"Very well," said Tarzan. "If they wish they may come with me also, but these other two will have to shift for themselves."
"Not the American," said Zora.
"No? And why not?" demanded the ape-man.
"Because he is a special agent in the employ of the United States Government," replied the girl.
The entire party, including Colt, looked at her in astonishment. "How did you learn that?" demanded Colt.
"The message that you sent when you first came to camp and we were here alone was intercepted by one of Zveri's agents. Now do you understand how I know?"
"Yes," said Colt. "It is quite plain."
"That is why Zveri called you a traitor and tried to kill you."
"And how about this other?" demanded Tarzan, indicating Ivitch. "Is he, also, a sheep in wolf's clothing?"
"He is one of those paradoxes who are so numerous," replied Zora. "He is one of those Reds who is all yellow."
Tarzan turned to the blacks who had come forward and were standing, listening questioningly to a conversation they could not understand. "I know your country," he said to them in their own dialect. "It lies near the end of the railroad that runs to the Coast."
"Yes, master," said one of the blacks.
"You will take this white man with you as far as the railroad. See that he has enough to eat and is not harmed, and then tell him to get out of the country. Start now." Then he turned back to the whites. "The rest of you will follow me to my camp." And with that he turned and swung away toward the trail by which he had entered the camp. Behind him followed the four who owed to his humanity more than they could ever know, nor had they known could have guessed that his great tolerance, courage, resourcefulness and the protective instinct that had often safeguarded them sprang not from his human progenitors, but from his lifelong association with the natural beasts of the forest and the jungle, who have these instinctive qualities far more strongly developed than do the unnatural beasts of civilization, in whom the greed and lust of competition have dimmed the luster of these noble qualities where they have not eradicated them entirely.
Behind the others walked Zora Drinov and Wayne Colt, side by side.
"I thought you were dead," she said.
"And I thought that you were dead," he replied.
"And worse than that," she continued, "I thought that, whether dead or alive, I might never tell you what was in my heart."
"And I thought that a hideous gulf separated us that I could never span to ask you the question that I wanted to ask you," he answered in a low tone.
She turned toward him, her eyes filled with tears, her lips trembling. "And I thought that, alive or dead, I could never say yes to that question, if you did ask me," she replied.
A curve in the trait hid them from the sight of the others as he took her in his arms and drew her lips to his.
THE END
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS TARZAN TRIUMPHANT BOOK 15 IN THE TARZAN SERIES Serialized as "The Triumph Of Tarzan" in
The Blue Book Magazine, October 1931—March 1932
First Book Edition—Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., September 1932
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1. Gathering The Threads
Chapter 2. The Land Of Midian
Chapter 3. The "Gunner"
Chapter 4. Gathering The Strands
Chapter 5. When the Lion Charged
Chapter 6. The Waters Of Chinnereth
Chapter 7. The Slave Raider
Chapter 8. The Baboons
Chapter 9. The Great Fissure
Chapter 10. In The Clutches Of The Enemy
Chapter 11. The Crucifixion
Chapter 12. Out Of The Grave
Chapter 13. The "Gunner" Walks
Chapter 14. Flight
Chapter 15. Eshbaal The Shepherd
Chapter 16. Trailing
Chapter 17. She Is Mine!
Chapter 18. A Guy And A Skirt
Chapter 19. In The Village Of Elija
Chapter 20. The Best Three Out Of Five
Chapter 21. An Awakening
Chapter 22. By A Lonely Pool
Chapter 23. Captured
Chapter 24. The Long Night
Chapter 25. The Waziri
Chapter 26. The Last Knot Is Tied
PROLOGUE
Time is the warp of the tapestry which is life. It is eternal, constant, unchanging. But the woof is gathered together from the four corners of the earth and the twenty-eight seas and out of the air and the minds of men by that master artist, Fate, as she weaves the design that is never finished.
A thread from here, a thread from there, another from out of the past that has waited years for the companion thread without which the picture must be incomplete.
But Fate is patient. She waits a hundred or a thousand years to bring together two strands of thread whose union is essential to the fabrication of her tapestry, to the composition of the design that was without beginning and is without end.
A matter of some one thousand eight hundred sixty- five years ago (scholars do not agree as to the exact year) Paul of Tarsus suffered martyrdom at Rome.
That a tragedy so remote should seriously affect the lives and destinies of an English aviatrix and an American professor of geology, neither of whom was conscious of the existence of the other at the time this narrative begins—when it does begin, which is not yet, since Paul of Tarsus is merely by way of prologue—may seem remarkable to us, but not to Fate, who has been patiently waiting these nearly two thousand years for these very events I am about to chronicle.
But there is a link between Paul and these two young people. It is Angustus the Ephesian. Angustus was a young man of moods and epilepsy, a nephew of the house of Onesiphorus. Numbered was he among the early converts to the new faith when Paul of Tarsus first visited the ancient Ionian city of Ephesus.