Part 4 (1/2)

”What has happened here?” asked one of the policemen

Tarzan explained briefly, but when he turned to the woman for confirmation of his statement he was appalled by her reply

”He lies!” she screa the policeood purpose When I repulsed hientle the house at the time He is a devil, monsieurs; alone he has all but killed ten men with his bare hands and his teeth”

So shocked was Tarzan by her ingratitude that for a moment he was struck dumb The police were inclined to be a little skeptical, for they had had other dealings with this saentlees, so they decided to place all the inmates of the room under arrest, and let another, whose business it was, separate the innocent fro to tell this well-dressed young man that he was under arrest, but quite another to enforce it

”I aht to defend myself I do not knohy the woainst me, for never until I came to this room in response to her cries for help had I seen her”

”Coes to listen to all that,” and he advanced to lay his hand upon Tarzan's shoulder An instant later he lay crumpled in a corner of the room, and then, as his comrades rushed in upon the ape-man, they experienced a taste of what the apaches had but recently gone through So quickly and so roughly did he handle them that they had not even an opportunity to draw their revolvers

During the brief fight Tarzan had noted the openand, beyond, the steraph pole--he could not tell which As the last officer went down, one of his fellows succeeded in drawing his revolver and, from where he lay on the floor, fired at Tarzan The shot ain Tarzan had swept the laed the room into darkness

The next they saas a lithe for to the sill of the openand leap, panther-like, onto the pole across the walk When the police gathered theether and reached the street their prisoner was nowhere to be seen

They did not handle the woently when they took them to the station; they were a very sore and hualled thele unarmed man had wiped the floor with the whole lot of theh they had not existed

The officer who had remained in the street swore that no one had leaped fro from the tiht that he lied, but they could not prove it

When Tarzan found hi to the pole outside the , he followed his jungle instinct and looked below for enemies before he ventured down It ell he did, for just beneath stood a policeman

Above, Tarzan saw no one, so he went up instead of down

The top of the pole was opposite the roof of the building, so it was but the work of an instant for the h the treetops of his primeval forest to carry him across the little space between the pole and the roof Fro he went to another, and so on, with , until at a cross street he discovered another pole, dohich he ran to the ground

For a square or two he ran swiftly; then he turned into a little all-night cafe and in the lavatory removed the evidences of his over-roof proed a few moments later it was to saunter slowly on toward his aparthted boulevard which it was necessary to cross As he stood directly beneath a brilliant arc light, waiting for a li to pass hi up, he a de Coude as she leaned forward upon the back seat of the reeting When he straightened up the machine had borne her away

”Rokoff and the Countess de Coude both in the sae, after all”

Chapter 4

The Countess Explains

”Your Paris is les, Paul,” concluded Tarzan, after narrating his adventures to his friend thehis encounter with the apaches and police in the Rue Maule

”Why did they lure ned a horrified shudder, but he laughed at the quaint suggestion

”It is difficult to rise above the jungle standards and reason by the light of civilized ways, is it not, ly

”Civilized ways, forsooth,” scoffed Tarzan ”Jungle standards do not countenance wanton atrocities There we kill for food and for self-preservation, or in the winning ofAlways, you see, in accordance with the dictates of soh, your civilized man is more brutal than the brutes He kills wantonly, and, worse than that, he utilizes a noble sentiment, the brotherhood of man, as a lure to entice his unwary victim to his doo that I hastened to that room where the assassins lay in wait fortime afterward, that any woman could sink to such moral depravity as that one must have to call a would-be rescuer to death But it ht of Rokoff there and the woman's later repudiation of me to the police make it impossible to place any other construction upon her acts