ips smiled bravely.

"Good-bye!" she cried.

"Good-bye, and God bless you!" he called back--his voice the least
bit husky--and then: "The thing I wanted to say-may I say it now,
we are so very near the end?"

Her lips moved but whether they voiced consent or refusal he did
not know, for the words were drowned in the whir of the propeller.

The black had learned his lesson sufficiently well so that the
motor was started without bungling and the machine was soon under
way across the meadowland. A groan escaped the lips of the distracted
Englishman as he watched the woman he loved being carried to almost
certain death. He saw the plane tilt and the machine rise from
the ground. It was a good take-off--as good as Lieutenant Harold
Percy Smith-Oldwick could make himself but he realized that it was
only so by chance. At any instant the machine might plunge to earth
and even if, by some miracle of chance, the black could succeed
in rising above the tree tops and make a successful flight, there
was not one chance in one hundred thousand that he could ever land
again without killing his fair captive and himself.

But what was that? His heart stood still.

Chapter XIII

Usanga's Reward

For two days Tarzan of the Apes had been hunting leisurely to the
north, and swinging in a wide circle, he had returned to within
a short distance of the clearing where he had left Bertha Kircher
and the young lieutenant. He had spent the night in a large tree
that overhung the river only a short distance from the clearing,
and now in the early morning hours he was crouching at the water's
edge waiting for an opportunity to capture Pisah, the fish, thinking
that he would take it back with him to the hut where the girl could
cook it for herself and her companion.

Motionless as a bronze statue was the wily ape-man, for well he knew
how wary is Pisah, the fish. The slightest movement would frighten
him away and only by infinite patience might he be captured at
all. Tarzan depended upon his own quickness and the suddenness of
his attack, for he had no bait or hook. His knowledge of the ways
of the denizens of the water told him where to wait for Pisah. It
might be a minute or it might be an hour before the fish would swim
into the little pool above which he crouched, but sooner or later
one would come. That the ape-man knew, so with the patience of the
beast of prey he waited for his quarry.

At last there was a glint of shiny s