17

Tarzan the Terrible

by Edgar R. Burroughs

17, TARZAN THE TERRIBLE by Edgar R. Burroughs
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By Jad-bal-lul

AS MO-SAR carried Jane Clayton from the palace of Ko-tan, the
king, the woman struggled incessantly to regain her freedom. He
tried to compel her to walk, but despite his threats and his
abuse she would not voluntarily take a single step in the
direction in which he wished her to go. Instead she threw herself
to the ground each time he sought to place her upon her feet, and
so of necessity he was compelled to carry her though at last he
tied her hands and gagged her to save himself from further
lacerations, for the beauty and slenderness of the woman belied
her strength and courage. When he came at last to where his men
had gathered he was glad indeed to turn her over to a couple of
stalwart warriors, but these too were forced to carry her since
Mo-sar's fear of the vengeance of Ko-tan's retainers would brook
no delays.

And thus they came down out of the hills from which A-lur is
carved, to the meadows that skirt the lower end of Jad-ben-lul,
with Jane Clayton carried between two of Mo-sar's men. At the
edge of the lake lay a fleet of strong canoes, hollowed from the
trunks of trees, their bows and sterns carved in the semblance of
grotesque beasts or birds and vividly colored by some master in
that primitive school of art, which fortunately is not without
its devotees today.

Into the stern of one of these canoes the warriors tossed their
captive at a sign from Mo-sar, who came and stood beside her as
the warriors were finding their places in the canoes and
selecting their paddles.

"Come, Beautiful One," he said, "let us be friends and you shall
not be harmed. You will find Mo-sar a kind master if you do his
bidding," and thinking to make a good impression on her he
removed the gag from her mouth and the thongs from her wrists,
knowing well that she could not escape surrounded as she was by
his warriors, and presently, when they were out on the lake, she
would be as safely imprisoned as though he held her behind bars.

And so the fleet moved off to the accompaniment of the gentle
splashing of a hundred paddles, to follow the windings of the
rivers and lakes through which the waters of the Valley of
Jad-ben-Otho empty into the great morass to the south. The
warriors, resting upon one knee, faced the bow and in the last
canoe Mo-sar tiring of his fruitless attempts to win responses
from his sullen captive, squatted in the bottom of the canoe with
his back toward her and resting his head upon the gunwale sought
sleep.

Thus they moved in silence between the verdure-clad banks of the
little river through which the waters of Jad-ben-lul emptied--now
in the moonlight, now in dense shadow where great trees overhung
the stream, and at last out upon the waters of another lake, the
black shores of which seemed far away under the weird influence
of a moonlight night.

Jane Clayton sat alert in the stern of the last canoe. For months
she had been under constant surveillance, the prisoner first of
one ruthless race and now the prisoner of another. Since the
long-gone day that Hauptmann Fritz Schneider and his band of
native German troops had treacherously wrought the Kaiser's work
of rapine and destruction on the Greystoke bungalow and carried
her away to captivity she had not drawn a free breath. That she
had survived unharmed the countless dangers through which she had
passed she attributed solely to the beneficence of a kind and
watchful Providence.

At first she had been held on the orders of the German High
Command with a view of her ultimate value as a hostage and during
these months she had been subjected to neither hardship nor
oppression, but when the Germans had become hard pressed toward
the close of their unsuccessful campaign in East Africa it had
been determined to take her further into the interior and now
there was an element of revenge in their motives, since it must
have been apparent that she could no longer be of any possible
military value.

Bitter indeed were the Germans against that half-savage mate of
hers who had cunningly annoyed and harassed them with a
fiendishness of persistence and ingenuity that had resulted in a
noticeable loss in morale in the sector he had chosen for his
operations. They had to charge against him the lives of certain
officers that he had deliberately taken with his own hands, and
one entire section of trench that had made possible a disastrous
turning movement by the British. Tarzan had out-generaled them at
every point. He had met cunning with cunning and cruelty with
cruelties until they feared and loathed his very name. The
cunning trick that they had played upon him in destroying his
home, murdering his retainers, and covering the abduction of his
wife in such a way as to lead him to believe that she had been
killed, they had regretted a thousand times, for a thousandfold
had they paid the price for their senseless ruthlessness, and
now, unable to wreak their vengeance directly upon him, they had
conceived the idea of inflicting further suffering upon his mate.

