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STEBAN MIRANDA had played the role of Tarzan of the Apes with the W aziri as his audience fo r less than twenty-four hours when he began to realize that, even with the lee-way that his supposedly injured brain gave him, it was going to be a very difficult thing to carry on the decep­ tion indefinitely. In the first place Usula did not seem at all pleased at the idea of merely taking the gold away from the intruders and then running from them. N o r did his fellow warriors seem any more enthusiastic over the plan than he. A s a mat­ ter of fact they could not conceive that any number of bumps upon the head could render their Tarzan of the Apes a coward, and to run away from these west coast blacks and a handful of inexperienced whites seemed nothing less than cowardly.

Following all this, there had occurred in the afternoon that which finally decided the Spaniard that he was building fo r himself anything other than a bed of roses, and that the sooner he found an excuse for quitting the company of the W aziri the greater would be his life expectancy.

They were passing through rather open jungle