own, and you can only save your own by giving us the cheque we ask.""Very well," replied Tarzan, for he knew that he could trust them to carry out any sinister threat that Paulvitch had made, and there was a bare chance that by conceding their demands he might save the boy.
That they would permit him to live after he had appended his name to the cheque never occurred to him as being within the realms of probability. But he was determined to give them such a battle as they would never forget, and possibly to take Paulvitch with him
8
into eternity. He was only sorry that it was not Rokoff.
He took his pocket cheque-book and fountain-pen from his pocket. "What is the amount?" he asked.
Paulvitch named an enormous sum. Tarzan could scarce restrain a smile.
Their very cupidity was to prove the means of their undoing, in the matter of the ransom at least. Purposely he hesitated and haggled over the amount, but Paulvitch was obdurate. Finally the ape-man wrote out his cheque for a larger sum than stood to his credit at the bank.
As he turned to hand the worthless slip of paper to the Russian his glance chanced to pass across the starboard bow of the Kincaid. To his surprise he saw that the ship lay within a few hundred yards of land. Almost down to the water's edge ran a dense tropical jungle, and behind was higher land clothed in forest.
Paulvitch noted the direction of his gaze. "You are to be set at liberty here," he said.
Tarzan's plan for immediate physical revenge upon the Russian vanished. He thought the land before him the mainland of Africa,
and he knew that should they liberate him here he could doubtless find his way to civilization with comparative ease.
Paulvitch took the cheque.
"Remove your clothing," he said to the ape-man. "Here you will not need it." Tarzan demurred.
Paulvitch pointed to the armed sailors. Then the Englishman slowly divested himself of his clothing.
A boat was lowered, and, still heavily guarded, the ape-man was rowed ashore. Half an hour later the sailors had returned to the
Kincaid, and the steamer was slowly getting under way.
As Tarzan stood upon the narrow strip of beach watching the departure of the vessel he saw a figure appear at the rail and call aloud
to attract his attention.
The ape-man had been about to read a note that one of the sailors had handed him as the small boat that bore him to the shore was on the point of returning to the steamer, but at the hail from the vessel's deck he looked up.
He saw a black-bearded man who laughed at him in derision as he held high above his head the figure of a little child. Tarzan half started as though to rush through the surf and strike out for the already moving steamer; but realizing the futility of so rash an act he halted at the water's edge.
Thus he stood, his gaze riveted upon the Kincaid until it disappeared beyond a projecting promontory of the coast.
From the jungle at his back fierce bloodshot eyes glared from beneath shaggy overhanging brows upon him.
Little monkeys in the tree-tops chattered and scolded, and from the distance of the inland forest came the scream of a leopard.
But still John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, stood deaf and unseeing, suffering the pangs of keen regret for the opportunity that he had
wasted because he had been so gullible as to place credence in a single statement of the first lieutenant of his arch-enemy.
"I have at least," he thought, "one consolation--the knowledge that Jane is safe in London. Thank Heaven she, too, did not fall into the clutches of those villains."
Behind him the hairy thing whose evil eyes had been watching his as a cat watches a mouse was creeping stealthily toward him.
9
Where were the trained senses of the savage ape-man? Where the acute hearing?
Where the uncanny sense of scent?
Chapter 3
Beasts at Bay
Slowly Tarzan unfolded the note the sailor had thrust into his hand, and read it. At first it made little impression on his sorrow-numbed senses, but finally the full purport of the hideous plot of revenge unfolded itself before his imagination.
"This will explain to you" [the note read] "the exact nature of my intentions relative to your offspring and to you.
"You were born an ape. You lived naked in the jungles--to your own we have returned you; but your son shall rise a step above his sire. It is the immutable law of evolution.
"The father was a beast, but the son shall be a man--he shall take the next ascending step in the scale of progress. He shall be no naked beast of the jungle, but shall wear a loin-cloth and copper anklets, and, perchance, a ring in his nose, for he is to be reared by men--a tribe of savage cannibals.
"I might have killed you, but that would have curtailed the full measure of the punishment you have earned at my hands.
"Dead, you could not have suffered in the knowledge of your son's plight; but living and in a place from which you may not escape to seek or succour your child, you shall suffer worse than death for all the years of your life in contemplation of the horrors of your son's existence.
"This, then, is to be a part of your punishment for having dared to pit yourself against
N. R.
"P.S.--The balance of your punishment has to do with what shall presently befall your wife--that I shall leave to your imagination."
As he finished reading, a slight sound behind him brought him back with a start to the world of present realities.
Instantly his senses awoke, and he was again Tarzan of the Apes.
As he wheeled about, it was a beast at bay, vibrant with the instinct of self-preservation, that faced a huge bull-ape that was already charging down upon him.
The two years that had elapsed since Tarzan had come out of the savage forest with his rescued mate had witnessed slight diminu-tion of the mighty powers that had made him the invincible lord of the jungle. His great estates in Uziri had claimed much of his time and attention, and there he had found ample field for the practical use and retention of his almost superhuman powers; but na-ked and unarmed to do battle with the shaggy, bullnecked beast that now confronted him was a test that the ape-man would scarce have welcomed at any period of his wild existence.
But there was no alternative other than to meet the rage-maddened creature with the weapons with which nature had endowed him. Over the bull's shoulder Tarzan could see now the heads and shoulders of perhaps a dozen more of these mighty fore-runners of
primitive man.
He knew, however, that there was little chance that they would attack him, since it is not within the reasoning powers of the anthropoid to be able to weigh or appreciate the value of concentrated action against an enemy--otherwise they would long since have
