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a disembodied spirit. For a moment he stood motionless just within the

entranceway, listening. No, there was no one here, of that he was sure, but he

would investigate. As his eyes became accustomed to the greater darkness within

the hut an object began to take form that presently outlined itself in a human

form supine upon the floor.

Tarzan stepped closer and leaned over to examine it--it was the dead body of a

naked warrior from whose chest protruded a short spear. Then he searched

carefully every square foot of the remaining floor space and at last returned to the

body again where he stooped and smelled of the haft of the weapon that had slain

the black. A slow smile touched his lips--that and a slight movement of his head

betokened that he understood.

A rapid search of the balance of the village assured him that the girl had escaped

and a feeling of relief came over him that no harm had befallen her. That her life

was equally in jeopardy in the savage jungle to which she must have flown did

not impress him as it would have you or me, since to Tarzan the jungle was not a

dangerous place--he considered one safer there than in Paris or London by night.

He had entered the trees again and was outside the palisade when there came

faintly to his ears from far beyond the village an old, familiar sound. Balancing

lightly upon a swaying branch he stood, a graceful statue of a forest god, listening

intently. For a minute he stood thus and then there broke from his lips the long,

weird cry of ape calling to ape and he was away through the jungle toward the

sound of the booming drum of the anthropoids leaving behind him an awakened

and terrified village of cringing blacks, who would forever after connect that eerie

cry with the disappearance of their white prisoner and the death of their fellow-

warrior.

Bertha Kircher, hurrying through the jungle along a well-beaten game trail,

thought only of putting as much distance as possible between herself and the

village before daylight could permit pursuit of her. Whither she was going she did

not know, nor was it a matter of great moment since death must be her lot sooner

or later.

Fortune favored her that night, for she passed unscathed through as savage and

lion-ridden an area as there is in all Africa--a natural hunting ground which the

white man has not yet discovered, where deer and antelope and zebra, giraffe and

elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, and the other herbivorous animals of central Africa

abound unmolested by none but their natural enemies, the great cats which,

lured here by easy prey and immunity from the rifles of big-game hunters, swarm

the district.

Tarzan the Untamed