Part 1 (1/2)

Werper, Barton.

New Tarzan.

Tarzan and the Silver Globe.

Chapter I.

”The Message”

AN ominous quiet had settled over the jungle surrounding the vast estate of Lord and Lady Greystoke. Had it not been for the importance of their conversation. Lord Greystoke, known to his jungle friends as Tarzan of the Apes, would have paid it more heed. Even his wife, Jane, hesitated during her conversation to listen to the strangeness of the quiet for a moment. Her sensitive, feminine nostrils quivered in an effort to identify the strange new odor which seemed to permeate the air. One? glance at her tall, grey-eyed husband, so much more familiar with jungle lore than she, and she dismissed her premonitions. Had it been of importance, her husband would have been aroused. Imagination, she decided, and shrugged it off.

Shortly after the runner had arrived at their holdings with the weekly mails, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, had retired to his study to spend the early evening hours in preoccupied study of the new problem with which he had been presented. At dinner, he seemed distraught, and later in the evening when he excused himself and retired to the bedroom. Lady Greystoke followed him immediately. He told her of the bad news before she could ask about it, and any bystander hearing their voices would have realized that something most unusual to this estate had come about.

”amust of course help them. After all, John, they were our dearest friends in London. Why-without Veronica, it's well possible we might never have returned to Africa.” Jane Clayton continued, ”I realize it's an incredible sum of money, but we can help them, can't we?”

”We shall,” replied Tarzan. ”But you must realize that time is of the essence. We cannot put the matter before the board of our company in London. By the time they studied it, and argued about it, Veronica and Ward would be lost.” He turned to look tenderly at his wife.

”You must understand, Jane. There is nothing for me to do but go back to Opar. It's the quickest-the only way.”

”Oh, no, John,” and Jane moved quickly to embrace him, ”you can't do that! As much as they mean to us-to me-your life means more! It's so terribly dangerous. You know that Opar has always hurt you-twice, it almost killed you. There must be another way! ”

”I've always come back, haven't I, dearest?” Tarzan laughed. ”I think I can still take care of myself. Besides which, I will take some of the Waziri with me. Should I falter, they'll see me through.”

”You can't say that, John. They failed you before-they may fail you again, and I couldn't bear-”

Tarzan lifted his vote's chin, placing her lips near his. ”You want help for our dearest friends, don't you? And you trust me, don't you? ”

”Yes, darling, but there must be some other way.”

”There is not any other way. Not if we're to get the amount of money Veronica and Ward need, by the time they need it! They did not fail us, Jane. How can we fail them?”

It was at this time the silence, and the strange odor, reached the loving couple. And it was because of their deep love that both ignored these warning signals. They had become immersed in both their memories and their emotions. Jane wept upon Tarzan's shoulder. He held her tenderly, and tried to rea.s.sure her.

”I will be careful, Jane. It's truly the easiest way to get that amount of money so quickly. Truth of the matter is, the Oparians will probably never realize I've been there again. After all, they don't even know where the treasure caves are-and this time, I'll take such small group of warriors that they may keep themselves hidden.”

Lady Greystoke shuddered once, sniffed once again, and dissolved into tears. The two abandoned the subject, both recognizing the decision as final. She would wait. He would go. They could both do, more or less, nothing but pray.

They would have begun their prayers that moment had either been aware of the dark figure outside their window. As Jane's tears ended their conversation, this figure stole stealthily away from the bungalow, keeping close to the shadows. Incredibly, it pa.s.sed almost un.o.bserved through the night guard of the Waziri warriors upon whom Tarzan had placed full dependence, and disappeared into the heavy jungle at the edge of the clearing. As the figure left, the silence descended once again upon the jungle, and the weeping Jane wondered again about the strange odor she sensed.

Someone-or something-knew that Tarzan was returning once more to Opar.

The next morning Tarzan took leave of his wife. Stripped to the loincloth and armed after the primitive fas.h.i.+on he best loved, he led a group of his fierce and loyal Waziri away from the estate and on the path toward the dead city of Opar. And, unknown to Tarzan, someone-or something-haunted their trail during the long hot day; camped close behind his group by night.

