-encircled hut a short distance away.

The ape-man shook his tousled head and sighed. His eyes wandered toward the

west and his thoughts to the far-away cabin by the land-locked harbor of the

great water that washed the beach of his boyhood home--to the cabin of his long-

dead father to which the memories and treasures of a happy childhood lured him.

Since the loss of his mate, a great longing had possessed him to return to the

haunts of his youth--to the untracked jungle wilderness where he had lived the

life he loved best long before man had invaded the precincts of his wild stamping

grounds. There he hoped in a renewal of the old life under the old conditions to

win surcease from sorrow and perhaps some measure of forgetfulness.

But the little cabin and the land-locked harbor were many long, weary marches

away, and he was handicapped by the duty which he felt he owed to the two

figures walking in the clearing before him. One was a young man in a worn and

ragged uniform of the British Royal Air Forces, the other, a young woman in the

even more disreputable remnants of what once had been trim riding togs.

A freak of fate had thrown these three radically different types together. One was

a savage, almost naked beast-man, one an English army officer, and the woman,

she whom the ape-man knew and hated as a German spy.

How he was to get rid of them Tarzan could not imagine unless he accompanied

them upon the weary march back to the east coast, a march that would

necessitate his once more retracing the long, weary way he already had covered

towards his goal, yet what else could be done? These two had neither the

strength, endurance, nor jungle-craft to accompany him through the unknown

country to the west, nor did he wish them with him. The man he might have

tolerated, but he could not even consider the presence of the girl in the far-off

cabin, which had in a way become sacred to him through its memories, without a

growl or anger rising to his lips. There remained, then, but the one way, since he

could not desert them. He must move by slow and irksome marches back to the

east coast, or at least to the first white settlement in that direction.

He had, it is true, contemplated leaving the girl to her fate but that was before

she had been instrumental in saving him from torture and death at the hands of

the black Wamabos. He chafed under the obligation she had put upon him, but

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Tarzan the Untamed