k, and,
sitting astride the bole of the tree, spun the slender rod rapidly
between his palms.

After a time a thin smoke rose from the little mass of tinder, and a
moment later the whole broke into flame. Heaping some larger twigs
and sticks upon the tiny fire, Tarzan soon had quite a respectable
blaze roaring in the enlarging cavity of the dead tree.

Into this he thrust the blade of his stone knife, and as it became
superheated he would withdraw it, touching a spot near the thin edge
with a drop of moisture. Beneath the wetted area a little flake of the
glassy material would crack and scale away.

Thus, very slowly, the ape-man commenced the tedious operation of
putting a thin edge upon his primitive hunting-knife.

He did not attempt to accomplish the feat all in one sitting. At first
he was content to achieve a cutting edge of a couple of inches, with
which he cut a long, pliable bow, a handle for his knife, a stout
cudgel, and a goodly supply of arrows.

These he cached in a tall tree beside a little stream, and here also he
constructed a platform with a roof of palm-leaves above it.

When all these things had been finished it was growing dusk, and Tarzan
felt a strong desire to eat.

He had noted during the brief incursion he had made into the forest
that a short distance up-stream from his tree there was a much-used
watering place, where, from the trampled mud of either bank, it was
evident beasts of all sorts and in great numbers came to drink. To
this spot the hungry ape-man made his silent way.

Through the upper terrace of the tree-tops he swung with the grace and
ease of a monkey. But for the heavy burden upon his heart he would
have been happy in this return to the old free life of his boyhood.

Yet even with that burden he fell into the little habits and manners of
his early life that were in reality more a part of him than the thin
veneer of civilization that the past three years of his association
with the white men of the outer world had spread lightly over him--a
veneer that only hid the crudities of the beast that Tarzan of the Apes
had been.

Could his fellow-peers of the House of Lords have seen him then they
would have held up their noble hands in holy horror.

Silently he crouched in the lower branches of a great forest giant that
overhung the trail, his keen eyes and sensitive ears strained into the
distant jungle, from which he knew his dinner would presently emerge.

Nor ha