Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
That night she made her door doubly secure with additional thongs of
rawhide cut from the pelt of the buck she had slain the day that she
met Obergatz. She was very tired for she had lost much sleep the night
before; but for a long time she lay with wide-open eyes staring into
the darkness. What saw she there? Visions that brought tears to those
brave and beautiful eyes--visions of a rambling bungalow that had been
home to her and that was no more, destroyed by the same cruel force
that haunted her even now in this remote, uncharted corner of the
earth; visions of a strong man whose protecting arm would never press
her close again; visions of a tall, straight son who looked at her
adoringly out of brave, smiling eyes that were like his father's.
Always the vision of the crude simple bungalow rather than of the
stately halls that had been as much a part of her life as the other.
But he had loved the bungalow and the broad, free acres best and so she
had come to love them best, too.
At last she slept, the sleep of utter exhaustion. How long it lasted
she did not know; but suddenly she was wide awake and once again she
heard the scuffing of a body against the bark of her tree and again the
limb bent to a heavy weight. He had returned! She went cold, trembling
as with ague. Was it he, or, O God! had she killed him then and was
this--? She tried to drive the horrid thought from her mind, for this
way, she knew, lay madness.
And once again she crept to the door, for the thing was outside just as
it had been last night. Her hands trembled as she placed the point of
her weapon to the opening. She wondered if it would scream as it fell.
21
The Maniac
The last bar that would make the opening large enough to permit his
body to pass had been removed as Tarzan heard the warriors whispering
beyond the stone door of his prison. Long since had the rope of hide
been braided. To secure one end to the remaining bar that he had left
for this purpose was the work of but a moment, and while the warriors
whispered without, the brown body of the ape-man slipped through the
small aperture and disappeared below the sill.
Tarzan's escape from the cell left him still within the walled area
that comprised the palace and temple grounds and buildings. He had
reconnoitered as best he might from the window after he had removed
enough bars to permit him to pass his head through the opening, so that
he knew what lay immediately before him--a winding and usually deserted
alleyway leading in the direction of the outer gate that opened from
the palace grounds into the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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