To Tarzan, however, the entire expedition was somewhat in the nature of a holiday. No matter how civilized Jane had made him, the veneer always chafed him, and occasionally became all but unbearable. Bad though the news had been from his friends, Tarzan had welcomed this chance to return to his jungle, and his jungle ways. Even while comforting his weeping wife, Tarzan had been mentally unpeeling the European clothes which bound him so. It was her love that kept him civilized-and even her love had failed to remove his contempt for the civilization she'd shown him. He hated the sham, the hypocrisy, the rottenness of it all. Even the finer things of civilization which he had grown to love-art, literature, music-didn't make up the difference for him. His jungle friends also had art, a form of literature, and who -having once heard them-could deny the power of jungle drums? He had tried to explain to his mate these deep, innermost feelings. ”Show me,” he would tell her softly, ”the fat, opulent cowards of your civilized world who have given it any of its grace. Show me one of them who could stand up and face the fears, the natural fears of the jungle beasts, and not cry coward!” And when, as she had once done in the past, Jane tried to protest, he would cover her protests with other words. ”There is nothing more beautiful than life, and the fight for living. Even your world will admit this fact. What, then, is more beautiful than the battle for survival in my jungle? The display of Nature's most eminent, most terrific beasts, most wild forces, born to fight? It is the finest thing in the world, Jane.” And he would calm her unborn protests with the sweet, natural kisses of love.

So, now, Tarzan came back to the jungle in the spirit of a lover returning to his love after a long absence. Once there, he found again-as he had found always in the past-his Waziri,- his blacks, were more civilized-than he. They did not like raw meat. They had learned to cook it before they ate it. They shunned as not edible many of the foods upon which Tarzan had fed as a child. Tarzan felt always a sense of guilt when his natural longings overcame him in their presence. Rather than eat as he wished, he shared burnt flesh with them. Always, he would have preferred it raw-unspoiled. He brought down game with arrow or spear when he would far rather have leaped on it from ambush and sunk his strong teeth its jugular; but at last the call of the milk of the savage mother that had suckled him in infancy rose to an insistent demand. He craved the hot blood of a fresh kill. His muscles yearned to pit themselves against the savage jungle in the battle for existence that had been his sole birthright for the first twenty years of his life.

Moved by these vague but all-powerful urgings, the ape-man lay awake one night in the little thorn boma that had protected, in a way, his party from the depredations of the great carnivore of the jungle. A single warrior stood sleepy guard beside the fire that yellow eyes out of the darkness beyond the camp made imperative. The moans and the coughing of the big cats mingled with the myriad noises of the lesser denizens of the jungle to fan the savage flame in the breast of this untamed English lord. He tossed upon his bed of gra.s.ses, sleepless, for an hour, and then he rose, noiseless as a wraith, and while the Waziri's back was turned, vaulted the boma wall in the face of the flaming eyes, swung silently into a great tree and was gone.

For a time, in sheer exuberance of animal spirits he raced swiftly through the middle terrace, swinging perilously across wide spans from one jungle giant to the next. Then he clambered upward to the swaying, lesser boughs of the upper terrace where the moon shone full upon him an the air was stirred by little breezes and death lurked ready in each frail branch. Here, he paused and raised his face to Goro, the moon. With uplifted arm he stood, the cry of the bull ape quivering upon his lips, and yet he remained silent lest he arouse his faithful Waziri who were all too familiar with the hideous challenge of their master.

Then he went on slower, with greater stealth and caution. Now Tarzan of the Apes was seeking a kill. Down to the ground he came in the utter blackness of the close-set boles and the overhanging verdure of the jungle. He stooped from time to time and put his nose close to earth. He sought and found a wild game trail and at last his nostrils were rewarded with the scent of the fresh spoor of Bara, the deer. Tarzan's mouth watered and a low growl escaped his patrician lips. Sloughed from him was the last vestige of artificial caste; once again he was the primeval hunter-the first man - the highest caste type of the human race. Upwind he had followed the elusive spoor with a sense of perception so transcending that of ordinary man as to be inconceivable to us. Through countercurrents of the heavy stench of meat eaters he traced Bara the deer; the sweet and cloying scent of Horta, the boar, could not drown his quarry's distinctive scent-the permeating, mellow musk of the deer's spoor.

