The Return of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs [chromebook ebook reader TXT] 📗

were very black. Later in the day they chanced to meet Tarzan on deck, but as one hurriedly called his companion’s attention to something at sea their faces were turned from Tarzan as he passed, so that he did not notice their features. In fact, he had paid no attention to them at all.

Following the instructions of his chief, Tarzan had booked his passage under an assumed name⁠—John Caldwell, London. He did not understand the necessity of this, and it caused him considerable speculation. He wondered what role he was to play in Cape Town.

“Well,” he thought, “thank Heaven that I am rid of Rokoff. He was commencing to annoy me. I wonder if I am really becoming so civilized that presently I shall develop a set of nerves. He would give them to me if anyone could, for he does not fight fair. One never knows through what new agency he is going to strike. It is as though Numa, the lion, had induced Tantor, the elephant, and Histah, the snake, to join him in attempting to kill me. I would then never have known what minute, or by whom, I was to be attacked next. But the brutes are more chivalrous than man⁠—they do not stoop to cowardly intrigue.”

At dinner that night Tarzan sat next to a young woman whose place was at the captain’s left. The officer introduced them.

Miss Strong! Where had he heard the name before? It was very familiar. And then the girl’s mother gave him the clue, for when she addressed her daughter she called her Hazel.

Hazel Strong! What memories the name inspired. It had been a letter to this girl, penned by the fair hand of Jane Porter, that had carried to him the first message from the woman he loved. How vividly he recalled the night he had stolen it from the desk in the cabin of his long-dead father, where Jane Porter had sat writing it late into the night, while he crouched in the darkness without. How terror-stricken she would have been that night had she known that the wild jungle beast squatted outside her window, watching her every move.

And this was Hazel Strong⁠—Jane Porter’s best friend!

XII Ships That Pass

Let us go back a few months to the little, windswept platform of a railway station in northern Wisconsin. The smoke of forest fires hangs low over the surrounding landscape, its acrid fumes smarting the eyes of a little party of six who stand waiting the coming of the train that is to bear them away toward the south.

Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, his hands clasped beneath the tails of his long coat, paces back and forth under the ever-watchful eye of his faithful secretary, Mr. Samuel T. Philander. Twice within the past few minutes he has started absentmindedly across the tracks in the direction of a nearby swamp, only to be rescued and dragged back by the tireless Mr. Philander.

Jane Porter, the professor’s daughter, is in strained and lifeless conversation with William Cecil Clayton and Tarzan of the Apes. Within the little waiting room, but a bare moment before, a confession of love and a renunciation had taken place that had blighted the lives and happiness of two of the party, but William Cecil Clayton, Lord Greystoke, was not one of them.

Behind Miss Porter hovered the motherly Esmeralda. She, too, was happy, for was she not returning to her beloved Maryland? Already she could see dimly through the fog of smoke the murky headlight of the oncoming engine. The men began to gather up the hand baggage. Suddenly Clayton exclaimed.

“By Jove! I’ve left my ulster in the waiting-room,” and hastened off to fetch it.

“Goodbye, Jane,” said Tarzan, extending his hand. “God bless you!”

“Goodbye,” replied the girl faintly. “Try to forget me⁠—no, not that⁠—I could not bear to think that you had forgotten me.”

“There is no danger of that, dear,” he answered. “I wish to Heaven that I might forget. It would be so much easier than to go through life always remembering what might have been. You will be happy, though; I am sure you shall⁠—you must be. You may tell the others of my decision to drive my car on to New York⁠—I don’t feel equal to bidding Clayton goodbye. I want always to remember him kindly, but I fear that I am too much of a wild beast yet to be trusted too long with the man who stands between me and the one person in all the world I want.”

As Clayton stooped to pick up his coat in the waiting room his eyes fell on a telegraph blank lying face down upon the floor. He stooped to pick it up, thinking it might be a message of importance which someone had dropped. He glanced at it hastily, and then suddenly he forgot his coat, the approaching train⁠—everything but that terrible little piece of yellow paper in his hand. He read it twice before he could fully grasp the terrific weight of meaning that it bore to him.

When he had picked it up he had been an English nobleman, the proud and wealthy possessor of vast estates⁠—a moment later he had read it, and he knew that he was an untitled and penniless beggar. It was D’Arnot’s cablegram to Tarzan, and it read:

Finger prints prove you Greystoke. Congratulations.

D’Arnot

He staggered as though he had received a mortal blow. Just then he heard the others calling to him to hurry⁠—the train was coming to a stop at the little platform. Like a man dazed he gathered up his ulster. He would tell them about the cablegram when they were all on board the train. Then he ran out upon the platform just as the engine whistled twice in the final warning that precedes the first rumbling jerk of coupling pins. The others were on board, leaning out from the platform of a Pullman, crying to him to hurry. Quite five minutes elapsed