and, with the six remaining apes, the three
Europeans moved slowly toward the village gate, the aviator arming
himself with a spear discarded by one of the scalded warriors, as
they eagerly advanced toward the outer darkness.

Numabo was unable to rally the now thoroughly terrified and
painfully burned warriors so that rescued and rescuers passed out
of the village into the blackness of the jungle without further
interference.

Tarzan strode through the jungle in silence. Beside him walked Zu-tag,
the great ape, and behind them strung the surviving anthropoids
followed by Fraulein Bertha Kircher and Lieutenant Harold Percy
Smith-Oldwick, the latter a thoroughly astonished and mystified
Englishman.

In all his life Tarzan of the Apes had been obliged to acknowledge
but few obligations. He won his way through his savage world by the
might of his own muscle, the superior keenness of his five senses
and his God-given power to reason. Tonight the greatest of
all obligations had been placed upon him--his life had been saved
by another and Tarzan shook his head and growled, for it had been
saved by one whom he hated above all others.

Chapter XI

Finding the Airplane

Tarzan of the Apes, returning from a successful hunt, with the
body of Bara, the deer, across one sleek, brown shoulder, paused
in the branches of a great tree at the edge of a clearing and gazed
ruefully at two figures walking from the river to the boma-encircled
hut a short distance away.

The ape-man shook his tousled head and sighed. His eyes wandered
toward the west and his thoughts to the far-away cabin by the
land-locked harbor of the great water that washed the beach of his
boyhood home--to the cabin of his long-dead father to which the
memories and treasures of a happy childhood lured him. Since the
loss of his mate, a great longing had possessed him to return to
the haunts of his youth--to the untracked jungle wilderness where
he had lived the life he loved best long before man had invaded
the precincts of his wild stamping grounds. There he hoped in a
renewal of the old life under the old conditions to win surcease
from sorrow and perhaps some measure of forgetfulness.

But the little cabin and the land-locked harbor were many long,
weary marches away, and he was handicapped by the duty which he
felt he owed to the two figures walking in the clearing before him.
One was a young man in a worn and ragged uniform of the British Royal