Tarzan of the Apes

  Chapter XXII

  The Search Party

  When dawn broke upon the little camp of Frenchmen in the heart of thejungle it found a sad and disheartened group.

  As soon as it was light enough to see their surroundings LieutenantCharpentier sent men in groups of three in several directions to locatethe trail, and in ten minutes it was found and the expedition washurrying back toward the beach.

  It was slow work, for they bore the bodies of six dead men, two morehaving succumbed during the night, and several of those who werewounded required support to move even very slowly.

  Charpentier had decided to return to camp for reinforcements, and thenmake an attempt to track down the natives and rescue D'Arnot.

  It was late in the afternoon when the exhausted men reached theclearing by the beach, but for two of them the return brought so greata happiness that all their suffering and heartbreaking grief wasforgotten on the instant.

  As the little party emerged from the jungle the first person thatProfessor Porter and Cecil Clayton saw was Jane, standing by the cabindoor.

  With a little cry of joy and relief she ran forward to greet them,throwing her arms about her father's neck and bursting into tears forthe first time since they had been cast upon this hideous andadventurous shore.

  Professor Porter strove manfully to suppress his own emotions, but thestrain upon his nerves and weakened vitality were too much for him, andat length, burying his old face in the girl's shoulder, he sobbedquietly like a tired child.

  Jane led him toward the cabin, and the Frenchmen turned toward thebeach from which several of their fellows were advancing to meet them.

  Clayton, wishing to leave father and daughter alone, joined the sailorsand remained talking with the officers until their boat pulled awaytoward the cruiser whither Lieutenant Charpentier was bound to reportthe unhappy outcome of his adventure.

  Then Clayton turned back slowly toward the cabin. His heart was filledwith happiness. The woman he loved was safe.

  He wondered by what manner of miracle she had been spared. To see heralive seemed almost unbelievable.

  As he approached the cabin he saw Jane coming out. When she saw himshe hurried forward to meet him.

  "Jane!" he cried, "God has been good to us, indeed. Tell me how youescaped--what form Providence took to save you for--us."

  He had never before called her by her given name. Forty-eight hoursbefore it would have suffused Jane with a soft glow of pleasure to haveheard that name from Clayton's lips--now it frightened her.

  "Mr. Clayton," she said quietly, extending her hand, "first let methank you for your chivalrous loyalty to my dear father. He has toldme how noble and self-sacrificing you have been. How can we repay you!"

  Clayton noticed that she did not return his familiar salutation, but hefelt no misgivings on that score. She had been through so much. Thiswas no time to force his love upon her, he quickly realized.

  "I am already repaid," he said. "Just to see you and Professor Porterboth safe, well, and together again. I do not think that I could muchlonger have endured the pathos of his quiet and uncomplaining grief.

  "It was the saddest experience of my life, Miss Porter; and then, addedto it, there was my own grief--the greatest I have ever known. But hiswas so hopeless--his was pitiful. It taught me that no love, not eventhat of a man for his wife may be so deep and terrible andself-sacrificing as the love of a father for his daughter."

  The girl bowed her head. There was a question she wanted to ask, butit seemed almost sacrilegious in the face of the love of these two menand the terrible suffering they had endured while she sat laughing andhappy beside a godlike creature of the forest, eating delicious fruitsand looking with eyes of love into answering eyes.

  But love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger, soshe asked her question.

  "Where is the forest man who went to rescue you? Why did he notreturn?"

  "I do not understand," said Clayton. "Whom do you mean?"

  "He who has saved each of us--who saved me from the gorilla."

  "Oh," cried Clayton, in surprise. "It was he who rescued you? Youhave not told me anything of your adventure, you know."

  "But the wood man," she urged. "Have you not seen him? When we heardthe shots in the jungle, very faint and far away, he left me. We hadjust reached the clearing, and he hurried off in the direction of thefighting. I know he went to aid you."

  Her tone was almost pleading--her manner tense with suppressed emotion.Clayton could not but notice it, and he wondered, vaguely, why she wasso deeply moved--so anxious to know the whereabouts of this strangecreature.

