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Fraulein Bertha Kircher was by nature a companionable and cheerful character.

She was not given to morbid forebodings, and above all things she craved the

society of her kind and that interchange of thought which is one of the marked

distinctions between man and the lower animals. Tarzan, on the other hand, was

sufficient unto himself. Long years of semi-solitude among creatures whose

powers of oral expression are extremely limited had thrown him almost entirely

upon his own resources for entertainment.

His active mind was never idle, but because his jungle mates could neither follow

nor grasp the vivid train of imaginings that his man-mind wrought, he had long

since learned to keep them to himself; and so now he found no need for confiding

them in others. This fact, linked with that of his dislike for the girl, was sufficient

to seal his lips for other than necessary conversation, and so they worked on

together in comparative silence. Bertha Kircher, however, was nothing if not

feminine and she soon found that having someone to talk to who would not talk

was extremely irksome. Her fear of the man was gradually departing, and she was

full of a thousand unsatisfied curiosities as to his plans for the future in so far as

they related to her, as well as more personal questions regarding himself, since

she could not but wonder as to his antecedents and his strange and solitary life

in the jungle, as well as his friendly intercourse with the savage apes among

which she had found him.

With the waning of her fears she became sufficiently emboldened to question him,

and so she asked him what he intended doing after the hut and boma were

completed.

"I am going to the west coast where I was born," replied Tarzan. "I do not know

when. I have all my life before me and in the jungle there is no reason for haste.

We are not forever running as fast as we can from one place to another as are you

of the outer world. When I have been here long enough I will go on toward the

west, but first I must see that you have a safe place in which to sleep, and that

you have learned how to provide yourself with necessaries. That will take time."

"You are going to leave me here alone?" cried the girl; her tones marked the fear

which the prospect induced. "You are going to leave me here alone in this terrible

jungle, a prey to wild beasts and savage men, hundreds of miles from a white

settlement and in a country which gives every evidence of never having been

touched by the foot of civilized men?"

"Why not?" asked Tarzan. "I did not bring you here. Would one of your men

accord any better treatment to an enemy woman?"

Tarzan the Untamed