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D'Arnot
gave a warning shout to his column as the blacks closed on him, but before
he could draw his revolver he had been pinioned and dragged into the
jungle.
His
cry had alarmed the sailors and a dozen of them sprang forward past
Professor Porter, running up the trail to their officer's aid.
They
did not know the cause of his outcry, only that it was a warning of danger
ahead. They had rushed past
the spot where D'Arnot had been seized when a spear hurled from the jungle
transfixed one of the men, and then a volley of arrows fell among them.
Raising
their rifles they fired into the underbrush in the direction from which
the missiles had come.
By
this time the balance of the party had come up, and volley after volley
was fired toward the concealed foe. It
was these shots that Tarzan and Jane Porter had heard.
Lieutenant
Charpentier, who had been bringing up the rear of the column, now came
running to the scene, and on hearing the details of the ambush ordered the
men to follow him, and plunged into the tangled vegetation.
In
an instant they were in a hand-to-hand fight with some fifty black
warriors of Mbonga's village. Arrows
and bullets flew thick and fast.
Queer
African knives and French gun butts mingled for a moment in savage and
bloody duels, but soon the natives fled into the jungle, leaving the
Frenchmen to count their losses.
Four
of the twenty were dead, a dozen others were wounded, and Lieutenant
D'Arnot was missing. Night
was falling rapidly, and their predicament was rendered doubly worse when
they could not even find the elephant trail which they had been following.
There
was but one thing to do, make camp where they were until daylight.
Lieutenant Charpentier ordered a clearing made and a circular
abatis of underbrush constructed about the camp.
This
work was not completed until long after dark, the men building a huge fire
in the center of the clearing to give them light to work by.
When
all was safe as possible against attack of wild beasts and savage men,
Lieutenant Charpentier placed sentries about the little camp and the tired
and hungry men threw themselves upon the ground to sleep.
The
groans of the wounded, mingled with the roaring and growling of the great
beasts which the noise and firelight had attracted, kept sleep, except in
its most fitful form, from the tired eyes.
It was a sad and hungry party that lay through the long night
praying for dawn.
The
blacks who had seized D'Arnot had not waited to participate in the fight
which followed, but instead had dragged their prisoner a little way
through the jungle and then struck the trail further on beyond the scene
of the fighting in which their fellows were engaged.
They
hurried him along, the sounds of battle growing fainter and fainter as
they drew away from the contestants until there suddenly broke upon
D'Arnot's vision a good-sized clearing at one end of which stood a
thatched and palisaded village.
It
was now dusk, but the watchers at the gate saw the approaching trio and
distinguished one as a prisoner ere they reached the portals.
A
cry went up within the palisade. A
great throng of women and children rushed out to meet the party.
And
then began for the French officer the most terrifying experience which man
can encounter upon earth--the reception of a white prisoner into a village
of African cannibals.
To
add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of
still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white
officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose
atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State--a pitiful remnant of what
once had been a mighty tribe.
They
fell upon D'Arnot tooth and nail, beating him with sticks and stones and
tearing at him with claw-like hands. Every vestige of clothing was torn
from him, and the merciless blows fell upon his bare and quivering flesh.
But not once did the Frenchman cry out in pain.
He breathed a silent prayer that he be quickly delivered from his
torture.
But
the death he prayed for was not to be so easily had. Soon the warriors
beat the women away from their prisoner. He was to be saved for nobler
sport than this, and the first wave of their passion having subsided they
contented themselves with crying out taunts and insults and spitting upon
him.
Presently
they reached the center of the village.
There D'Arnot was bound securely to the great post from which no
live man had ever been released.
A
number of the women scattered to their several huts to fetch pots and
water, while others built a row of fires on which portions of the feast
were to be boiled while the balance would be slowly dried in strips for
future use, as they expected the other warriors to return with many
prisoners. The festivities were delayed awaiting the return of the
warriors who had remained to engage in the skirmish with the white men, so
that it was quite late when all were in the village, and the dance of
death commenced to circle around the doomed officer.
Half
fainting from pain and exhaustion, D'Arnot watched from beneath
half-closed lids what seemed but the vagary of delirium, or some horrid
nightmare from which he must soon awake.
The
bestial faces, daubed with color--the huge mouths and flabby hanging
lips--the yellow teeth, sharp filed--the rolling, demon eyes--the shining
naked bodies--the cruel spears. Surely no such creatures really existed
upon earth--he must indeed be dreaming.