  Yet a feeling of apprehension of some impending sorrow haunted him, andin his breast, unknown to himself, was implanted the first germ ofjealousy and suspicion of the ape-man, to whom he owed his life.

  "We did not see him," he replied quietly. "He did not join us." Andthen after a moment of thoughtful pause: "Possibly he joined his owntribe--the men who attacked us." He did not know why he had said it,for he did not believe it.

  The girl looked at him wide eyed for a moment.

  "No!" she exclaimed vehemently, much too vehemently he thought. "Itcould not be. They were savages."

  Clayton looked puzzled.

  "He is a strange, half-savage creature of the jungle, Miss Porter. Weknow nothing of him. He neither speaks nor understands any Europeantongue--and his ornaments and weapons are those of the West Coastsavages."

  Clayton was speaking rapidly.

  "There are no other human beings than savages within hundreds of miles,Miss Porter. He must belong to the tribes which attacked us, or tosome other equally savage--he may even be a cannibal."

  Jane blanched.

  "I will not believe it," she half whispered. "It is not true. Youshall see," she said, addressing Clayton, "that he will come back andthat he will prove that you are wrong. You do not know him as I do. Itell you that he is a gentleman."

  Clayton was a generous and chivalrous man, but something in the girl'sbreathless defense of the forest man stirred him to unreasoningjealousy, so that for the instant he forgot all that they owed to thiswild demi-god, and he answered her with a half sneer upon his lip.

  "Possibly you are right, Miss Porter," he said, "but I do not thinkthat any of us need worry about our carrion-eating acquaintance. Thechances are that he is some half-demented castaway who will forget usmore quickly, but no more surely, than we shall forget him. He is onlya beast of the jungle, Miss Porter."

  The girl did not answer, but she felt her heart shrivel within her.

  She knew that Clayton spoke merely what he thought, and for the firsttime she began to analyze the structure which supported her newfoundlove, and to subject its object to a critical examination.

  Slowly she turned and walked back to the cabin. She tried to imagineher wood-god by her side in the saloon of an ocean liner. She saw himeating with his hands, tearing his food like a beast of prey, andwiping his greasy fingers upon his thighs. She shuddered.

  She saw him as she introduced him to her friends--uncouth,illiterate--a boor; and the girl winced.

  She had reached her room now, and as she sat upon the edge of her bedof ferns and grasses, with one hand resting upon her rising and fallingbosom, she felt the hard outlines of the man's locket.

  She drew it out, holding it in the palm of her hand for a moment withtear-blurred eyes bent upon it. Then she raised it to her lips, andcrushing it there buried her face in the soft ferns, sobbing.

  "Beast?" she murmured. "Then God make me a beast; for, man or beast, Iam yours."

  She did not see Clayton again that day. Esmeralda brought her supperto her, and she sent word to her father that she was suffering from thereaction following her adventure.

  The next morning Clayton left early with the relief expedition insearch of Lieutenant D'Arnot. There were two hundred armed men thistime, with ten officers and two surgeons, and provisions for a week
.

  They carried bedding and hammocks, the latter for transporting theirsick and wounded.

  It was a determined and angry company--a punitive expedition as well asone of relief. They reached the site of the skirmish of the previousexpedition shortly after noon, for they were now traveling a knowntrail and no time was lost in exploring.

  From there on the elephant-track led straight to Mbonga's village. Itwas but two o'clock when the head of the column halted upon the edge ofthe clearing.

  Lieutenant Charpentier, who was in command, immediately sent a portionof his force through the jungle to the opposite side of the village.Another detachment was dispatched to a point before the village gate,while he remained with the balance upon the south side of the clearing.

  It was arranged that the party which was to take its position to thenorth, and which would be the last to gain its station should commencethe assault, and that their opening volley should be the signal for aconcerted rush from all sides in an attempt to carry the village bystorm at the first charge.

  For half an hour the men with Lieutenant Charpentier crouched in thedense foliage of the jungle, waiting the signal. To them it seemedlike hours. They could see natives in the fields, and others moving inand out of the village gate.

