last savage spear-thrust releases you from your torture."

The dance had commenced now, and the yells of the circling warriors
drowned Rokoff's further attempts to distress his victim.

The leaping savages, the flickering firelight playing upon their
painted bodies, circled about the victim at the stake.

To Tarzan's memory came a similar scene, when he had rescued
D'Arnot from a like predicament at the last moment before the final
spear-thrust should have ended his sufferings. Who was there now
to rescue him? In all the world there was none able to save him
from the torture and the death.

The thought that these human fiends would devour him when the
dance was done caused him not a single qualm of horror or disgust.
It did not add to his sufferings as it would have to those of an
ordinary white man, for all his life Tarzan had seen the beasts of
the jungle devour the flesh of their kills.

Had he not himself battled for the grisly forearm of a great ape
at that long-gone Dum-Dum, when he had slain the fierce Tublat and
won his niche in the respect of the Apes of Kerchak?

The dancers were leaping more closely to him now. The spears were
commencing to find his body in the first torturing pricks that
prefaced the more serious thrusts.

It would not be long now. The ape-man longed for the last savage
lunge that would end his misery.