f one awake; yet
he was sure that the girl had been here and perhaps was even now,
and so he entered, slipping in as silently as a disembodied spirit.
For a moment he stood motionless just within the entranceway,
listening. No, there was no one here, of that he was sure, but he
would investigate. As his eyes became accustomed to the greater
darkness within the hut an object began to take form that presently
outlined itself in a human form supine upon the floor.

Tarzan stepped closer and leaned over to examine it--it was the dead
body of a naked warrior from whose chest protruded a short spear.
Then he searched carefully every square foot of the remaining floor
space and at last returned to the body again where he stooped and
smelled of the haft of the weapon that had slain the black. A slow
smile touched his lips--that and a slight movement of his head
betokened that he understood.

A rapid search of the balance of the village assured him that the
girl had escaped and a feeling of relief came over him that no harm
had befallen her. That her life was equally in jeopardy in the
savage jungle to which she must have flown did not impress him
as it would have you or me, since to Tarzan the jungle was not
a dangerous place--he considered one safer there than in Paris or
London by night.

He had entered the trees again and was outside the palisade when
there came faintly to his ears from far beyond the village an old,
familiar sound. Balancing lightly upon a swaying branch he stood,
a graceful statue of a forest god, listening intently. For a minute
he stood thus and then there broke from his lips the long, weird
cry of ape calling to ape and he was away through the jungle toward
the sound of the booming drum of the anthropoids leaving behind him
an awakened and terrified village of cringing blacks, who would
forever after connect that eerie cry with the disappearance of
their white prisoner and the death of their fellow-warrior.

Bertha Kircher, hurrying through the jungle along a well-beaten
game trail, thought only of putting as much distance as possible
between herself and the village before daylight could permit pursuit
of her. Whither she was going she did not know, nor was it a matter
of great moment since death must be her lot sooner or later.

Fortune favored her that night, for she passed unscathed through
as savage and lion-ridden an area as there is in all Africa--a
natural hunting ground which the white m