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as he lay concealed in the bushes close beside a regimental headquarters he

listened to the conversation of several Boche officers. One of the men reverted to

the stories told by the native troops in connection with their rout by a lion several

weeks before and the simultaneous appearance in their trenches of a naked,

white giant whom they were perfectly assured was some demon of the jungle.

"The fellow must have been the same as he who leaped into the general's

headquarters and carried off Schneider," asserted one. "I wonder how he

happened to single out the poor major. They say the creature seemed interested

in no one but Schneider. He had von Kelter in his grasp, and he might easily have

taken the general himself; but he ignored them all except Schneider. Him he

pursued about the room, seized and carried off into the night. Gott knows what

his fate was."

Captain Fritz Schneider has some sort of theory," said another. "He told me only

a week or two ago that he thinks he knows why his brother was taken--that it

was a case of mistaken identity. He was not so sure about it until von Goss was

killed, apparently by the same creature, the night the lion entered the trenches.

Von Goss was attached to Schneider's company. One of Schneider's men was

found with his neck wrung the same night that the major was carried off and

Schneider thinks that this devil is after him and his command--that it came for

him that night and got his brother by mistake. He says Kraut told him that in

presenting the major to Fraulein Kircher the former's name was no sooner spoken

than this wild man leaped through the window and made for him."

Suddenly the little group became rigid--listening. "What was that?" snapped one,

eyeing the bushes from which a smothered snarl had issued as Tarzan of the

Apes realized that through his mistake the perpetrator of the horrid crime at his

bungalow still lived--that the murderer of his wife went yet unpunished.

For a long minute the officers stood with tensed nerves, every eye riveted upon

the bushes from whence the ominous sound had issued. Each recalled recent

mysterious disappearances from the heart of camps as well as from lonely out-

guards. Each thought of the silent dead he had seen, slain almost within sight of

their fellows by some unseen creature. They thought of the marks upon dead

throats-made by talons or by giant fingers, they could not tell which--and those

upon shoulders and jugulars where powerful teeth had fastened and they waited

with drawn pistols.

Once the bushes moved almost imperceptibly and an instant later one of the

officers, without warning, fired into them; but Tarzan of the Apes was not there.

In the interval between the moving of the bushes and the firing of the shot he had

melted into the night. Ten minutes later he was hovering on the outskirts of that

Tarzan the Untamed