incipled, Alexis Paulvitch of old.

It had been ten years since the Russian had escaped the fate of his
friend, the arch-fiend Rokoff, and not once, but many times during
those ten years had Paulvitch cursed the fate that had given to
Nicholas Rokoff death and immunity from suffering while it had meted to
him the hideous terrors of an existence infinitely worse than the death
that persistently refused to claim him.

Paulvitch had taken to the jungle when he had seen the beasts of Tarzan
and their savage lord swarm the deck of the Kincaid, and in his terror
lest Tarzan pursue and capture him he had stumbled on deep into the
jungle, only to fall at last into the hands of one of the savage
cannibal tribes that had felt the weight of Rokoff's evil temper and
cruel brutality. Some strange whim of the chief of this tribe saved
Paulvitch from death only to plunge him into a life of misery and
torture. For ten years he had been the butt of the village, beaten and
stoned by the women and children, cut and slashed and disfigured by the
warriors; a victim of often recurring fevers of the most malignant
variety. Yet he did not die. Smallpox laid its hideous clutches upon
him; leaving him unspeakably branded with its repulsive marks. Between
it and the attentions of the tribe the countenance of Alexis Paulvitch
was so altered that his own mother could not have recognized in the
pitiful mask he called his face a single familiar feature. A few
scraggly, yellow-white locks had supplanted the thick, dark hair that
had covered his head. His limbs were bent and twisted, he walked with
a shuffling, unsteady gait, his body doubled forward. His teeth were
gone--knocked out by his savage masters. Even his mentality was but a
sorry mockery of what it once had been.

They took him aboard the Marjorie W., and there they fed and nursed
him. He gained a little in strength; but his appearance never altered
for the better--a human derelict, battered and wrecked, they had found
him; a human derelict, battered and wrecked, he would remain until
death claimed him. Though still in his thirties, Alexis Paulvitch
could easily have passed for eighty. Inscrutable Nature had demanded
of the accomplice a greater penalty than his principal had paid.

In the mind of Alexis Paulvitch there lingered no thoughts of
revenge--only a dull hatred of the man whom he and Rokoff had tried to
break, and failed. There was hatred, too, of the memory of Rokof