  At length the signal came--a sharp rattle of musketry, and like oneman, an answering volley tore from the jungle to the west and to thesouth.

  The natives in the field dropped their implements and broke madly forthe palisade. The French bullets mowed them down, and the Frenchsailors bounded over their prostrate bodies straight for the villagegate.

  So sudden and unexpected the assault had been that the whites reachedthe gates before the frightened natives could bar them, and in anotherminute the village street was filled with armed men fighting hand tohand in an inextricable tangle.

  For a few moments the blacks held their ground within the entrance tothe street, but the revolvers, rifles and cutlasses of the Frenchmencrumpled the native spearmen and struck down the black archers withtheir bows halfdrawn.

  Soon the battle turned to a wild rout, and then to a grim massacre; forthe French sailors had seen bits of D'Arnot's uniform upon several ofthe black warriors who opposed them.

  They spared the children and those of the women whom they were notforced to kill in self-defense, but when at length they stopped,panting, blood covered and sweating, it was because there lived tooppose them no single warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga.

  Carefully they ransacked every hut and corner of the village, but nosign of D'Arnot could they find. They questioned the prisoners bysigns, and finally one of the sailors who had served in the FrenchCongo found that he could make them understand the bastard tongue thatpasses for language between the whites and the more degraded tribes ofthe coast, but even then they could learn nothing definite regardingthe fate of D'Arnot.

  Only excited gestures and expressions of fear could they obtain inresponse to their inquiries concerning their fellow; and at last theybecame convinced that these were but evidences of the guilt of thesedemons who had slaughtered and eaten their comrade two nights before.

  At length all hope left them, and they prepared to camp for the nightwithin the village. The prisoners were herded into three huts wherethey were heavily guarded. Sentries were posted at the barred gates,and finally the village was wrapped in the silence of slumber, exceptfor the wailing of the native women for their dead.

  The next morning they set out upon the return march. Their originalintention had been to burn the village, but this idea was abandoned andthe prisoners were left behind, weeping and moaning, but with roofs tocover them and a palisade for refuge from the beasts of the jungle.

  Slowly the expedition retraced its steps of the preceding day. Tenloaded hammocks retarded its pace. In eight of them lay the moreseriously wounded, while two swung beneath the weight of the dead.

  Clayton and Lieutenant Charpentier brought up the rear of the column;the Englishman silent in respect for the other's grief, for D'Arnot andCharpentier had been inseparable friends since boyhood.

  Clayton could not but realize that the Frenchman felt his grief themore keenly because D'Arnot's sacrifice had been so futile, since Janehad been rescued before D'Arnot had fallen into the hands of thesavages, and again because the service in which he had lost his lifehad been outside his duty and for strangers and aliens; but when hespoke of it to Lieutenant Charpentier, the latter shook his head.

  "No, Monsieur," he said, "D'Arnot would have chosen to die thus. Ionly grieve that I could not have died for him, or at least with him.I wish that you could have known him better, Monsieur. He was indeedan officer and a gentleman--a title conferred on many, but deserved byso few.

  "He did not die futilely, for his death in the cause of a strangeAmerican girl will make us, his comrades, face our ends the morebravely, however they may come to us."

  Clayton did not reply, but within him rose a new respect for Frenchmenwhich remained undimmed ever after.

  It was quite late when they reached the cabin by the beach. A singleshot before they emerged from the jungle had announced to those in campas well as on the ship that the expedition had been too late--for ithad been prearranged that when they came within a mile or two of campone shot was to be fired to denote failure, or three for success, whiletwo would have indicated that they had found no sign of either D'Arnotor his black captors.

  So it was a solemn party that awaited their coming, and few words werespoken as the dead and wounded men were tenderly placed in boats androwed silently toward the cruiser.

  Clayton, exhausted from his five days of laborious marching through thejungle and from the effects of his two battles with the blacks, turnedtoward the cabin to seek a mouthful of food and then the comparativeease of his bed of grasses after two nights in the jungle.

