Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
To take coffee with these men would do no harm. Perhaps he had wronged
them, but however that might be a cup of their coffee would place no
great obligation upon him. Flora had been right in her assertion that if
Tarzan of the Apes had any weakness whatsoever it was for an occasional
cup of black coffee late at night. He did not accept the proffered
camp-stool, but squatted, ape-fashion, before them, the flickering light
of the beast fires playing upon his bronzed hide and bringing into
relief the gracefully contoured muscles of his godlike frame. Not as the
muscles of the blacksmith or the professional strong man were the
muscles of Tarzan of the Apes, but rather those of Mercury or Apollo, so
symmetrically balanced were their proportions, suggesting only the great
strength that lay in them. Trained to speed and agility were they as
well as to strength, and thus, clothing as they did his giant frame,
they imparted to him the appearance of a demi-god.
Throck, Peebles, and Bluber sat watching him in spellbound fascination,
while Kraski walked over to the cook fire to arrange for the coffee. The
two Englishmen were as yet only half awakened to the fact that they had
mistaken this newcomer for another, and as it was, Peebles still
scratched his head and grumbled to himself in inarticulate half-denial
of Kraski’s assumption of the new identity of Tarzan. Bluber was
inwardly terror-stricken. His keener intelligence had quickly grasped
the truth of Kraski’s recognition of the man for what he was rather than
for what Peebles and Throck thought him to be, and, as Bluber knew
nothing of Flora’s plan, he was in quite a state of funk as he tried to
visualize the outcome of Tarzan’s discovery of them at the very
threshold of Opar. He did not realize, as did Flora, that their very
lives were in danger—that it was Tarzan of the Apes, a beast of the
jungle, with whom they had to deal, and not John Clayton, Lord
Greystoke, an English peer. Rather was Bluber considering the two
thousand pounds that they stood to lose through this deplorable
termination of their expedition, for he was sufficiently familiar with
the reputation of the ape-man to know that they would never be permitted
to take with them the gold that Esteban was very likely, at this moment,
pilfering from the vaults of Opar. Really Bluber was almost upon the
verge of tears when Kraski returned with the coffee, which he brought
himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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