The great cat, flattened upon its belly, remained motionless except for
twitching tail and snarling lips where it lay perhaps fifty feet beyond
the body of the pithecanthropus. As Tarzan stepped over the body of the
latter he saw the eyelids quiver and open, and in his heart he felt a
strange sense of relief that the creature was not dead and a
realization that without his suspecting it there had arisen within his
savage bosom a bond of attachment for this strange new friend.

Tarzan continued to approach the saber-tooth, nor did the shaggy beast
at his right lag behind. Closer and closer they came until at a
distance of about twenty feet the hybrid charged. Its rush was directed
toward the shaggy manlike ape who halted in his tracks with upraised
bludgeon to meet the assault. Tarzan, on the contrary, leaped forward
and with a celerity second not even to that of the swift-moving cat, he
threw himself headlong upon him as might a Rugby tackler on an American
gridiron. His right arm circled the beast's neck in front of the right
shoulder, his left behind the left foreleg, and so great was the force
of the impact that the two rolled over and over several times upon the
ground, the cat screaming and clawing to liberate itself that it might
turn upon its attacker, the man clinging desperately to his hold.

Seemingly the attack was one of mad, senseless ferocity unguided by
either reason or skill. Nothing, however, could have been farther from
the truth than such an assumption since every muscle in the ape-man's
giant frame obeyed the dictates of the cunning mind that long
experience had trained to meet every exigency of such an encounter. The
long, powerful legs, though seemingly inextricably entangled with the
hind feet of the clawing cat, ever as by a miracle, escaped the raking
talons and yet at just the proper instant in the midst of all the
rolling and tossing they were where they should be to carry out the
ape-man's plan of offense. So that on the instant that the cat believed
it had won the mastery of its antagonist it was jerked suddenly upward
as the ape-man rose to his feet, holding the striped back close against
his body as he rose and forcing it backward until it could but claw the
air helplessly.

Instantly the shaggy black rushed in with drawn knife which it buried
in the beast's heart. For a few moments Tarzan retained his hold but
when the body had relaxed in final dissolution he pushed it from him
and th