"Akut!" he cried.

The boy looked, bewildered, from the ape to his father, and from
his father to the ape. The trainer's jaw dropped as he listened
to what followed, for from the lips of the Englishman flowed the
gutturals of an ape that were answered in kind by the huge anthropoid
that now clung to him.

And from the wings a hideously bent and disfigured old man watched
the tableau in the box, his pock-marked features working spasmodically
in varying expressions that might have marked every sensation in
the gamut from pleasure to terror.

"Long have I looked for you, Tarzan," said Akut. "Now that I have
found you I shall come to your jungle and live there always."

The man stroked the beast's head. Through his mind there was
running rapidly a train of recollection that carried him far into
the depths of the primeval African forest where this huge, man-like
beast had fought shoulder to shoulder with him years before. He
saw the black Mugambi wielding his deadly knob-stick, and beside
them, with bared fangs and bristling whiskers, Sheeta the terrible;
and pressing close behind the savage and the savage panther, the
hideous apes of Akut. The man sighed. Strong within him surged
the jungle lust that he had thought dead. Ah! if he could go back
even for a brief month of it, to feel again the brush of leafy
branches against his naked hide; to smell the musty rot of dead
vegetation--frankincense and myrrh to the jungle born; to sense the
noiseless coming of the great carnivora upon his trail; to hunt and