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"
"
While you are away--" she said. "You are going away?"
When the boma is built I am going out after meat," he replied. "Tomorrow I will
go again and take you and show you how you may make your own kills after I am
gone."
Without a word she took the gourds and walked toward the river. As she filled
them, her mind was occupied with painful forebodings of the future. She knew
that Tarzan had passed a death sentence upon her, and that the moment that he
left her, her doom was sealed, for it could be but a question of time--a very short
time--before the grim jungle would claim her, for how could a lone woman hope
successfully to combat the savage forces of destruction which constituted so large
a part of existence in the jungle?
So occupied was she with the gloomy prophecies that she had neither ears nor
eyes for what went on about her. Mechanically she filled the gourds and, taking
them up, turned slowly to retrace her steps to the boma only to voice immediately
a half-stifled scream and shrank back from the menacing figure looming before
her and blocking her way to the hut.
Go-lat, the king ape, hunting a little apart from his tribe, had seen the woman go
to the river for water, and it was he who confronted her when she turned back
with her filled gourds. Go-lat was not a pretty creature when judged by standards
of civilized humanity, though the shes of his tribe and even Go-lat himself,
considered his glossy black coat shot with silver, his huge arms dangling to his
knees, his bullet head sunk between his mighty shoulders, marks of great
personal beauty. His wicked, bloodshot eyes and broad nose, his ample mouth
and great fighting fangs only enhanced the claim of this Adonis of the forest upon
the affections of his shes.
Doubtless in the little, savage brain there was a well-formed conviction that this
strange she belonging to the Tarmangani must look with admiration upon so
handsome a creature as Go-lat, for there could be no doubt in the mind of any
that his beauty entirely eclipsed such as the hairless white ape might lay claim
to.
But Bertha Kircher saw only a hideous beast, a fierce and terrible caricature of
man. Could Go-lat have known what passed through her mind, he must have
been terribly chagrined, though the chances are that he would have attributed it
to a lack of discernment on her part. Tarzan heard the girl's cry and looking up
saw at a glance the cause of her terror. Leaping lightly over the boma, he ran
swiftly toward her as Go-lat lumbered closer to the girl the while he voiced his
emotions in low gutturals which, while in reality the most amicable of advances,
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