www.freeclassicebooks.com

"You think your wife safe in England," said Rokoff. "Poor fool! She is even now

in the hands of one not even of decent birth, and far from the safety of London

and the protection of her friends. I had not meant to tell you this until I could

bring to you upon Jungle Island proof of her fate.

"Now that you are about to die the most unthinkably horrid death that it is given

a white man to die--let this word of the plight of your wife add to the torments

that you must suffer before the last savage spear-thrust releases you from your

torture."

The dance had commenced now, and the yells of the circling warriors drowned

Rokoff's further attempts to distress his victim.

The leaping savages, the flickering firelight playing upon their painted bodies,

circled about the victim at the stake.

To Tarzan's memory came a similar scene, when he had rescued D'Arnot from a

like predicament at the last moment before the final spear-thrust should have

ended his sufferings. Who was there now to rescue him? In all the world there

was none able to save him from the torture and the death.

The thought that these human fiends would devour him when the dance was

done caused him not a single qualm of horror or disgust. It did not add to his

sufferings as it would have to those of an ordinary white man, for all his life

Tarzan had seen the beasts of the jungle devour the flesh of their kills.

Had he not himself battled for the grisly forearm of a great ape at that long-gone

Dum-Dum, when he had slain the fierce Tublat and won his niche in the respect

of the Apes of Kerchak?

The dancers were leaping more closely to him now. The spears were commencing

to find his body in the first torturing pricks that prefaced the more serious

thrusts.

It would not be long now. The ape-man longed for the last savage lunge that

would end his misery.

And then, far out in the mazes of the weird jungle, rose a shrill scream.

For an instant the dancers paused, and in the silence of the interval there rose

from the lips of the fast-bound white man an answering shriek, more fearsome

and more terrible than that of the jungle-beast that had roused it.

For several minutes the blacks hesitated; then, at the urging of Rokoff and their

chief, they leaped in to finish the dance and the victim; but ere ever another spear

The Beasts of Tarzan