," asserted one.
"I wonder how he happened to single out the poor major. They say
the creature seemed interested in no one but Schneider. He had von
Kelter in his grasp, and he might easily have taken the general
himself; but he ignored them all except Schneider. Him he pursued
about the room, seized and carried off into the night. Gott knows
what his fate was."

"Captain Fritz Schneider has some sort of theory," said another.
"He told me only a week or two ago that he thinks he knows why his
brother was taken--that it was a case of mistaken identity. He was
not so sure about it until von Goss was killed, apparently by the
same creature, the night the lion entered the trenches. Von Goss was
attached to Schneider's company. One of Schneider's men was found
with his neck wrung the same night that the major was carried off
and Schneider thinks that this devil is after him and his
command--that it came for him that night and got his brother by
mistake. He says Kraut told him that in presenting the major to
Fraulein Kircher the former's name was no sooner spoken than this
wild man leaped through the window and made for him."

Suddenly the little group became rigid--listening. "What was that?"
snapped one, eyeing the bushes from which a smothered snarl had
issued as Tarzan of the Apes realized that through his mistake the
perpetrator of the horrid crime at his bungalow still lived--that
the murderer of his wife went yet unpunished.

For a long minute the officers stood with tensed nerves, every eye
riveted upon the bushes from whence the ominous sound had issued.
Each recalled recent mysterious disappearances from the heart of
camps as well as from lonely out-guards. Each thought of the silent
dead he had seen, slain almost within sight of their fellows by some
unseen creature. They thought of the marks upon dead throats-made
by talons or by giant fingers, they could not tell which--and those
upon shoulders and jugulars where powerful teeth had fastened and
they waited with drawn pistols.

Once the bushes moved almost imperceptibly and an instant later
one of the officers, without warning, fired into them; but Tarzan
of the Apes was not there. In the interval between the moving of
the bushes and the firing of the shot he had melted into the night.
Ten minutes later he was hovering on the outskirts of that part
of camp where were bivouacked for the night the black soldiers of
a native company commanded by one Hauptmann F