Tarzan of the Apes
The next morning Jane found her missing letter in the exact spot from
which it had disappeared two nights before. She was mystified; but when
she saw the printed words beneath her signature, she felt a cold,
clammy chill run up her spine. She showed the letter, or rather the
last sheet with the signature, to Clayton.
“And to think,” she said, “that uncanny thing was probably watching me
all the time that I was writing—oo! It makes me shudder just to think
of it.”
“But he must be friendly,” reassured Clayton, “for he has returned your
letter, nor did he offer to harm you, and unless I am mistaken he left
a very substantial memento of his friendship outside the cabin door
last night, for I just found the carcass of a wild boar there as I came
out.”
From then on scarcely a day passed that did not bring its offering of
game or other food. Sometimes it was a young deer, again a quantity of
strange, cooked food—cassava cakes pilfered from the village of
Mbonga—or a boar, or leopard, and once a lion.
Tarzan derived the greatest pleasure of his life in hunting meat for
these strangers. It seemed to him that no pleasure on earth could
compare with laboring for the welfare and protection of the beautiful
white girl.
Some day he would venture into the camp in daylight and talk with these
people through the medium of the little bugs which were familiar to
them and to Tarzan.
But he found it difficult to overcome the timidity of the wild thing of
the forest, and so day followed day without seeing a fulfillment of his
good intentions.
The party in the camp, emboldened by familiarity, wandered farther and
yet farther into the jungle in search of nuts and fruit.
Scarcely a day passed that did not find Professor Porter straying in
his preoccupied indifference toward the jaws of death. Mr. Samuel T.
Philander, never what one might call robust, was worn to the shadow of
a shadow through the ceaseless worry and mental distraction resultant
from his Herculean efforts to safeguard the professor.
A month passed. Tarzan had finally determined to visit the camp by
daylight.
It was early afternoon. Clayton had wandered to the point at the
harbor’s mouth to look for passing vessels. Here he kept a great mass
of wood, high piled, ready to be ignited as a signal should a steamer
or a sail top the far horizon.
Professor Porter was wandering along the beach south of the camp with
Mr. Philander at his elbow, urging him to turn his steps back before
the two became again the sport of some savage beast.
The others gone, Jane and Esmeralda had wandered into the jungle to
gather fruit, and in their search were led farther and farther from the
cabin.
Tarzan waited in silence before the door of the little house until they
should return. His thoughts were of the beautiful white girl. They were
always of her now. He wondered if she would fear him, and the thought
all but caused him to relinquish his plan.
He was rapidly becoming impatient for her return, that he might feast
his eyes upon her and be near her, perhaps touch her. The ape-man knew
no god, but he was as near to worshipping his divinity as mortal man
ever comes to worship. While he waited he passed the time printing a
message to her; whether he intended giving it to her he himself could
not have told, but he took infinite pleasure in seeing his thoughts
expressed in print—in which he was not so uncivilized after all. He
wrote:
I am Tarzan of the Apes. I want you. I am yours. You are mine. We live
here together always in my house. I will bring you the best of fruits,
the tenderest deer, the finest meats that roam the jungle. I will hunt
for you. I am the greatest of the jungle fighters. I will fight for
you. I am the mightiest of the jungle fighters. You are Jane Porter, I
saw it in your letter. When you see this you will know that it is for
you and that Tarzan of the Apes loves you.
As he stood, straight as a young Indian, by the door, waiting after he
had finished the message, there came to his keen ears a familiar sound.
It was the passing of a great ape through the lower branches of the
forest.
For an instant he listened intently, and then from the jungle came the
agonized scream of a woman, and Tarzan of the Apes, dropping his first
love letter upon the ground, shot like a panther into the forest.
Clayton, also, heard the scream, and Professor Porter and Mr.
Philander, and in a few minutes they came panting to the cabin, calling
out to each other a volley of excited questions as they approached. A
glance within confirmed their worst fears.
Jane and Esmeralda were not there.
Instantly, Clayton, followed by the two old men, plunged into the
jungle, calling the girl’s name aloud. For half an hour they stumbled
on, until Clayton, by merest chance, came upon the prostrate form of
Esmeralda.
He stopped beside her, feeling for her pulse and then listening for her
heartbeats. She lived. He shook her.
“Esmeralda!” he shrieked in her ear. “Esmeralda! For God’s sake, where
is Miss Porter? What has happened? Esmeralda!”
Slowly Esmeralda opened her eyes. She saw Clayton. She saw the jungle
about her.
“Oh, Gaberelle!” she screamed, and fainted again.
By this time Professor Porter and Mr. Philander had come up.
“What shall we do, Mr. Clayton?” asked the old professor. “Where shall
we look? God could not have been so cruel as to take my little girl
away from me now.”
“We must arouse Esmeralda first,” replied Clayton. “She can tell us
what has happened. Esmeralda!” he cried again, shaking the black woman
roughly by the shoulder.
“O Gaberelle, I want to die!” cried the poor woman, but with eyes fast
closed. “Let me die, dear Lord, don’t let me see that awful face
again.”
“Come, come, Esmeralda,” cried Clayton.