In sending her into the interior to avoid the path of the
victorious British, they had chosen as her escort Lieutenant
Erich Obergatz who had been second in command of Schneider's
company, and who alone of its officers had escaped the consuming
vengeance of the ape-man. For a long time Obergatz had held her
in a native village, the chief of which was still under the
domination of his fear of the ruthless German oppressors. While
here only hardships and discomforts assailed her, Obergatz
himself being held in leash by the orders of his distant superior
but as time went on the life in the village grew to be a
veritable hell of cruelties and oppressions practiced by the
arrogant Prussian upon the villagers and the members of his
native command--for time hung heavily upon the hands of the
lieutenant and with idleness combining with the personal
discomforts he was compelled to endure, his none too agreeable
temper found an outlet first in petty interference with the
chiefs and later in the practice of absolute cruelties upon them.

What the self-sufficient German could not see was plain to Jane
Clayton--that the sympathies of Obergatz' native soldiers lay
with the villagers and that all were so heartily sickened by his
abuse that it needed now but the slightest spark to detonate the
mine of revenge and hatred that the pig-headed Hun had been
assiduously fabricating beneath his own person.

And at last it came, but from an unexpected source in the form of
a German native deserter from the theater of war. Footsore,
weary, and spent, he dragged himself into the village late one
afternoon, and before Obergatz was even aware of his presence the
whole village knew that the power of Germany in Africa was at an
end. It did not take long for the lieutenant's native soldiers to
realize that the authority that held them in service no longer
existed and that with it had gone the power to pay them their
miserable wage. Or at least, so they reasoned. To them Obergatz
no longer represented aught else than a powerless and hated
foreigner, and short indeed would have been his shrift had not a
native woman who had conceived a doglike affection for Jane
Clayton hurried to her with word of the murderous plan, for the
fate of the innocent white woman lay in the balance beside that
of the guilty Teuton.

"Already they are quarreling as to which one shall possess you,"
she told Jane.

"When will they come for us?" asked Jane. "Did you hear them
say?"

"Tonight," replied the woman, "for even now that he has none to
fight for him they still fear the white man. And so they will
come at night and kill him while he sleeps."

Jane thanked the woman and sent her away lest the suspicion of
her fellows be aroused against her when they discovered that the
two whites had learned of their intentions. The woman went at
once to the hut occupied by Obergatz. She had never gone there
before and the German looked up in surprise as he saw who his
visitor was.

Briefly she told him what she had heard. At first he was inclined
to bluster arrogantly, with a great display of bravado but she
silenced him peremptorily.

"Such talk is useless," she said shortly. "You have brought upon
yourself the just hatred of these people. Regardless of the truth
or falsity of the report which has been brought to them, they
believe in it and there is nothing now between you and your Maker
other than flight. We shall both be dead before morning if we are
unable to escape from the village unseen. If you go to them now
with your silly protestations of authority you will be dead a
little sooner, that is all."

"You think it is as bad as that?" he said, a noticeable alteration
in his tone and manner.

"It is precisely as I have told you," she replied. "They will
come tonight and kill you while you sleep. Find me pistols and a
rifle and ammunition and we will pretend that we go into the
jungle to hunt. That you have done often. Perhaps it will arouse
suspicion that I accompany you but that we must chance. And be
sure my dear Herr Lieutenant to bluster and curse and abuse your
servants unless they note a change in your manner and realizing
your fear know that you suspect their intention. If all goes well
then we can go out into the jungle to hunt and we need not
return.

"But first and now you must swear never to harm me, or otherwise
it would be better that I called the chief and turned you over to
him and then put a bullet into my own head, for unless you swear
as I have asked I were no better alone in the jungle with you
than here at the mercies of these degraded blacks."

"I swear," he replied solemnly, "in the names of my God and my
Kaiser that no harm shall befall you at my hands, Lady
Greystoke."

"Very well," she said, "we will make this pact to assist each
other to return to civilization, but let it be understood that
there is and never can be any semblance even of respect for you
upon my part. I am drowning and you are the straw. Carry that
always in your mind, German."

If Obergatz had held any doubt as to the sincerity of her word it
would have been wholly dissipated by the scathing contempt of her
tone. And so Obergatz, without further parley, got pistols and an
extra rifle for Jane, as well as bandoleers of cartridges. In his
usual arrogant and disagreeable manner he called his servants,
telling them that he and the white kali were going out into the
brush to hunt. The beaters would go north as far as the little
hill and then circle back to the east and in toward the village.
The gun carriers he directed to take the extra pieces and precede
himself and Jane slowly toward the east, waiting for them at the
ford about half a mile distant. The blacks responded with greater
alacrity than usual and it was noticeable to both Jane and
Obergatz that they left the village whispering and laughing.

"The swine think it is a great joke," growled Obergatz, "that the
afternoon before I die I go out and hunt meat for them."

