ective method of offense, for he had determined to prevent
Numa from profiting in any way through his attack upon the tribe. The
man-mind reasoned against the future, while the shaggy apes thought
only of their present hatred of this ancestral enemy. Tarzan guessed
that should Numa find it an easy thing to snatch a meal from the tribe
of Kerchak, it would be but a short time before their existence would
be one living nightmare of hideous watchfulness and dread. Numa must
be taught that the killing of an ape brought immediate punishment and
no rewards. It would take but a few lessons to insure the former
safety of the tribe. This must be some old lion whose failing strength
and agility had forced him to any prey that he could catch; but even a
single lion, undisputed, could exterminate the tribe, or at least make
its existence so precarious and so terrifying that life would no longer
be a pleasant condition.

"Let him hunt among the Gomangani," thought Tarzan. "He will find them
easier prey. I will teach ferocious Numa that he may not hunt the
Mangani."

But how to wrest the body of his victim from the feeding lion was the
first question to be solved. At last Tarzan hit upon a plan. To
anyone but Tarzan of the Apes it might have seemed rather a risky plan,
and perhaps it did even to him; but Tarzan rather liked things that
contained a considerable element of danger. At any rate, I rather
doubt that you or I would have chosen a similar plan for foiling an
angry and a hungry lion.

Tarzan required assistance in the scheme he had hit upon and his
assistant must be equally as brave and almost as active as he. The
ape-man's eyes fell upon Taug, the playmate of his childhood, the rival
in his first love and now, of all the bulls of the tribe, the only one
that might be thought to hold in his savage brain any such feeling
toward Tarzan as we describe among ourselves as friendship. At least,
Tarzan knew, Taug was courageous, and he was young and agile and
wonderfully muscled.

"Taug!" cried the ape-man. The great ape looked up from a dead limb he
was attempting to tear from a lightning-blasted tree. "Go close to
Numa and worry him," said Tarzan. "Worry him until he charges. Lead
him away from the body of Mamka. Keep him away as long as you can."

Taug nodded. He was across the clearing from Tarzan. Wresting the
limb at last from the tree he dropped to the ground and advanced toward
Numa, growling and bark