ing to his throat. Swiftly and surely life was being
choked from him. His eyes bulged, his tongue protruded, his face
turned to a ghastly purplish hue--there was a convulsive tremor of the
stiffening muscles, and the Manyuema sentry lay quite still.

The ape-man threw the body across one of his broad shoulders and,
gathering up the fellow's gun, trotted silently up the sleeping village
street toward the tree that gave him such easy ingress to the palisaded
village. He bore the dead sentry into the midst of the leafy maze
above.

First he stripped the body of cartridge belt and such ornaments as he
craved, wedging it into a convenient crotch while his nimble fingers
ran over it in search of the loot he could not plainly see in the dark.
When he had finished he took the gun that had belonged to the man, and
walked far out upon a limb, from the end of which he could obtain a
better view of the huts. Drawing a careful bead on the beehive
structure in which he knew the chief Arabs to be, he pulled the
trigger. Almost instantly there was an answering groan. Tarzan
smiled. He had made another lucky hit.

Following the shot there was a moment's silence in the camp, and then
Manyuema and Arab came pouring from the huts like a swarm of angry
hornets; but if the truth were known they were even more frightened
than they were angry. The strain of the preceding day had wrought upon
the fears of both black and white, and now this single shot in the
night conjured all manner of terrible conjectures in their terrified
minds.

When they discovered that their sentry had disappeared, their fears
were in no way allayed, and as though to bolster their courage by
warlike actions, they began to fire rapidly at the barred gates of the
village, although no enemy was in sight. Tarzan took advantage of the
deafening roar of this fusillade to fire into the mob beneath him.

No one heard his shot above the din of rattling musketry in the street,
but some who were standing close saw one of their number crumple
suddenly to the earth. When they leaned over him he was dead. They
were panic-stricken, and it took all the brutal authority of the Arabs
to keep the Manyuema from rushing helter-skelter into the
jungle--anywhere to escape from this terrible village.

After a time they commenced to quiet down, and as no further mysterious
deaths occurred among them they took heart again. But it was a
short-lived respite, for just as they had