As soon as the gun bearers disappeared in the jungle beyond the
village the two Europeans followed along the same trail, nor was
there any attempt upon the part of Obergatz' native soldiers, or
the warriors of the chief to detain them, for they too doubtless
were more than willing that the whites should bring them in one
more mess of meat before they killed them.

A quarter of a mile from the village, Obergatz turned toward the
south from the trail that led to the ford and hurrying onward the
two put as great a distance as possible between them and the
village before night fell. They knew from the habits of their
erstwhile hosts that there was little danger of pursuit by night
since the villagers held Numa, the lion, in too great respect to
venture needlessly beyond their stockade during the hours that
the king of beasts was prone to choose for hunting.

And thus began a seemingly endless sequence of frightful days and
horror-laden nights as the two fought their way toward the south
in the face of almost inconceivable hardships, privations, and
dangers. The east coast was nearer but Obergatz positively
refused to chance throwing himself into the hands of the British
by returning to the territory which they now controlled,
insisting instead upon attempting to make his way through an
unknown wilderness to South Africa where, among the Boers, he was
convinced he would find willing sympathizers who would find some
way to return him in safety to Germany, and the woman was
perforce compelled to accompany him.

And so they had crossed the great thorny, waterless steppe and
come at last to the edge of the morass before Pal-ul-don. They
had reached this point just before the rainy season when the
waters of the morass were at their lowest ebb. At this time a
hard crust is baked upon the dried surface of the marsh and there
is only the open water at the center to materially impede
progress. It is a condition that exists perhaps not more than a
few weeks, or even days at the termination of long periods of
drought, and so the two crossed the otherwise almost impassable
barrier without realizing its latent terrors. Even the open
water in the center chanced to be deserted at the time by its
frightful denizens which the drought and the receding waters had
driven southward toward the mouth of Pal-ul-don's largest river
which carries the waters out of the Valley of Jad-ben-Otho.

Their wanderings carried them across the mountains and into the
Valley of Jad-ben-Otho at the source of one of the larger streams
which bears the mountain waters down into the valley to empty
them into the main river just below The Great Lake on whose
northern shore lies A-lur. As they had come down out of the
mountains they had been surprised by a party of Ho-don hunters.
Obergatz had escaped while Jane had been taken prisoner and
brought to A-lur. She had neither seen nor heard aught of the
German since that time and she did not know whether he had
perished in this strange land, or succeeded in successfully
eluding its savage denizens and making his way at last into South
Africa.

For her part, she had been incarcerated alternately in the palace
and the temple as either Ko-tan or Lu-don succeeded in wresting
her temporarily from the other by various strokes of cunning and
intrigue. And now at last she was in the power of a new captor,
one whom she knew from the gossip of the temple and the palace to
be cruel and degraded. And she was in the stern of the last
canoe, and every enemy back was toward her, while almost at her
feet Mo-sar's loud snores gave ample evidence of his
unconsciousness to his immediate surroundings.

The dark shore loomed closer to the south as Jane Clayton, Lady
Greystoke, slid quietly over the stern of the canoe into the
chill waters of the lake. She scarcely moved other than to keep
her nostrils above the surface while the canoe was yet
discernible in the last rays of the declining moon. Then she
struck out toward the southern shore.

Alone, unarmed, all but naked, in a country overrun by savage
beasts and hostile men, she yet felt for the first time in many
months a sensation of elation and relief. She was free! What if
the next moment brought death, she knew again, at least a brief
instant of absolute freedom. Her blood tingled to the almost
forgotten sensation and it was with difficulty that she
restrained a glad triumphant cry as she clambered from the quiet
waters and stood upon the silent beach.

Before her loomed a forest, darkly, and from its depths came
those nameless sounds that are a part of the night life of the
jungle--the rustling of leaves in the wind, the rubbing together
of contiguous branches, the scurrying of a rodent, all magnified
by the darkness to sinister and awe-inspiring proportions; the
hoot of an owl, the distant scream of a great cat, the barking of
wild dogs, attested the presence of the myriad life she could not
see--the savage life, the free life of which she was now a part.
And then there came to her, possibly for the first time since the
giant ape-man had come into her life, a fuller realization of
what the jungle meant to him, for though alone and unprotected
from its hideous dangers she yet felt its lure upon her and an
exaltation that she had not dared hope to feel again.

Ah, if that mighty mate of hers were but by her side! What utter
joy and bliss would be hers! She longed for no more than this.
The parade of cities, the comforts and luxuries of civilization
held forth no allure half as insistent as the glorious freedom of
the jungle.

