The long boat of the Marjorie W. was floating down the broad Ugambi with ebb tide andcurrent. Her crew were lazily enjoying this respite from the arduous labor of rowing up stream.Three miles below them lay the Marjorie W. herself, quite ready to sail so soon as they should haveclambered aboard and swung the long boat to its davits. Presently the attention of every man wasdrawn from his dreaming or his gossiping to the northern bank of the river. There, screaming atthem in a cracked falsetto and with skinny arms outstretched, stood a strange apparition of a man."Wot the 'ell?" ejaculated one of the crew."A white man!" muttered the mate, and then: "Man the oars, boys, and we'll just pull over an' seewhat he wants."When they came close to the shore they saw an emaciated creature with scant white lockstangled and matted. The thin, bent body was naked but for a loin cloth. Tears were rolling down thesunken pock-marked cheeks. The man jabbered at them in a strange tongue."Rooshun," hazarded the mate. "Savvy English?" he called to the man.He did, and in that tongue, brokenly and haltingly, as though it had been many years since hehad used it, he begged them to take him with them away from this awful country. Once on boardthe Marjorie W. the stranger told his rescuers a pitiful tale of privation, hardships, and torture, extending over a period of ten years. How he happened to have come to Africa he did not tell them, leaving them to assume he had forgotten the incidents of his life prior to the frightful ordeals thathad wrecked him mentally and physically. He did not even tell them his true name, and so they knewhim only as Michael Sabrov, nor was there any resemblance between this sorry wreck and the virile, though unprincipled, Alexis Paulvitch of old.It had been ten years since the Russian had escaped the fate of his friend, the arch-fiend Rokoff, and not once, but many times during those ten years had Paulvitch cursed the fate that had given toNicholas Rokoff death and immunity from suffering while it had meted to him the hideous terrorsof an existence infinitely worse than the death that persistently refused to claim him.Paulvitch had taken to the jungle when he had seen the beasts of Tarzan and their savage lordswarm the deck of the Kincaid, and in his terror lest Tarzan pursue and capture him he hadstumbled on deep into the jungle, only to fall at last into the hands of one of the savage cannibaltribes that had felt the weight of Rokoff's evil temper and cruel brutality. Some strange whim of thechief of this tribe saved Paulvitch from death only to plunge him into a life of misery and torture.For ten years he had been the butt of the village, beaten and stoned by the women and children, cutand slashed and disfigured by the warriors; a victim of often recurring fevers of the most malignantvariety. Yet he did not die. Smallpox laid its hideous clutches upon him; leaving him unspeakablybranded with its repulsive marks.