The
savage, whirling bodies circled nearer.
Now a spear sprang forth and touched his arm.
The sharp pain and the feel of hot, trickling blood assured him of
the awful reality of his hopeless position.
Another
spear and then another touched him. He
closed his eyes and held his teeth firm set--he would not cry out.
He
was a soldier of France, and he would teach these beasts how an officer
and a gentleman died.
Tarzan of the Apes needed no interpreter to translate the
story of those distant shots. With
Jane Porter's kisses still warm upon his lips he was swinging with
incredible rapidity through the forest trees straight toward the village
of Mbonga.
He
was not interested in the location of the encounter, for he judged that
that would soon be over. Those
who were killed he could not aid, those who escaped would not need his
assistance.
It
was to those who had neither been killed or escaped that he hastened.
And he knew that he would find them by the great post in the center
of Mbonga village.
Many
times had Tarzan seen Mbonga's black raiding parties return from the
northward with prisoners, and always were the same scenes enacted about
that grim stake, beneath the flaring light of many fires.
He
knew, too, that they seldom lost much time before consummating the
fiendish purpose of their captures. He doubted that he would arrive in
time to do more than avenge.
On
he sped. Night had fallen and he traveled high along the upper terrace
where the gorgeous tropic moon lighted the dizzy pathway through the
gently undulating branches of the tree tops.
Presently
he caught the reflection of a distant blaze.
It lay to the right of his path.
It must be the light from the camp fire the two men had built
before they were attacked--Tarzan knew nothing of the presence of the
sailors.
So
sure was Tarzan of his jungle knowledge that he did not turn from his
course, but passed the glare at a distance of a half mile.
It was the camp fire of the Frenchmen.
In
a few minutes more Tarzan swung into the trees above Mbonga's village.
Ah, he was not quite too late!
Or, was he? He could not tell.
The figure at the stake was very still, yet the black warriors were
but pricking it.
Tarzan
knew their customs. The death
blow had not been struck. He
could tell almost to a minute how far the dance had gone.
In
another instant Mbonga's knife would sever one of the victim's ears--that
would mark the beginning of the end, for very shortly after only a
writhing mass of mutilated flesh would remain.
There
would still be life in it, but death then would be the only charity it
craved.
The
stake stood forty feet from the nearest tree.
Tarzan coiled his rope. Then
there rose suddenly above the fiendish cries of the dancing demons the
awful challenge of the ape-man.
The
dancers halted as though turned to stone.
The
rope sped with singing whir high above the heads of the blacks.
It was quite invisible in the flaring lights of the camp fires.
D'Arnot
opened his eyes. A huge
black, standing directly before him, lunged backward as though felled by
an invisible hand.
Struggling
and shrieking, his body, rolling from side to side, moved quickly toward
the shadows beneath the trees.
The
blacks, their eyes protruding in horror, watched spellbound.
Once
beneath the trees, the body rose straight into the air, and as it
disappeared into the foliage above, the terrified negroes, screaming with
fright, broke into a mad race for the village gate.
D'Arnot
was left alone.
He
was a brave man, but he had felt the short hairs bristle upon the nape of
his neck when that uncanny cry rose upon the air.
As
the writhing body of the black soared, as though by unearthly power, into
the dense foliage of the forest, D'Arnot felt an icy shiver run along his
spine, as though death had risen from a dark grave and laid a cold and
clammy finger on his flesh.
As
D'Arnot watched the spot where the body had entered the tree he heard the
sounds of movement there.
The
branches swayed as though under the weight of a man's body--there was a
crash and the black came sprawling to earth again,--to lie very quietly
where he had fallen.
Immediately
after him came a white body, but this one alighted erect.
D'Arnot
saw a clean-limbed young giant emerge from the shadows into the firelight
and come quickly toward him.
What
could it mean? Who could it
be? Some new creature of torture and destruction, doubtless.
D'Arnot
waited. His eyes never left the face of the advancing man.
Nor did the other's frank, clear eyes waver beneath D'Arnot's fixed
gaze.
D'Arnot
was reassured, but still without much hope, though he felt that that face
could not mask a cruel heart.
Without
a word Tarzan of the Apes cut the bonds which held the Frenchman.
Weak from suffering and loss of blood, he would have fallen but for
the strong arm that caught him.
He
felt himself lifted from the ground.
There was a sensation as of flying, and then he lost consciousness.
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