A lion moaned in the blackness to her right, eliciting delicious
thrills that crept along her spine. The hair at the back of her
head seemed to stand erect--yet she was unafraid. The muscles
bequeathed her by some primordial ancestor reacted instinctively
to the presence of an ancient enemy--that was all. The woman
moved slowly and deliberately toward the wood. Again the lion
moaned; this time nearer. She sought a low-hanging branch and
finding it swung easily into the friendly shelter of the tree.
The long and perilous journey with Obergatz had trained her
muscles and her nerves to such unaccustomed habits. She found a
safe resting place such as Tarzan had taught her was best and
there she curled herself, thirty feet above the ground, for a
night's rest. She was cold and uncomfortable and yet she slept,
for her heart was warm with renewed hope and her tired brain had
found temporary surcease from worry.

She slept until the heat of the sun, high in the heavens,
awakened her. She was rested and now her body was well as her
heart was warm. A sensation of ease and comfort and happiness
pervaded her being. She rose upon her gently swaying couch and
stretched luxuriously, her naked limbs and lithe body mottled by
the sunlight filtering through the foliage above combined with
the lazy gesture to impart to her appearance something of the
leopard. With careful eye she scrutinized the ground below and
with attentive ear she listened for any warning sound that might
suggest the near presence of enemies, either man or beast.
Satisfied at last that there was nothing close of which she need
have fear she clambered to the ground. She wished to bathe but
the lake was too exposed and just a bit too far from the safety
of the trees for her to risk it until she became more familiar
with her surroundings. She wandered aimlessly through the forest
searching for food which she found in abundance. She ate and
rested, for she had no objective as yet. Her freedom was too new
to be spoiled by plannings for the future. The haunts of
civilized man seemed to her now as vague and unattainable as the
half-forgotten substance of a dream. If she could but live on
here in peace, waiting, waiting for--him. It was the old hope
revived. She knew that he would come some day, if he lived. She
had always known that, though recently she had believed that he
would come too late. If he lived! Yes, he would come if he lived,
and if he did not live she were as well off here as elsewhere,
for then nothing mattered, only to wait for the end as patiently
as might be.

Her wanderings brought her to a crystal brook and there she drank
and bathed beneath an overhanging tree that offered her quick
asylum in the event of danger. It was a quiet and beautiful spot
and she loved it from the first. The bottom of the brook was
paved with pretty stones and bits of glassy obsidian. As she
gathered a handful of the pebbles and held them up to look at
them she noticed that one of her fingers was bleeding from a
clean, straight cut. She fell to searching for the cause and
presently discovered it in one of the fragments of volcanic glass
which revealed an edge that was almost razor-like. Jane Clayton
was elated. Here, God-given to her hands, was the first beginning
with which she might eventually arrive at both weapons and
tools--a cutting edge. Everything was possible to him who
possessed it--nothing without.

She sought until she had collected many of the precious bits of
stone--until the pouch that hung at her right side was almost
filled. Then she climbed into the great tree to examine them at
leisure. There were some that looked like knife blades, and some
that could easily be fashioned into spear heads, and many smaller
ones that nature seemed to have intended for the tips of savage
arrows.

The spear she would essay first--that would be easiest. There
was a hollow in the bole of the tree in a great crotch high above
the ground. Here she cached all of her treasure except a single
knifelike sliver. With this she descended to the ground and
searching out a slender sapling that grew arrow-straight she
hacked and sawed until she could break it off without splitting
the wood. It was just the right diameter for the shaft of a
spear--a hunting spear such as her beloved Waziri had liked best.
How often had she watched them fashioning them, and they had
taught her how to use them, too--them and the heavy war
spears--laughing and clapping their hands as her proficiency
increased.

She knew the arborescent grasses that yielded the longest and
toughest fibers and these she sought and carried to her tree with
the spear shaft that was to be. Clambering to her crotch she bent
to her work, humming softly a little tune. She caught herself and
smiled--it was the first time in all these bitter months that
song had passed her lips or such a smile.

"I feel," she sighed, "I almost feel that John is near--my
John--my Tarzan!"

She cut the spear shaft to the proper length and removed the
twigs and branches and the bark, whittling and scraping at the
nubs until the surface was all smooth and straight. Then she
split one end and inserted a spear point, shaping the wood until
it fitted perfectly. This done she laid the shaft aside and fell
to splitting the thick grass stems and pounding and twisting them
until she had separated and partially cleaned the fibers. These
she took down to the brook and washed and brought back again and
wound tightly around the cleft end of the shaft, which she had
notched to receive them, and the upper part of the spear head
which she had also notched slightly with a bit of stone. It was a
crude spear but the best that she could attain in so short a
time. Later, she promised herself, she should have others--many
of them--and they would be spears of which even the greatest of
the Waziri spear-men might be proud.