h the muscles of his strong arms, presently
discovering that by working them back and forth he could loosen
them: and then a new plan was suggested to him so that he fell to
work excavating with his knife at a point above where one of the
stakes was imbedded. The loam was soft and easily removed, and it
was not long until Tarzan had exposed that part of one of the stakes
which was imbedded in the wall of the pit to almost its entire
length, leaving only enough imbedded to prevent the stake from
falling into the excavation. Then he turned his attention to an
adjoining stake and soon had it similarly exposed, after which he
threw the noose of his grass rope over the two and swung quickly
to the branch of the tree above. Here he gathered in the slack of
the rope and, bracing himself against the bole of the tree, pulled
steadily upward. Slowly the stakes rose from the trench in which
they were imbedded and with them rose Numa's suspicion and growling.

Was this some new encroachment upon his rights and his liberties?
He was puzzled and, like all lions, being short of temper, he
was irritated. He had not minded it when the Tarmangani squatted
upon the verge of the pit and looked down upon him, for had not
this Tarmangani fed him? But now something else was afoot and the
suspicion of the wild beast was aroused. As he watched, however,
Numa saw the stakes rise slowly to an erect position, tumble
against each other and then fall backwards out of his sight upon
the surface of the ground above. Instantly the lion grasped the
possibilities of the situation, and, too, perhaps he sensed the fact
that the man-thing had deliberately opened a way for his escape.
Seizing the remains of Bara in his great jaws, Numa, the lion,
leaped agilely from the pit of the Wamabos and Tarzan of the Apes
melted into the jungles to the east.

On the surface of the ground or through the swaying branches of the
trees the spoor of man or beast was an open book to the ape-man, but
even his acute senses were baffled by the spoorless trail of the
airship. Of what good were eyes, or ears, or the sense of smell
in following a thing whose path had lain through the shifting
air thousands of feet above the tree tops? Only upon his sense of
direction could Tarzan depend in his search for the fallen plane.
He could not even judge accurately as to the distance it might
lie from him, and he knew that from the moment that it disappeared
beyond the hills it might h