“It is well for you, Monsieur Thuran,” she said, “that the poor Monsieur Tarzan who was lost from the ship that brought you and Miss Strong to Cape Town is not here now.”
“You knew the pig?” asked Thuran, with a sneer.
“I knew the man,” she replied. “The only real man, I think, that I have ever known.”
There was something in her tone of voice that led the Russian to attribute to her a deeper feeling for his enemy than friendship, and he grasped at the suggestion to be further revenged upon the man whom he supposed dead by besmirching his memory to the girl.
“He was worse than a pig,” he cried. “He was a poltroon and a coward. To save himself from the righteous wrath of the husband of a woman he had wronged, he perjured his soul in an attempt to place the blame entirely upon her. Not succeeding in this, he ran away from France to escape meeting the husband upon the field of honor. That is why he was on board the ship that bore Miss Strong and myself to Cape Town. I know whereof I speak, for the woman in the case is my sister. Something more I know that I have never told another—your brave Monsieur Tarzan leaped overboard in an agony of fear because I recognized him, and insisted that he make reparation to me the following morning—we could have fought with knives in my stateroom.”
Jane Porter laughed. “You do not for a moment imagine that one who has known both Monsieur Tarzan and you could ever believe such an impossible tale?”
“Then why did he travel under an assumed name?” asked Monsieur Thuran.
“I do not believe you,” she cried, but nevertheless the seed of suspicion was sown, for she knew that Hazel Strong had known her forest god only as John Caldwell, of London.
A scant five miles north of their rude shelter, all unknown to them, and practically as remote as though separated by thousands of miles of impenetrable jungle, lay the snug little cabin of Tarzan of the Apes. While farther up the coast, a few miles beyond the cabin, in crude but well-built shelters, lived a little party of eighteen souls—the occupants of the three boats from the Lady Alice from which Clayton’s boat had become separated.
Over a smooth sea they had rowed to the mainland in less than three days. None of the horrors of shipwreck had been theirs, and though depressed by sorrow, and suffering from the shock of the catastrophe and the unaccustomed hardships of their new existence there was none much the worse for the experience.