Could any one thing have further bound Jane Porter to her promise to Clayton it would have been in the nature of some such misfortune as this overtaking him.
Tarzan's thoughts drifted from the past to the future.
He tried to look forward with pleasurable sensations to his return to the jungle of his birth and boyhood; the cruel, fierce jungle in which he had spent twenty of his twenty-two years.
But who or what of all the myriad jungle life would there be to welcome his return? Not one.Only Tantor, the elephant, could he call friend.The others would hunt him or flee from him as had been their way in the past.
Not even the apes of his own tribe would extend the hand of fellowship to him.
If civilization had done nothing else for Tarzan of the Apes, it had to some extent taught him to crave the society of his own kind, and to feel with genuine pleasure the congenial warmth of companionship.And in the same ratio had it made any other life distasteful to him.It was difficult to imagine a world without a friend--without a living thing who spoke the new tongues which Tarzan had learned to love so well.And so it was that Tarzan looked with little relish upon the future he had mapped out for himself.
As he sat musing over his cigarette his eyes fell upon a mirror before him, and in it he saw reflected a table at which four men sat at cards.Presently one of them rose to leave, and then another approached, and Tarzan could see that he courteously offered to fill the vacant chair, that the game might not be interrupted.He was the smaller of the two whom Tarzan had seen whispering just outside the smoking-room.