scholarly to impress any college board. He tried whiskers, but the result was humiliating; and then he conceived the idea of horn rimmed spectacles and pared his ambition down, temporarily, from a university to a prep school.
For a school year, now, he had been an instructor in an inconspicuous western military academy, and now he was about to achieve another of his cherished ambitions—he was going to Africa to study the great rift valleys of the Dark Continent, concerning the formation of which there are so many theories propounded and acclaimed by acknowledged authorities on the subject as to leave the layman with the impression that a fundamental requisite to success in the science of geology is identical to that required by weather forecasters.
But be that as it may, Lafayette Smith was on his way to Africa with the financial backing of a wealthy father and the wide experience that might be gained from a number of week-end field excursions into the back pastures of accommodating farmers, plus considerable ability as a tennis player and a swimmer.
We may leave him now, with his note books and seasickness, in the hands of Fate, who is leading him inexorably toward sinister situations from which no amount of geological knowledge nor swimming nor tennis ability may extricate him.
When it is two hours before noon in New York it is an hour before sunset in Moscow and so it was that as Lafe Smith boarded the liner in the morning, Leon Stabutch, at the same moment, was closeted with Stalin late in the afternoon.
'That is all,' said Stalin; 'you understand?'
'Perfectly,' replied Stabutch. 'Peter Zveri shall be avenged, and the obstacle that thwarted our plans in Africa shall be removed.'
'The latter is most essential,' emphasized Stalin, 'but do not belittle the abilities of your obstacle. He may be, as you have said, naught but an ape-man; but he utterly routed a well organized Red expedition that might have accomplished much in Abyssinia and Egypt but for his interference. And,' he added, 'I may tell you, comrade, that we contemplate another attempt; but it will not be made until we have a report from you that—the obstacle has been removed.'
Stabutch swelled his great chest. 'Have I ever failed?' he asked.
Stalin rose and laid a hand upon the other's shoulder. 'Red Russia does not look to the OGPU for failures,' he said. Only his lips smiled as he spoke.
That same night Leon Stabutch left Moscow . He thought that he left secretly and alone, but Fate was at his side in the compartment of the railway carriage.
As Lady Barbara Collis bailed out in the clouds above the Ghenzi range, and Lafayette Smith trod the gangplank leading aboard the liner, and Stabutch stood before Stalin, Tarzan, with knitted brows, looked down upon the black kneeling at his feet.
'Rise!' he commanded, and then; 'Who are you and why have you sought Tarzan of the Apes?'
'I am Kabariga, O Great Bwana,' replied the black. 'I am chief of the Bangalo people of Bungalo. I come to the Great Bwana because my people suffer much sorrow and great fear and our neighbors, who are related to the Gallas, have told us that you are the friend of those who suffer wrongs at the hands of bad men.'
'And what wrongs have your people suffered?' demanded Tarzan, 'and at whose hands?'
'For long we lived at peace with all men,' explained Kabariga; 'we did not make war upon our neighbors. We wished only to plant and harvest in security. But one day there came into our country from Abyssima a band of
'They do not take everything, they destroy nothing; but they do not go away out of our country. They remain in a village they have built in inaccessible mountains, and when they need more provisions or slaves they come again to other villages of my people.
'And so they permit us to live and plant and harvest that they may continue to take toll of us.'
'But why do you come to me?' demanded the ape-man. 'I do not interfere among tribes beyond the boundaries of my own country, unless they commit some depredation against my own people.'
'I come to you, Great Bwana,' replied the black chief, 'because you are a white man and these
'That,' said Tarzan, 'is different. I will return with you to your country.'
And thus Fate, enlisting the services of the black chief, Kabariga, led Tarzan of the Apes out of his own country, toward the north. Nor did many of his own people know whither he had gone nor why—not even little Nkima, the close friend and confidant of the ape-man.
Chapter 2
The Land of Midian
Abraham, the son of Abraham, stood at the foot of the towering cliff that is the wall of the mighty crater of a long extinct volcano. Behind and above him were the dwellings of his people, carved from the soft volcanic ash that rose from the bottom of the crater part way up the encircling cliffs; and clustered about hini were the men and women and children of his tribe.
One and all, they stood with faces raised toward the heavens, upon each countenance reflected the particular emotion that the occasion evoked—wonder, questioning, fear, and always rapt, tense listening, for from the low clouds hanging but a few hundred feet above the rim of the great crater, the floor of which stretched away for fully five miles to its opposite side, came a strange, ominous droning sound, the like of which not one of them had ever heard before.
The sound grew in volume until it seemed to hover just above them, filling all the heavens with its terrifying threat; and then it diminished gradually until it was only a suggestion of a sound that might have been no more than a persistent memory rumbling in their heads; and when they thought that it had gone it grew again in volume until once more it thundered down upon them where they stood in terror or in ecstasy, as each interpreted the significance of the phenomenon.
And upon the opposite side of the crater a similar group, actuated by identical fears and questionings, clustered about Elija, the son of Noah.
In the first group a woman turned to Abraham, the son of Abraham. 'What is it, Father?' she asked. 'I am afraid.'
'Those who trust in the Lord,' replied the man, 'know no fear. You have revealed the wickedness of your heresy, woman.'
The face of the questioner blenched and now, indeed, did she tremble. 'Oh, Father, you know that I am no heretic!' she cried piteously.
'Silence, Martha!' commanded Abraham. 'Perhaps this is the Lord Himself, come again to earth as was prophesied in the days of Paul, to judge us all.' His voice was high and shrill, and he trembled as he spoke.
A half grown child, upon the outskirts of the assemblage, fell to the ground, where he writhed, foaming at the mouth. A woman screamed and fainted.
'Oh, Lord, if it is indeed Thee, Thy chosen people await to receive Thy blessing and Thy commands,' prayed Abraham; 'but,' he added, 'if it is not Thee, we beseech that Thou savest us whole from harm.'
'Perhaps it is Gabriel!' suggested another of the long bearded men.
'And the sound of his trump,' wailed a woman—'the trump of doom!'
'Silence!' shrilled Abraham, and the woman shrank back in fear.
Unnoticed, the youth floundered and gasped for breath as, with eyes set as in death, he struggled in the throes of agony; and then another lurched and fell and he, too, writhed and foamed.
And now they were dropping on all sides—some in convulsions and others in deathlike faints—until a dozen or more sprawled upon the ground, where their pitiable condition elicited no attention from their fellows unless a stricken one chanced to fall against a neighbor or upon his feet, in which case the latter merely stepped aside without vouchsafing so much as a glance at the poor unfortunate.
With few exceptions those who suffered the violent strokes were men and boys, while it was the women who merely fainted; but whether man, woman or child, whether writhing in convulsions or lying quietly in coma, no one
