stealthily and catlike, into the dark space between the wall and
the back of an adjacent hut.

In the village street beyond women were preparing many little fires
and fetching cooking-pots filled with water, for a great feast
was to be celebrated ere the night was many hours older. About
a stout stake near the centre of the circling fires a little knot
of black warriors stood conversing, their bodies smeared with white
and blue and ochre in broad and grotesque bands. Great circles
of colour were drawn about their eyes and lips, their breasts and
abdomens, and from their clay-plastered coiffures rose gay feathers
and bits of long, straight wire.

The village was preparing for the feast, while in a hut at one side
of the scene of the coming orgy the bound victim of their bestial
appetites lay waiting for the end. And such an end!

Tarzan of the Apes, tensing his mighty muscles, strained at the
bonds that pinioned him; but they had been re-enforced many times
at the instigation of the Russian, so that not even the ape-man's
giant brawn could budge them.

Death!

Tarzan had looked the Hideous Hunter in the face many a time, and
smiled. And he would smile again tonight when he knew the end was
coming quickly; but now his thoughts were not of himself, but of
those others--the dear ones who must suffer most because of his
passing.