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drawn about their eyes and lips, their breasts and abdomens, and from their
clay-plastered coiffures rose gay feathers and bits of long, straight wire.
The village was preparing for the feast, while in a hut at one side of the scene of
the coming orgy the bound victim of their bestial appetites lay waiting for the end.
And such an end!
Tarzan of the Apes, tensing his mighty muscles, strained at the bonds that
pinioned him; but they had been re-enforced many times at the instigation of the
Russian, so that not even the ape-man's giant brawn could budge them.
Death!
Tarzan had looked the Hideous Hunter in the face many a time, and smiled. And
he would smile again tonight when he knew the end was coming quickly; but now
his thoughts were not of himself, but of those others--the dear ones who must
suffer most because of his passing.
Jane would never know the manner of it. For that he thanked Heaven; and he
was thankful also that she at least was safe in the heart of the world's greatest
city. Safe among kind and loving friends who would do their best to lighten her
misery.
But the boy!
Tarzan writhed at the thought of him. His son! And now he--the mighty Lord of
the Jungle--he, Tarzan, King of the Apes, the only one in all the world fitted to
find and save the child from the horrors that Rokoff's evil mind had planned--had
been trapped like a silly, dumb creature. He was to die in a few hours, and with
him would go the child's last chance of succour.
Rokoff had been in to see and revile and abuse him several times during the
afternoon; but he had been able to wring no word of remonstrance or murmur of
pain from the lips of the giant captive.
So at last he had given up, reserving his particular bit of exquisite mental torture
for the last moment, when, just before the savage spears of the cannibals should
for ever make the object of his hatred immune to further suffering, the Russian
planned to reveal to his enemy the true whereabouts of his wife whom he thought
safe in England.
Dusk had fallen upon the village, and the ape-men could hear the preparations
going forward for the torture and the feast. The dance of death he could picture
in his mind's eye--for he had seen the thing many times in the past. Now he was
to be the central figure, bound to the stake.
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