Then he raised the heavy spear to drive it through the mighty heart, and still Tarzan of the Apes smiled contemptuously upon him.
Before Rokoff could drive the weapon home the chief sprang upon him and dragged him away from his intended victim.
“Stop, white man!” he cried. “Rob us of this prisoner and our death-dance, and you yourself may have to take his place.”
The threat proved most effective in keeping the Russian from further assaults upon the prisoner, though he continued to stand a little apart and hurl taunts at his enemy. He told Tarzan that he himself was going to eat the ape-man’s heart. He enlarged upon the horrors of the future life of Tarzan’s son, and intimated that his vengeance would reach as well to Jane Clayton.
“You think your wife safe in England,” said Rokoff. “Poor fool! She is even now in the hands of one not even of decent birth, and far from the safety of London and the protection of her friends. I had not meant to tell you this until I could bring to you upon Jungle Island proof of her fate.
“Now that you are about to die the most unthinkably horrid death that it is given a white man to die—let this word of the plight of your wife add to the torments that you must suffer before the last savage spear-thrust releases you from your torture.”
The dance had commenced now, and the yells of the circling warriors drowned Rokoff’s further attempts to distress his victim.
The leaping savages, the flickering firelight playing upon their painted bodies, circled about the victim at the stake.
To Tarzan’s memory came a similar scene, when he had rescued D’Arnot from a like predicament at the last moment before the final spear-thrust should have ended his sufferings. Who was there now to rescue him? In all the world there was none able to save him from the torture and the death.
The thought that these human fiends would devour him when the dance was done caused him not a single qualm of horror or disgust. It did not add to his sufferings as it would have to those of an ordinary white man, for all his life Tarzan had seen the beasts of the jungle devour the flesh of their kills.