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TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN

to make assurance doubly sure, then she reached beneath the grasses just beside her and when she withdrew her hand again she brought forth a short, stout cudgel. Slowly and cautiously she rose until she kneeled beside the recumbent form of the sleeping Spaniard. Then she raised her weapon above her head and brought it down once, heavily, upon Esteban’s skull. She did not continue to beat him—the one blow was enough. She hoped that she had not killed him, for he must live if her scheme of revenge was to be realized; he must live and know that Uhha had stolen the bag of pebbles that he so worshiped. Uhha appropriated the knife that swung at Mi­randa’s hip and with it she cut away his loin-cloth and took possession of the buck-skin bag and its contents. Then she removed the thorns from the entrance to the shelter, slipped out into the night and vanished into the jungle. During all her wan­derings with the Spaniard she had not once lost her sense of the direction which pointed toward her home, and now, free, she set her face reso­lutely toward the southwest and the village of Obebe the cannibal. An elephant trail formed a jungle highway along which she moved at a swing­ing walk, her way lighted by the rays of a full moon that filtered through the foliage of a sparse forest. She feared the jungle night and the noc­turnal beasts of prey, but she knew that she must take this chance that she might put as great a dis-­