Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
AT sight of the true Tarzan, Esteban Miranda turned and fled blindly
into the jungle. His heart was cold with terror as he rushed on in blind
fear. He had no objective in mind. He did not know in what direction he
was going. His only thought—the thought which dominated him—was based
solely upon a desire to put as much distance as possible between himself
and the ape-man, and so he blundered on, forcing his way through dense
thickets of thorns that tore and lacerated his flesh until, at every
step he left a trail of blood behind him.
At the river’s edge the thorns reached out and seized again, as they had
several times before, the precious leopard skin to which he clung with
almost the same tenacity as he clung to life itself. But this time the
thorns would not leave go their hold, and as he struggled to tear it
away from them his eyes turned back in the direction from which he had
come. He heard the sound of a great body moving rapidly through the
thicket toward him, and an instant later saw the baleful glare of two
gleaming, yellow-green spots of flame. With a stifled cry of terror the
Spaniard relinquished his hold upon the leopard skin and, wheeling,
dived into the river.
As the black waters closed above his head Jad-bal-ja came to the edge of
the bank and looked down upon the widening circles which marked the spot
of his quarry’s disappearance, for Esteban, who was a strong swimmer,
struck boldly for the opposite side of the stream, keeping himself well
submerged.
For a moment the golden lion scanned the surface of the river, and then
he turned and sniffed at the hide the Spaniard had been forced to leave
behind, and grasping it in his jaws tore it from the thorns that held it
and carried it back to lay it at the feet of his master.
Forced at last to come to the surface for air the Spaniard arose amid a
mass of tangled foliage and branches. For a moment he thought that he
was lost, so tightly held was he by the entangling boughs, but presently
he forced his way upward, and as his head appeared above the surface of
the water amidst the foliage he discovered that he had arisen directly
beneath a fallen tree that was floating down the center of the stream.
After considerable effort he managed to draw himself up to the boughs
and find a place astride the great bole, and thus he floated down stream
in comparative safety.
He breathed a deep sigh of relief as he realized with what comparative
ease he had escaped the just vengeance of the ape-man. It is true that
he bemoaned the loss of the hide which carried the map to the location
of the hidden gold, but he still retained in his possession a far
greater treasure, and as he thought of it his hands gloatingly fondled
the bag of diamonds fastened to his loin cloth. Yet, even though he
possessed this great fortune in diamonds, his avaricious mind constantly
returned to the golden ingots by the waterfall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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