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Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
page 6 of 343 (01%)
to look forward with pleasurable sensations to his return to the
jungle of his birth and boyhood; the cruel, fierce jungle in which
he had spent twenty of his twenty-two years. But who or what of
all the myriad jungle life would there be to welcome his return?
Not one. Only Tantor, the elephant, could he call friend. The
others would hunt him or flee from him as had been their way in
the past.

Not even the apes of his own tribe would extend the hand of fellowship
to him.

If civilization had done nothing else for Tarzan of the Apes,
it had to some extent taught him to crave the society of his own
kind, and to feel with genuine pleasure the congenial warmth of
companionship. And in the same ratio had it made any other life
distasteful to him. It was difficult to imagine a world without
a friend--without a living thing who spoke the new tongues which
Tarzan had learned to love so well. And so it was that Tarzan looked
with little relish upon the future he had mapped out for himself.

As he sat musing over his cigarette his eyes fell upon a mirror
before him, and in it he saw reflected a table at which four men
sat at cards. Presently one of them rose to leave, and then another
approached, and Tarzan could see that he courteously offered to
fill the vacant chair, that the game might not be interrupted. He
was the smaller of the two whom Tarzan had seen whispering just
outside the smoking-room.

It was this fact that aroused a faint spark of interest in Tarzan,
and so as he speculated upon the future he watched in the mirror
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