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Late in the evening of the second day he came to the well-remembered gorge in
which lay the clean-picked bones of the ancient adventurer, and here, for the first
time, Ska, the vulture, picked up his trail. "Not this time, Ska," cried the ape-man
in a taunting voice, "for now indeed is Tarzan Tarzan. Before, you stalked the
grim skeleton of a Tarmangani and even then you lost. Waste not your time upon
Tarzan of the Apes in the full of his strength." But still Ska, the vulture, circled
and soared above him, and the ape-man, notwithstanding his boasts, felt a
shudder of apprehension. Through his brain ran a persistent and doleful chant to
which he involuntarily set two words, repeated over and over again in horrible
monotony: "Ska knows! Ska knows!" until, shaking himself in anger, he picked up
a rock and hurled it at the grim scavenger.
Lowering himself over the precipitous side of the gorge Tarzan half clambered and
half slid to the sandy floor beneath. He had come upon the rift at almost the
exact spot at which he had clambered from it weeks before, and there he saw,
just as he had left it, just, doubtless, as it had lain for centuries, the mighty
skeleton and its mighty armor.
As he stood looking down upon this grim reminder that another man of might
had succumbed to the cruel powers of the desert, he was brought to startled
attention by the report of a firearm, the sound of which came from the depths of
the gorge to the south of him, and reverberated along the steep walls of the
narrow rift.
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