ed, he stooped low and with all the great power of his right arm
drove the long blade of his father's hunting knife straight into the
heart of Horta, the boar. A quick leap carried him from the zone of
the creature's death throes, and a moment later the hot and dripping
heart of Horta was in his grasp.

His hunger satisfied, Tarzan did not seek a lying-up place for sleep,
as was sometimes his way, but continued on through the jungle more in
search of adventure than of food, for today he was restless. And so it
came that he turned his footsteps toward the village of Mbonga, the
black chief, whose people Tarzan had baited remorselessly since that
day upon which Kulonga, the chief's son, had slain Kala.

A river winds close beside the village of the black men. Tarzan
reached its side a little below the clearing where squat the thatched
huts of the Negroes. The river life was ever fascinating to the
ape-man. He found pleasure in watching the ungainly antics of Duro, the
hippopotamus, and keen sport in tormenting the sluggish crocodile,
Gimla, as he basked in the sun. Then, too, there were the shes and the
balus of the black men of the Gomangani to frighten as they squatted by
the river, the shes with their meager washing, the balus with their
primitive toys.

This day he came upon a woman and her child farther down stream than
usual. The former was searching for a species of shellfish which was
to be found in the mud close to the river bank. She was a young black
woman of about thirty. Her teeth were filed to sharp points, for her
people ate the flesh of man. Her under lip was slit that it might
support a rude pendant of copper which she had worn for so many years
that the lip had been dragged downward to prodigious lengths, exposing
the teeth and gums of her lower jaw. Her nose, too, was slit, and
through the slit was a wooden skewer. Metal ornaments dangled from her
ears, and upon her forehead and cheeks; upon her chin and the bridge of
her nose were tattooings in colors that were mellowed now by age. She
was naked except for a girdle of grasses about her waist. Altogether
she was very beautiful in her own estimation and even in the estimation
of the men of Mbonga's tribe, though she was of another people--a
trophy of war seized in her maidenhood by one of Mbonga's fighting men.

Her child was a boy of ten, lithe, straight and, for a black, handsome.
Tarzan looked upon the two from the concealing foliage o