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her he loved because he thought it made her happier to see him thus. In reality
he had always held the outward evidences of so-called culture in deep contempt.
Civilization meant to Tarzan of the Apes a curtailment of freedom in all its
aspects--freedom of action, freedom of thought, freedom of love, freedom of hate.
Clothes he abhorred--uncomfortable, hideous, confining things that reminded
him somehow of bonds securing him to the life he had seen the poor creatures of
London and Paris living. Clothes were the emblems of that hypocrisy for which
civilization stood--a pretense that the wearers were ashamed of what the clothes
covered, of the human form made in the semblance of God. Tarzan knew how silly
and pathetic the lower orders of animals appeared in the clothing of civilization,
for he had seen several poor creatures thus appareled in various traveling shows
in Europe, and he knew, too, how silly and pathetic man appears in them since
the only men he had seen in the first twenty years of his life had been, like
himself, naked savages. The ape-man had a keen admiration for a well-muscled,
well-proportioned body, whether lion, or antelope, or man, and it had ever been
beyond him to understand how clothes could be considered more beautiful than a
clear, firm, healthy skin, or coat and trousers more graceful than the gentle
curves of rounded muscles playing beneath a flexible hide.
In civilization Tarzan had found greed and selfishness and cruelty far beyond that
which he had known in his familiar, savage jungle, and though civilization had
given him his mate and several friends whom he loved and admired, he never had
come to accept it as you and I who have known little or nothing else; so it was
with a sense of relief that he now definitely abandoned it and all that it stood for,
and went forth into the jungle once again stripped to his loin cloth and weapons.
The hunting knife of his father hung at his left hip, his bow and his quiver of
arrows were slung across his shoulders, while around his chest over one shoulder
and beneath the opposite arm was coiled the long grass rope without which
Tarzan would have felt quite as naked as would you should you be suddenly
thrust upon a busy highway clad only in a union suit. A heavy war spear which
he sometimes carried in one hand and again slung by a thong about his neck so
that it hung down his back completed his armament and his apparel. The
diamond-studded locket with the pictures of his mother and father that he had
worn always until he had given it as a token of his highest devotion to Jane
Clayton before their marriage was missing. She always had worn it since, but it
had not been upon her body when he found her slain in her boudoir, so that now
his quest for vengeance included also a quest for the stolen trinket.
Toward midnight Tarzan commenced to feel the physical strain of his long hours
of travel and to realize that even muscles such as his had their limitations. His
pursuit of the murderers had not been characterized by excessive speed; but
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