Presently the body scent of the deer told Tarzan that his prey was close at hand. It sent him into the trees again-into the lower terrace where he could watch the ground below and catch with ears and nose the first intimation of actual contact with his quarry. Nor was it long before the ape-man came upon Bara standing alert at the edge of a moon-bathed clearing.

Noiselessly, Tarzan crept through the trees until he was directly over the deer. In the ape-man's right hand was the long hunting knife of his father and in his heart the blood l.u.s.t of the carnivore. Just for an instant he poised above the unsuspecting Bara, and then he launched himself downward upon the sleek back. The impact of his weight carried the deer to the ground and before the animal could reach its feet the knife had found its heart. As Tarzan rose to his feet to scream forth his hideous victory cry into the face of the moon, the wind carried something to his nostrils which froze him to statuesque immobility and silence. His savage eyes blazed into the direction from which the wind had borne down the warning to him as a moment later the gra.s.ses atone side of the clearing parted, and Numa, the lion, strode majestically into view. His yellow-green eyes were fastened upon Tarzan as he halted just within the clearing and glared enviously at the successful hunter. For Numa had had no luck this night.

Tarzan had been on his way for several days and nights to the mysterious lost city of Opar while Jane missed him sorely, and worried about the ape-man's security, she nevertheless realized that the giant Lord of the Jungle could never be quite all hers, that she shared him with a savage, b.l.o.o.d.y and dangerous mistress; a mistress, moreover, of whom she was inordinately jealous, but against whom she had no true weapons except her over-weening love for her lord and master. These sufficed on most occasions, but she had long since learned to recognize the flash that came to Tarzan's eyes from time to time, and to resign herself to the fact that her mate would return to his savage ways until the desire was gone from him.

So, for lack of something else to do, Jane Clayton called in the Waziri maidens and commenced a major operation of cleaning. The bewildered natives soon found themselves knee-deep in an endeavor that made absolutely no sense to them at all. When their own huts became cluttered and dirty, they built new, fresh ones, smelling wonderfully of new gra.s.s and boughs, so that they now constantly clacked m bewilderment, even while following the stern orders of Tarzan's mate.

So it came to pa.s.s that shortly after midnight of this particular night, Jane, exhausted, nevertheless wakened abruptly from her fatigue-induced slumbers. Her senses, perhaps not as alert as those of her mate, sensed something wrong. It took only a second to realize what it was. An ominous quiet had settled over the jungle which surrounded her bungalow. Night birds, lesser and greater predators-all were silent. Even the trees seemed to be silent, as if the very leaves and boughs had stopped moving. What was it? Jane sat up in bed, clutching the bed-clothing tightly around herself. It was like the calm before a major disaster, almost Nature's way of warning against an impending storm or earthquake, and the lone woman shuddered.

Jane got from her bed, threw on a robe, and padded barefoot into the kitchen. She knew that until her curiosity was satisfied she'd never be able to return to sleep, exhausted from the labors of the day though she was. Before she could make a light, there came a cautious scratching at her kitchen door. Without hesitation, she threw it open. None could pa.s.s the eyes of the Waziri guards without permission, so the caller had to be, even at this hour, a welcome one.

It was a great ape, and Jane squinted closely in the moonlight to determine which of them it might be. ”Leena?” she said, hesitantly.

The great ape nodded, impatiently. Leena was the mate of Nendat, leader of the tribe that had raised Tarzan from an infant, and hence no minor crisis had arisen. Others could have been sent with an urgent message, but Nendat would trust only his wife for this one. Jane made up her mind quickly. She made a light, and Leena waddled further into the kitchen, squinting anxiously. None of the apes spoke English, but a few, like Leena, understood certain words, and could comprehend gestures.

Leena made anxious sounds, placing a hairy paw on Jane's shoulder. Jane rubbed her cheek alongside Leena's hairy visage, then went to the refrigerator and got out an orange. Leena had learned to love this fruit above all others, and conveyed the urgency of her visit by gently declining it. She made beckoning gestures to Tarzan's mate.

”Danger? ”Jane asked.

The ape nodded, shuffling impatiently.

