ruthless race and now the prisoner of another. Since the long-gone day
that Hauptmann Fritz Schneider and his band of native German troops had
treacherously wrought the Kaiser's work of rapine and destruction on
the Greystoke bungalow and carried her away to captivity she had not
drawn a free breath. That she had survived unharmed the countless
dangers through which she had passed she attributed solely to the
beneficence of a kind and watchful Providence.

At first she had been held on the orders of the German High Command
with a view of her ultimate value as a hostage and during these months
she had been subjected to neither hardship nor oppression, but when the
Germans had become hard pressed toward the close of their unsuccessful
campaign in East Africa it had been determined to take her further into
the interior and now there was an element of revenge in their motives,
since it must have been apparent that she could no longer be of any
possible military value.

Bitter indeed were the Germans against that half-savage mate of hers
who had cunningly annoyed and harassed them with a fiendishness of
persistence and ingenuity that had resulted in a noticeable loss in
morale in the sector he had chosen for his operations. They had to
charge against him the lives of certain officers that he had
deliberately taken with his own hands, and one entire section of trench
that had made possible a disastrous turning movement by the British.
Tarzan had out-generaled them at every point. He had met cunning with
cunning and cruelty with cruelties until they feared and loathed his
very name. The cunning trick that they had played upon him in
destroying his home, murdering his retainers, and covering the
abduction of his wife in such a way as to lead him to believe that she
had been killed, they had regretted a thousand times, for a
thousandfold had they paid the price for their senseless ruthlessness,
and now, unable to wreak their vengeance directly upon him, they had
conceived the idea of inflicting further suffering upon his mate.

In sending her into the interior to avoid the path of the victorious
British, they had chosen as her escort Lieutenant Erich Obergatz who
had been second in command of Schneider's company, and who alone of its
officers had escaped the consuming vengeance of the ape-man. For a long
time Obergatz had held her in a native village, the chief of which was
still under the domination of his fear of the ruthle