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would be before they charged and while he waited he resumed his feeding, though

with every sense constantly alert.

One by one the lions lay down, but always their faces were toward him and their

eyes upon him. There had been no growling and no roaring--just the quiet

drawing of the silent circle about him. It was all so entirely foreign to anything

that Tarzan ever before had seen lions do that it irritated him so that presently,

having finished his repast, he fell to making insulting remarks to first one and

then another of the lions, after the habit he had learned from the apes of his

childhood.

Dango, eater of carrion," he called them, and he compared them most

unfavorably with Histah, the snake, the most loathed and repulsive creature of

the jungle. Finally he threw handfuls of earth at them and bits of broken twigs,

and then the lions growled and bared their fangs, but none of them advanced.

"Cowards," Tarzan taunted them. "Numa with a heart of Bara, the deer." He told

them who he was, and after the manner of the jungle folk he boasted as to the

horrible things he would do to them, but the lions only lay and watched him.

It must have been a half hour after their coming that Tarzan caught in the

distance along the trail the sound of footsteps approaching. They were the

footsteps of a creature who walked upon two legs, and though Tarzan could catch

no scent spoor from that direction he knew that a man was approaching. Nor had

he long to wait before his judgment was confirmed by the appearance of a man

who halted in the trail directly behind the first lion that Tarzan had seen.

At sight of the newcomer the ape-man realized that here was one similar to those

who had given off the unfamiliar scent spoor that he had detected the previous

night, and he saw that not only in the matter of scent did the man differ from

other human beings with whom Tarzan was familiar.

The fellow was strongly built with skin of a leathery appearance, like parchment

yellowed with age. His hair, which was coal black and three or four inches in

length, grew out stiffly at right angles to his scalp. His eyes were close set and the

irises densely black and very small, so that the white of the eyeball showed

around them. The man's face was smooth except for a few straggly hairs on his

chin and upper lip. The nose was aquiline and fine, but the hair grew so far

down on the forehead as to suggest a very low and brutal type. The upper lip was

short and fine while the lower lip was rather heavy and inclined to be pendulous,

the chin being equally weak. Altogether the face carried the suggestion of a once

strong and handsome countenance entirely altered by physical violence or by

167

Tarzan the Untamed