Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
And in the meantime the ape-man moved swiftly through the trees along
one side of the avenue, dropped to a low roof, crossed it and sprang
into a tree that rose from an inner court, pausing there to listen for
signs of pursuit. After the manner of a wild beast hunted through his
native jungle, he moved as silently as the shadow of a shadow, so that
now, although he crouched scarce twenty feet above them, the two people
in the courtyard below him were unaware of his presence.
But Tarzan was not unaware of theirs and as he listened to the noise of
the growing pursuit, that was spreading now in all directions through
the city, he took note of the girl and the man in the garden beneath
him. It was apparent that the man was wooing the maid, and Tarzan
needed no knowledge of their spoken language to interpret the gestures,
the glances, and the facial expressions of passionate pleading upon the
part of the man or the cold aloofness of the girl.
Sometimes a tilt of her head presented a partial view of her profile to
the ape-man and he guessed that she was very beautiful, but the face of
the young man with her reminded him of the face of Pamba the rat.
It was evident that his courtship was not progressing to the liking
of the youth and now there were evidences of anger in his tone. The
girl rose haughtily and with a cold word turned away, and then the man
leaped to his feet from the bench upon which they had been sitting and
seized her roughly by the arm. She turned surprised and angry eyes upon
him and had half voiced a cry for help when the rat-faced man clapped
a hand across her mouth and with his free arm dragged her into his
embrace.
Now all this was none of Tarzan's affair. The shes of the city of
Castra Sanguinarius meant no more to the savage ape-man than did the
shes of the village of Nyuto, chief of the Bagegos. They meant no more
to him than did Sabor the lioness and far less than did the shes of the
tribe of Akut or of Toyat the king ape--but Tarzan of the Apes was
often a creature of impulses; now he realized that he did not like the
rat-faced young man, and that he never could like him, while the girl
that he was maltreating seemed to be doubly likeable because of her
evident aversion to her tormentor.
The man had bent the girl's frail body back upon the bench. His lips
were close to hers when there was a sudden jarring of the ground beside
him and he turned astonished eyes upon the figure of a half-naked
giant. Steel-gray eyes looked into his beady black ones, a heavy hand
fell upon the collar of his tunic, and he felt himself lifted from the
body of the girl and then hurled roughly aside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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