only Manape made no effort to fight, knowing it
useless.

Scores of black folk armed with spears danced and yelled in the brush,
frankly delighted at the success of their grand coup. Barter was
nowhere to be seen, and there was a possibility that he knew nothing
about this. Yet Bentley knew better. Perhaps, in order to stimulate
the blacks, he had offered them money for great apes taken alive.
Anyhow, scores of the apes were taken, and now exhausted themselves in
savage bellowing and snarling, as they fought for freedom.

A half dozen to each net, the blacks gathered in their captives. They
made much over Ellen Estabrook. They pawed over Apeman despite his
snarls and bellowings, and laughed when Apeman played the ape as
though to the manner born. They scented some mystery here, a white man
raised by the apes, perhaps. But that Ellen and Apeman were prisoners
of blacks, Bentley could plainly understand. He scarcely knew which
was the more horrible for her--to be prisoner of the apes or the
blacks.

But for the moment there was nothing he could do. And the blacks were
not torturing either Apeman or Ellen, though there was no mistaking
what he saw in the faces of the blacks when they looked at Ellen and
grinned at one another.

Darkness had fallen over the world when the blacks went shouting into
a village of mud-wattled huts, bearing the trophies of their ape hunt.
Still in their nets for safety's sake, the great apes were thrown into
a sort of stockade which had plainly just been built for their
reception--proof to Bentley that this decision to make an attack
against the passing band of anthropoids had been a sudden one. What
did that indicate?

Someone had caused the blacks to react in a way that never would have
occurred to them ordinarily.

Caleb Barter?

Bentley thought so. What now was Bentley supposed to do? What did
Barter expect him to do? What did Barter expect Ellen to do? What did
he expect Apeman to do?

There was no question, as Bentley saw it, but that Caleb Barter still
pulled the strings, and that before morning this jungle village was to
witness a horror it should never forget.

But at the moment Bentley had but one thought: to escape quietly with
Ellen and Apeman, and return to the dwelling of Caleb Barter.

CHAPTER XII

_Jungle Justice_

Again that grim concentration on the part of Bentley, forcing the
unaccustomed great hands of Manape to perform things they had never
done before.