“No; it is I alone who may go, for she was my daughter—all that was left on earth for me to love.”
“I shall go with you,” said Clayton simply.
The old man looked up, regarding the strong, handsome face of William Cecil Clayton intently. Perhaps he read there the love that lay in the heart beneath—the love for his daughter.
He had been too preoccupied with his own scholarly thoughts in the past to consider the little occurrences, the chance words, which would have indicated to a more practical man that these young people were being drawn more and more closely to one another. Now they came back to him, one by one.
“As you wish,” he said.
“You may count on me, also,” said Mr. Philander.
“No, my dear old friend,” said Professor Porter. “We may not all go. It would be cruelly wicked to leave poor Esmeralda here alone, and three of us would be no more successful than one.
“There be enough dead things in the cruel forest as it is. Come—let us try to sleep a little.”
CHAPTER XIX.
The Call of the Primitive
From the time Tarzan left the tribe of great anthropoids in which he had been raised, it was torn by continual strife and discord. Terkoz proved a cruel and capricious king, so that, one by one, many of the older and weaker apes, upon whom he was particularly prone to vent his brutish nature, took their families and sought the quiet and safety of the far interior.