"I say hop to it and the sooner the quicker," was Doc's answer.
"There! He's looking the other way now. Now's the time!"
The two boys, glancing fearfully over their shoulders, walked slowly toward their respective trees. If they were nervous, who may blame them? A forest lion at large in his grim jungle is a terrifying creature; so terrifying, in fact, that some persons, meeting one in the jungle, have been known to kneel in a paralysis of fear, waiting for the great beast to come and devour them, offering now defense and no resistance.
Jad-bal-ja, hearing the boy's footfalls, turned his fierce eyes upon them. Doc gasped. Dick tried to swallow, but failed. His throat was suddenly dry and parched. They were but a few steps from the trees they had selected and they did not stop. Their greatest difficulty was to restrain a desire to run.
Jad-bal-ja eyed them questioningly, then he started slowly toward them. Now the boys were at the foot of their respective trees.
"Climb!" gasped Dick, and in the instant both were scrambling up the boles of the trees as fast as they could go.
Jad-bal-ja halted in his tracks and watched them. Upon his wrinkled face was an expression that might have been pained surprise, and when the boys reached the safety of branches that swung high above the ground and looked down they saw the lion squatting upon his haunches staring steadily upward at them.
"There!" cried Dick. "I knew he wouldn't hurt us. He never tried to stop us at all. Golly, but you're sure a fraidy-cat. I'd hate to have Tarzan come back and find us up here."
"All right, if you're so brave, go on down. I don't care who finds me here. I'd rather be up here all in one piece than scattered around down there on the ground," was Doc's reply.
"Aw, shucks, he wouldn't hurt a flea," insisted Dick. "Look at him."
"Maybe he wouldn't, but I am not so unappetizing as a flea."
"You haven't the nerve of one anyway," Dick scoffed tauntingly.
"All right, instead of talking so much, why don't you go on down and play with him?"
"I guess I will."
Doc laughed raucously.
"All right, watch me!" cried Dick, making ostentatious preparations to descend.
Doc watched him intently. Dick slid from the branch upon which he had been sitting, grasped the bole of the tree with both arms and prepared to slide down to the ground.
"Aw, don't, Dick," cried Doc. "Please don't. Better not take any chances."
"All right," said Dick, "if you don't want me to, I won't," and he climbed back onto his branch again, to perch there safely.
"Gee, but it's getting dark," exclaimed Doc. "Do you suppose it's as late as that?"
"It must be the storm that Tarzan said was coming. Yes, look up there!"
Through a break in the dense foliage overhead, black, angry clouds could be seen billowing low above the forest. The gloom of the jungle deepened. The air became very quiet—breathless—as though the heart of Nature had momentarily ceased to beat. Presently the tree tops bent as though pressed down by a mighty palm. Then they whipped back. The wind shrieked, the trees waved wildly against the racing clouds, the lightning flashed—jagged, blinding lightning—and then the thunder crashed and roared and with it came the rain, not in drops, but in great sheets and gusts, borne on the frothing teeth of the hurricane.
The two boys were separated by a distance of scarce twenty feet, yet they could neither see nor hear one another, though each shouted at the top of his lungs in an effort to assure himself that the other was still safe and sound.
Branches, torn from great trees, hurtled through the air. Patriarchs of the jungle crashed to the earth, carrying lesser trees with them and adding to the horrid pandemonium that reigned supreme.
Dick and Doc clung with difficulty to their perilous perches, each sure that the other was dead and that he would soon join him. It seemed beyond the remotest possibility that any living thing could escape the fury of that titanic Saturnalia.
For an hour the storm raged, and then gradually it abated, but the rain still beat down, the wind still whined and moaned through the stricken jungle and the intense darkness persisted in only a slightly lessened degree.
Shivering with cold, the boys sat with bowed heads, the rain beating upon their naked backs, and waited. What they waited for they scarcely knew or dared to think.
Each boy thought that he was alone. Each was sure that Tarzan had been killed or injured in the terrific storm. Each wondered how he was to find his way alone back to the bungalow.
Dick raised his head and looked hopelessly about. Through the gloom and the rain he looked sorrowfully in the direction of the branch upon which Doc had been sitting when the storm broke. Dimly he discerned a figure hunched up miserably in an endeavor to avoid buffeting from the storm.
"Doc!" he cried.
The figure was electrified to life. It straightened and wheeled about.
"Dick!"
"Gee!" exclaimed Dick. "I thought you were surely gone."
"And I thought you were gone. I yelled my head off at you for an hour."
"I never heard you. Didn't you hear me?" Dick said in amazement.
"No. I guess nobody could hear anything in that awful racket. Say, did you ever hear anything like it?" demanded Doc.
"I should say not, and I don't want to ever again, either."
"What had we better do?" asked Doc. "Do you suppose Tarzan could find us now?"
"He could if—"
"If what?"
"If he is alive."
"Gee, you don't suppose—?" Doc hesitated.
"I don't see how we ever lived through it," said Dick. "Why the whole forest was tumbling down all around us."
"I'm cold," said Doc.
"I'm nearly frozen," said Dick.
The two boys shivered, their teeth chattering.
"We can't stay here, Dick. We'd die of exposure."
"What'll we do?"
"We've got to keep moving. We've got to keep our blood circulating."
"Do you suppose we could find the way back to the bungalow?" demanded Dick.
"I didn't pay much attention to directions when we came in here," admitted Doc. "I just depended on Tarzan; but we've got to do something. We can't sit here until we die of pneumonia. Let's beat it."
Simultaneously the two boys looked searchingly at the ground beneath them. Then they looked back questioningly at one another.
"Do you see him?" asked Dick.
"No," replied Doc. "Do you suppose he's gone? If not, where is he?"
"He might be hiding in the brush."
"Oh, well," said Doc, "you're not afraid so we might as well go on down."
"I think I'll practice swinging through the trees," said Dick.
Doc grinned. Cold and miserable as he was, he could not help it.
"All right," he agreed, "I'll practice with you. Which way do we go?"
CHAPTER THREE—THE SUN WORSHIPPERS
Cowering from the storm, twenty frightful men huddled close for warmth, crouching beneath the scant protection of a rude shelter, hastily thrown together at the first warning of the impending deluge.
Matted hair covered their heads and faces, almost concealing their close-set, wicked eyes, and black hair grew no less profusely upon their shapeless bodies, their long, gorilla-like arms and their short, crooked, stubby legs.
They were bent and crooked men with low brows and beast-like faces. Like gnomes or hobgoblins they seemed; but they were not. They were men of a sort, men of a low and degraded type, bearing down through countless ages more of the attributes of the ape-like men from whom we are all supposed to be descended than are apparent in normal men.