”We go now,” Jane decided. Leena made negative gestures, pawing at Jane's robe. ”Ah. Dress for jungle travel.” Leena agreed with urgent grunts.

When Jane had returned, dressed in soft doeskin, she found Leena happily wiping and licking the last of the orange from her fingers. Apparently, once the urgency of her mission had been conveyed, she felt, practically, that it was both foolish and wasteful not to eat the delicious golden fruit. Leena, wiping a paw across her muzzle, cautioned Jane to be quiet and careful, then herself turned out the light. With grunts and whimpers, she urged Jane out the door. Jane followed without hesitation, trusting Leena as she could never have trusted a beast a few short years ago.

Jane paused at the edge of the little clearing, to pa.s.s a few words of rea.s.surance with the Waziri guard, who also was uneasy about the strange silence that hung over the jungle. He nodded, hardly able to keep his attention on the mistress of the place as he rolled white-rimmed eyes about him.

Leena waited impatiently for Tarzan's mate to finish her instruction, then, as Jane returned to her side, leaped into the nearest tree. Jane followed easily, her jungle-trained muscles leaping lithely into play. As they swung up into the middle terrace for speed, Jane found herself hard-pressed to follow the pace set by the she-ape. She marveled anew that Tarzan could outrun all beasts, on the ground or in the trees. Leena slowed her rapid progress only once, stopping for a particularly succulent grub which she'd dug out from under a bit of tree bark. She tore it in half, politely offering Jane a share. The woman refused it courteously, and Leena, with a peculiarly feminine action that brought a faint smile of amus.e.m.e.nt to Jane's lips, shrugged, and ate both halves with obvious relish, then swung off at renewed speed. Below the strangely-a.s.sorted pair, the jungle was still ominously quiet, and Lady Greystoke still had no idea why she was being taken on this trip. Had something happened to Tarzan?

Chapter II.

”The Witch Doctors Prophecy”

FROM the lips of the ape-man broke a rumbling growl of warning. Numa answered but he did not advance. Instead, he stood waving his tail gently to and fro, and presently Tarzan squatted on his kill and cut a generous portion from a hindquarter. Numa eyed him with growing rage and resentment as, between mouthfuls, the ape-man growled out his savage warnings. Now, this particular lion had never before come in contact with Tarzan of the Apes, and he was much mystified. Here was the appearance and the scent of a man-thing. Numa had tasted of human flesh and learned that while not the most palatable, it was by far the easiest to secure; yet there was that in the b.e.s.t.i.a.l growls of the strange creature which reminded him of formidable antagonists and gave him pause, while his hunger and the odor of the hot flesh of Bara goaded him almost to madness. Always, Tarzan watched him, guessing what was pa.s.sing in the little brain of the carnivore. Well it was that he did watch him, for Numa could stand it no more. His tail shot suddenly erect and at the same instant, the wary ape-man, knowing all too well what the signal portended, grasped the remainder of the deer's hindquarter between his teeth and leaped into a nearby tree as Numa charged him with all the speed and a sufficient semblance to the weight of an express train.

Tarzan's retreat was no indication that he felt fear. Jungle life is ordered along different lines from ours and different standards prevail. Had Tarzan been famished, he would have stood his ground and met the lion's charge. He had done that very thing before on more than one occasion, just as in the past he had charged lions himself; but tonight he was far from famished and in the hindquarter he had carried off more meat with him than he could eat. Yet it was with no equanimity that he looked down at the spectacle of Numa rending Tarzan's kill. Such presumption must be punished! And forthwith Tarzan set out to make life miserable for the big cat. Close by were many trees bearing large, hard fruits, and to one of these the ape-man swung with the agility of a squirrel. Then commenced a bombardment which brought earth-shaking roars from Numa. One after another, as rapidly as he could gather and hurl them, Tarzan pelted the hard fruit down upon the lion. It was impossible for the tawny cat to eat under the hail of missiles - he could but roar and growl and dodge and eventually he was driven away entirely from the carca.s.s of Bara, the deer. He went roaring and resentful, but in the very center of the clearing his voice was hushed and Tarzan saw the great head lower and flatten out, the body crouch and the long tail quiver as the beast slunk cautiously toward the tree upon the opposite side.