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launched against the panther; but here too Numa was doomed to

disappointment, for with the first notes of his fearsome roar Sheeta, considering

well the better part of valor, leaped into a near-by tree.

A half-hour later it was a thoroughly furious Numa who came unexpectedly upon

the scent of man. Heretofore the lord of the jungle had disdained the unpalatable

flesh of the despised man-thing. Such meat was only for the old, the toothless,

and the decrepit who no longer could make their kills among the fleet-footed

grass-eaters. Bara, the deer, Horta, the boar, and, best and wariest, Pacco, the

zebra, were for the young, the strong, and the agile, but Numa was hungry-

hungrier than he ever had been in the five short years of his life.

What if he was a young, powerful, cunning, and ferocious beast? In the face of

hunger, the great leveler, he was as the old, the toothless, and the decrepit. His

belly cried aloud in anguish and his jowls slavered for flesh. Zebra or deer or

man, what mattered it so that it was warm flesh, red with the hot juices of life?

Even Dango, the hyena, eater of offal, would, at the moment, have seemed a tidbit

to Numa.

The great lion knew the habits and frailties of man, though he never before had

hunted man for food. He knew the despised Gomangani as the slowest, the most

stupid, and the most defenseless of creatures. No woodcraft, no cunning, no

stealth was necessary in the hunting of man, nor had Numa any stomach for

either delay or silence.

His rage had become an almost equally consuming passion with his hunger, so

that now, as his delicate nostrils apprised him of the recent passage of man, he

lowered his head and rumbled forth a thunderous roar, and at a swift walk,

careless of the noise he made, set forth upon the trail of his intended quarry.

Majestic and terrible, regally careless of his surroundings, the king of beasts

strode down the beaten trail. The natural caution that is inherent to all creatures

of the wild had deserted him. What had he, lord of the jungle, to fear and, with

only man to hunt, what need of caution? And so he did not see or scent what a

more wary Numa might readily have discovered until, with the cracking of twigs

and a tumbling of earth, he was precipitated into a cunningly devised pit that the

wily Wamabos had excavated for just this purpose in the center of the game trail.

Tarzan of the Apes stood in the center of the clearing watching the plane

shrinking to diminutive toy-like proportions in the eastern sky. He had breathed

a sigh of relief as he saw it rise safely with the British flier and Fraulein Bertha

Kircher. For weeks he had felt the hampering responsibility of their welfare in

this savage wilderness where their utter helplessness would have rendered them

137

Tarzan the Untamed