  By the cabin door stood Jane.

  "The poor lieutenant?" she asked. "Did you find no trace of him?"

  "We were too late, Miss Porter," he replied sadly.

  "Tell me. What had happened?" she asked.

  "I cannot, Miss Porter, it is too horrible."

  "You do not mean that they had tortured him?" she whispered.

  "We do not know what they did to him BEFORE they killed him," heanswered, his face drawn with fatigue and the sorrow he felt for poorD'Arnot and he emphasized the word before.

  "BEFORE they killed him! What do you mean? They are not--? They arenot--?"

  She was thinking of what Clayton had said of the forest man's probablerelationship to this tribe and she could not frame the awful word.

  "Yes, Miss Porter, they were--cannibals," he said, almost bitterly, forto him too had suddenly come the thought of the forest man, and thestrange, unaccountable jealousy he had felt two days before swept overhim once more.

  And then in sudden brutality that was as unlike Clayton as courteousconsideration is unlike an ape, he blurted out:

  "When your forest god left you he was doubtless hurrying to the feast."

  He was sorry ere the words were spoken though he did not know howcruelly they had cut the girl. His regret was for his baselessdisloyalty to one who had saved the lives of every member of his party,and offered harm to none.

  The girl's head went high.

  "There could be but one suitable reply to your assertion, Mr. Clayton,"she said icily, "and I regret that I am not a man, that I might makeit." She turned quickly and entered the cabin.

  Clayton was an Englishman, so the girl had passed quite out of sightbefore he deduced what reply a man would have made.

  "Upon my word," he said ruefully, "she called me a liar. And I fancy Ijolly well deserved it," he added thoughtfully. "Clayton, my boy, Iknow you are tired out and unstrung, but that's no reason why youshould make an ass of yourself. You'd better go to bed."

  But before he did so he called gently to Jane upon the opposite side ofthe sailcloth partition, for he wished to apologize, but he might aswell have addressed the
Sphinx. Then he wrote upon a piece of paperand shoved it beneath the partition.

  Jane saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry andhurt and mortified, but--she was a woman, and so eventually she pickedit up and read it.

  MY DEAR MISS PORTER:

  I had no reason to insinuate what I did. My only excuse is that mynerves must be unstrung--which is no excuse at all.

  Please try and think that I did not say it. I am very sorry. I wouldnot have hurt YOU, above all others in the world. Say that you forgiveme.

  WM. CECIL CLAYTON.

  "He did think it or he never would have said it," reasoned the girl,"but it cannot be true--oh, I know it is not true!"

  One sentence in the letter frightened her: "I would not have hurt YOUabove all others in the world."

  A week ago that sentence would have filled her with delight, now itdepressed her.

  She wished she had never met Clayton. She was sorry that she had everseen the forest god. No, she was glad. And there was that other noteshe had found in the grass before the cabin the day after her returnfrom the jungle, the love note signed by Tarzan of the Apes.

  Who could be this new suitor? If he were another of the wild denizensof this terrible forest what might he not do to claim her?

  "Esmeralda! Wake up," she cried.

  "You make me so irritable, sleeping there peacefully when you knowperfectly well that the world is filled with sorrow."

  "Gaberelle!" screamed Esmeralda, sitting up. "What is it now? Ahipponocerous? Where is he, Miss Jane?"

  "Nonsense, Esmeralda, there is nothing. Go back to sleep. You are badenough asleep, but you are infinitely worse awake."

  "Yes honey, but what's the matter with you, precious? You acts sort ofdisgranulated this evening."

  "Oh, Esmeralda, I'm just plain ugly to-night," said the girl. "Don'tpay any attention to me--that's a dear."

  "Yes, honey; now you go right to sleep. Your nerves are all on edge.What with all these ripotamuses and man eating geniuses that MisterPhilander been telling about--Lord, it ain't no wonder we all getnervous prosecution."

  Jane crossed the little room, laughing, and kissing the faithful woman,bid Esmeralda good night.