d Sabor, the lioness, passed
beneath him, side by side, and Sabor leaned against the lion and bit
playfully at his cheek. It was a half-caress. Tarzan sighed and hurled
a nut at them.

Later he came upon several of Mbonga's black warriors. He was upon the
point of dropping his noose about the neck of one of them, who was a
little distance from his companions, when he became interested in the
thing which occupied the savages. They were building a cage in the
trail and covering it with leafy branches. When they had completed
their work the structure was scarcely visible.

Tarzan wondered what the purpose of the thing might be, and why, when
they had built it, they turned away and started back along the trail in
the direction of their village.

It had been some time since Tarzan had visited the blacks and looked
down from the shelter of the great trees which overhung their palisade
upon the activities of his enemies, from among whom had come the slayer
of Kala.

Although he hated them, Tarzan derived considerable entertainment in
watching them at their daily life within the village, and especially at
their dances, when the fires glared against their naked bodies as they
leaped and turned and twisted in mimic warfare. It was rather in the
hope of witnessing something of the kind that he now followed the
warriors back toward their village, but in this he was disappointed,
for there was no dance that night.

Instead, from the safe concealment of his tree, Tarzan saw little
groups seated about tiny fires discussing the events of the day, and in
the darker corners of the village he descried isolated couples talking
and laughing together, and always one of each couple was a young man
and the other a young woman.

Tarzan cocked his head upon one side and thought, and before he went to
sleep that night, curled in the crotch of the great tree above the
village, Teeka filled his mind, and afterward she filled his
dreams--she and the young black men laughing and talking with the young
black women.

Taug, hunting alone, had wandered some distance from the balance of the
tribe. He was making his way slowly along an elephant path when he
discovered that it was blocked with undergrowth. Now Taug, come into
maturity, was an evil-natured brute of an exceeding short temper. When
something thwarted him, his sole idea was to overcome it by brute
strength and ferocity, and so now when he found his way blocked, he
tore angrily