“What of that?” growled the gorilla-man. “There are already too many Gomangani in the world. For what other purpose were you created than to serve Numa, the Emperor, and his chosen people, the Bolgani?” As he spoke he was examining the women and children, pinching their flesh and pounding upon their chests and backs. Presently he returned to a comparatively young woman, straddling whose hip was a small child.
“This one will do,” he said, snatching the child from its mother and hurling it roughly across the compound, where it lay against the face of the palisade, moaning pitifully, and perchance broken and dying. The poor, stupid mother, apparently more beast than human, stood for a moment trembling in dumb anguish, and then she started to rush forward to her child. But the gorilla-man seized her with one of his great hands and hurled her to the ground. Simultaneously there arose from the silent foliage above them the fierce and terrible scream of the challenging bull ape. In terror the simple blacks cast affrighted glances upward, while the gorilla-man raised his hideous face in snarling anger toward the author of the bestial cry.
Swaying upon a leafy bough they beheld such a creature as none of them had ever looked upon before—a white man, a Tarmangani, with hide as hairless as the body of Histah, the snake. In the instant that they looked they saw the spear hand of the stranger drive forward, and the shaft, speeding with the swiftness of thought, bury itself in the breast of the Bolgani. With a single scream of rage and pain, the gorilla-man crumbled to the earth, where he struggled spasmodically for a moment and then lay still, in death.
The ape-man held no great love for the Gomangani as a race, but inherent in his English brain and heart was the spirit of fair play, which prompted him to spontaneous espousal of the cause of the weak. On the other hand Bolgani was his hereditary enemy. His first battle had been with Bolgani, and his first kill.
The poor blacks were still standing in stupefied wonderment when he dropped from the tree to the ground among them. They stepped back in terror, and simultaneously they raised their spears menacingly against him.
“I am a friend,” he said. “I am Tarzan of the Apes. Lower your spears.” And then he turned and withdrew his own weapon from the carcass of Bolgani. “Who is this creature, that may come into your village and slay your balus and steal your shes? Who is he, that you dare not drive your spears through him?”
“He is one of the great Bolgani,” said the warrior, who seemed to be spokesman, and the leader in the village. “He is one of the chosen people of Numa, the Emperor, and when Numa learns that he has been killed in our village, we shall all die for what you have done.”
“Who is Numa?” demanded the ape-man, to whom Numa, in the language of the great apes, meant only lion.
“Numa is the Emperor,” replied the black, “who lives with the Bolgani in the Palace of Diamonds.”
He did not express himself in just these words, for the meager language of the great apes, even though amplified by the higher intelligence and greater development of the Oparians, is still primitive in the extreme. What he had really said was more nearly “Numa, the king of kings, who lives in the king’s hut of glittering stones,” which carried to the ape-man’s mind the faithful impression of the fact. Numa, evidently, was the name adopted by the king of the Bolgani, and the title emperor, indicated merely his preeminence among the chiefs.