upon La and smiled. In the
face of death he was unafraid.

"Where is the knife?" La asked him.

"I do not know," replied Tarzan. "The man took it with him when he
slipped away during the night. Since you are so desirous for its
return I would look for him and get it back for you, did you not hold
me prisoner; but now that I am to die I cannot get it back. Of what
good was your knife, anyway? You can make another. Did you follow us
all this way for nothing more than a knife? Let me go and find him and
I will bring it back to you."

La laughed a bitter laugh, for in her heart she knew that Tarzan's sin
was greater than the purloining of the sacrificial knife of Opar; yet
as she looked at him lying bound and helpless before her, tears rose to
her eyes so that she had to turn away to hide them; but she remained
inflexible in her determination to make him pay in frightful suffering
and in eventual death for daring to spurn the love of La.

When the shelter was completed La had Tarzan transferred to it. "All
night I shall torture him," she muttered to her priests, "and at the
first streak of dawn you may prepare the flaming altar upon which his
heart shall be offered up to the Flaming God. Gather wood well filled
with pitch, lay it in the form and size of the altar at Opar in the
center of the clearing that the Flaming God may look down upon our
handiwork and be pleased."

During the balance of the day the priests of Opar were busy erecting an
altar in the center of the clearing, and while they worked they chanted
weird hymns in the ancient tongue of that lost continent that lies at
the bottom of the Atlantic. They knew not the meanings of the words
they mouthed; they but repeated the ritual that had been handed down
from preceptor to neophyte since that long-gone day when the ancestors
of the Piltdown man still swung by their tails in the humid jungles
that are England now.

And in the shelter of the hut, La paced to and fro beside the stoic
ape-man. Resigned to his fate was Tarzan. No hope of succor gleamed
through the dead black of the death sentence hanging over him. He knew
that his giant muscles could not part the many strands that bound his
wrists and ankles, for he had strained often, but ineffectually for
release. He had no hope of outside help and only enemies surrounded
him within the camp, and yet he smiled at La as she paced nervously
back and forth the length of the shelter.

And La? She