Barney and Butzow dismounted to examine it in an effort to determine the nature of the enemy that had dispatched it. At the first glance Barney called to one of the other members of the party, an experienced big game hunter.

"What do you make of this, Brown?" he asked, pointing to the exposed haunch.

"It is a man's kill," replied the other. "Look at that gaping hole over the heart, that would tell the story were it not for the evidence of the knife that cut away these strips from the rump. The carcass is still warm—the kill must have been made within the past few minutes."

"Then it wouldn't have been a man," spoke up another, "or we should have heard the shot. Wait, here's Greystoke, let's see what he thinks of it."

The ape man, who had been riding a couple hundred yards in rear of the others with one of the older men, now reined in close to the dead zebra.

"What have we here?" he asked, swinging from his saddle.

"Brown says this looks like the kill of a man," said Barney; "but none of us heard any shot."

Tarzan grasped the zebra by a front and hind pastern and rolled him over upon his other side.

"It went way through, whatever it was," said Butzow, as the hole behind this shoulder was exposed to view. "Must have been a bullet even if we didn't hear the report of the gun."

"I'm not so sure of that," said Tarzan, and then he glanced casually at the ground about the carcass, and bending lower brought his sensitive nostrils close to the mutilated haunch and then to the tramped grasses at the zebra's side. When he straightened up the others looked at him questioningly.

"A man," he said—"a white man, has been here since the zebra died. He cut these steaks from the haunches. There is not the slightest odor of gun powder about the wound—it was not made by a powder-sped projectile. It is too large and too deep for an arrow wound. The only other weapon that could have inflicted it is a spear; but to cast a spear entirely through the carcass of a zebra at the distance to which a man could approach one in the open presupposes a mightiness of muscle and an accuracy of aim little short of super-human."

"And you think—?" commenced Brown.

"I think nothing," interrupted Tarzan, "except that my judgment tells me that my 

 Prev. P 21/154 next