the use of his legs was not greatly impaired
by the sharp teeth of the monster.

Rapidly he crawled and swam through the passage which inclined downward
and finally upward to open at last into the river bottom but a few feet
from the shore line. As the ape-man reached the surface he saw the
heads of two great crocodiles but a short distance from him. They were
making rapidly in his direction, and with a superhuman effort the man
struck out for the overhanging branches of a near-by tree.

Nor was he a moment too soon, for scarcely had he drawn himself to the
safety of the limb than two gaping mouths snapped venomously below him.
For a few minutes Tarzan rested in the tree that had proved the means
of his salvation. His eyes scanned the river as far down-stream as
the tortuous channel would permit, but there was no sign of the Russian
or his dugout.

When he had rested and bound up his wounded leg he started on in
pursuit of the drifting canoe. He found himself upon the opposite of
the river to that at which he had entered the stream, but as his quarry
was upon the bosom of the water it made little difference to the
ape-man upon which side he took up the pursuit.

To his intense chagrin he soon found that his leg was more badly
injured than he had thought, and that its condition seriously impeded
his progress. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could
proceed faster than a walk upon the ground, and in the trees he
discovered that it not only impeded his progress, but rendered
travelling distinctly dangerous.

From the old negress, Tambudza, Tarzan had gathered a suggestion that
now filled his mind with doubts and misgivings. When the old woman had
told him of the child's death she had also added that the white woman,
though grief-stricken, had confided to her that the baby was not hers.

Tarzan could see no reason for believing that Jane could have found it
advisable to deny her identity or that of the child; the only
explanation that he could put upon the matter was that, after all, the
white woman who had accompanied his son and the Swede into the jungle
fastness of the interior had not been Jane at all.

The more he gave thought to the problem, the more firmly convinced he
became that his son was dead and his wife still safe in London, and in
ignorance of the terrible fate that had overtaken her first-born.

After all, then, his interpretation of Rokoff's sinister taunt had been
erroneous,