“The Lord isn’t here; it’s Mr. Clayton. Open your eyes.”
Esmeralda did as she was bade.
“O Gaberelle! Thank the Lord,” she said.
“Where’s Miss Porter? What happened?” questioned Clayton.
“Ain’t Miss Jane here?” cried Esmeralda, sitting up with wonderful
celerity for one of her bulk. “Oh, Lord, now I remember! It must have
took her away,” and the Negress commenced to sob, and wail her
lamentations.
“What took her away?” cried Professor Porter.
“A great big giant all covered with hair.”
“A gorilla, Esmeralda?” questioned Mr. Philander, and the three men
scarcely breathed as he voiced the horrible thought.
“I thought it was the devil; but I guess it must have been one of them
gorilephants. Oh, my poor baby, my poor little honey,” and again
Esmeralda broke into uncontrollable sobbing.
Clayton immediately began to look about for tracks, but he could find
nothing save a confusion of trampled grasses in the close vicinity, and
his woodcraft was too meager for the translation of what he did see.
All the balance of the day they sought through the jungle; but as night
drew on they were forced to give up in despair and hopelessness, for
they did not even know in what direction the thing had borne Jane.
It was long after dark ere they reached the cabin, and a sad and
grief-stricken party it was that sat silently within the little
structure.
Professor Porter finally broke the silence. His tones were no longer
those of the erudite pedant theorizing upon the abstract and the
unknowable; but those of the man of action—determined, but tinged also
by a note of indescribable hopelessness and grief which wrung an
answering pang from Clayton’s heart.
“I shall lie down now,” said the old man, “and try to sleep. Early
to-morrow, as soon as it is light, I shall take what food I can carry
and continue the search until I have found Jane. I will not return
without her.”
His companions did not reply at once. Each was immersed in his own
sorrowful thoughts, and each knew, as did the old professor, what the
last words meant—Professor Porter would never return from the jungle.
At length Clayton arose and laid his hand gently upon Professor
Porter’s bent old shoulder.
“I shall go with you, of course,” he said.
“I knew that you would offer—that you would wish to go, Mr. Clayton;
but you must not. Jane is beyond human assistance now. What was once my
dear little girl shall not lie alone and friendless in the awful
jungle.
“The same vines and leaves will cover us, the same rains beat upon us;
and when the spirit of her mother is abroad, it will find us together
in death, as it has always found us in life.
“No; it is I alone who may go, for she was my daughter—all that was
left on earth for me to love.”
“I shall go with you,” said Clayton simply.
The old man looked up, regarding the strong, handsome face of William
Cecil Clayton intently. Perhaps he read there the love that lay in the
heart beneath—the love for his daughter.
He had been too preoccupied with his own scholarly thoughts in the past
to consider the little occurrences, the chance words, which would have
indicated to a more practical man that these young people were being
drawn more and more closely to one another. Now they came back to him,
one by one.
“As you wish,” he said.
“You may count on me, also,” said Mr. Philander.
“No, my dear old friend,” said Professor Porter. “We may not all go. It
would be cruelly wicked to leave poor Esmeralda here alone, and three
of us would be no more successful than one.
“There be enough dead things in the cruel forest as it is. Come—let us
try to sleep a little.”
CHAPTER XIX.
The Call of the Primitive
From the time Tarzan left the tribe of great anthropoids in which he
had been raised, it was torn by continual strife and discord. Terkoz
proved a cruel and capricious king, so that, one by one, many of the
older and weaker apes, upon whom he was particularly prone to vent his
brutish nature, took their families and sought the quiet and safety of
the far interior.
But at last those who remained were driven to desperation by the
continued truculence of Terkoz, and it so happened that one of them
recalled the parting admonition of Tarzan:
“If you have a chief who is cruel, do not do as the other apes do, and
attempt, any one of you, to pit yourself against him alone. But,
instead, let two or three or four of you attack him together. Then, if
you will do this, no chief will dare to be other than he should be, for
four of you can kill any chief who may ever be over you.”
And the ape who recalled this wise counsel repeated it to several of
his fellows, so that when Terkoz returned to the tribe that day he
found a warm reception awaiting him.
There were no formalities. As Terkoz reached the group, five huge,
hairy beasts sprang upon him.
At heart he was an arrant coward, which is the way with bullies among
apes as well as among men; so he did not remain to fight and die, but
tore himself away from them as quickly as he could and fled into the
sheltering boughs of the forest.
Two more attempts he made to rejoin the tribe, but on each occasion he
was set upon and driven away. At last he gave it up, and turned,
foaming with rage and hatred, into the jungle.
For several days he wandered aimlessly, nursing his spite and looking
for some weak thing on which to vent his pent anger.
It was in this state of mind that the horrible, man-like beast,
swinging from tree to tree, came suddenly upon two women in the jungle.
He was right above them when he discovered them. The first intimation
Jane Porter had of his presence was when the great hairy body dropped
to the earth beside her, and she saw the awful face and the snarling,
hideous mouth thrust within a foot of her.
One piercing scream escaped her lips as the brute hand clutched her
arm. Then she was dragged toward those awful fangs which yawned at her
throat. But ere they touched that fair skin another mood claimed the