Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/142

 Waldo to earth, and at the same instant each found the other’s throat with sinewy, viselike fingers.

They lay very still now, choking with firm, relentless clutch. Every ounce of muscle was needed, every grain of endurance.

Waldo was suffering agonies after a moment of that awful death-grip. He could feel his gasping, pain-racked lungs struggling for air.

He tried to wriggle free from those horrible fingers, but not once did he loosen his own hold upon the throat of Flatfoot; instead he tried to close a little tighter each second that he felt his own life ebbing. He became weaker and weaker. The pain was unendurable now.

A haze obscured his vision—everything became black—his brain was whizzing about at frightful velocity within the awful darkness of his skull.

The girl was bending close above them now, for both were struggling less violently. She had been minded to come to Thandar’s rescue when suddenly she recalled his desertion of her, and all the wild hatred of the primitive mind surged through her.

Let him die, she thought. He had spurned her, cast her off; he looked down upon her.

Well, let him take care of himself, then, and she turned deliberately away to leave the two men to decide the outcome of their own battle, and