Chapter IV
The Countess Explains
“Your Paris is more dangerous than my savage jungles, Paul,” concluded Tarzan, after narrating his adventures to his friend the morning following his encounter with the apaches and police in the Rue Maule. “Why did they lure me there? Were they hungry?”
D’Arnot feigned a horrified shudder, but he laughed at the quaint suggestion.
“It is difficult to rise above the jungle standards and reason by the light of civilized ways, is it not, my friend?” he queried banteringly.
“Civilized ways, forsooth,” scoffed Tarzan. “Jungle standards do not countenance wanton atrocities. There we kill for food and for self-preservation, or in the winning of mates and the protection of the young. Always, you see, in accordance with the dictates of some great natural law. But here! Faugh, your civilized man is more brutal than the brutes. He kills wantonly, and, worse than that, he utilizes a noble sentiment, the brotherhood of man, as a lure to entice his unwary victim to his doom. It was in answer to an appeal from a fellow being that I hastened to that room where the assassins lay in wait for me.
“I did not realize, I could not realize for a long time afterward, that any woman could sink to such moral depravity as that one must have to call a would-be rescuer to death. But it must have been so—the sight of Rokoff there and the woman’s later repudiation of me to the police make it impossible to place any other construction upon her acts. Rokoff must have known that I frequently passed through the Rue Maule. He lay in wait for me—his entire scheme worked out to the last detail, even to the woman’s story in case a hitch should occur in the program such as really did happen. It is all perfectly plain to me.”
“Well,” said D’Arnot, “among other things, it has taught you what I have been unable to impress upon you—that the Rue Maule is a good place to avoid after dark.”
“On the contrary,” replied Tarzan, with a smile, “it has convinced me that it is the one worth-while street in all Paris. Never again shall I miss an opportunity to traverse it, for it has given me the first real entertainment I have had since I left Africa.”
“It may give you more than you will relish even without another visit,” said D’Arnot. “You are not through with the police yet, remember. I know the Paris police well enough to assure you that they will not soon forget what you did to them. Sooner or later they will get you, my dear Tarzan, and then they will lock the wild man of the woods up behind iron bars. How will you like that?”
“They will never lock Tarzan of the Apes behind iron bars,” replied he, grimly.