Isn't this what he had promised his mother the year before? "They're laughing at you," she had told him in 1935. "They're saying you're an Indian. They're saying you have no job and they're saying all you do is run. They're making fun of you because you're an Indian. Show them!"

"Deer Foot" is what his Narragansett tribesmen called him, but who else knew how fleet were the feet?

Chief Stanton knew, because the great Indian runner would run the 15 miles from the tribal lands to Westerly in southwestern Rhode Island and this boy -- this Tarzan -- would run with him and be as fast, or faster.

Tarzan Brown had trained and trained for this 1936 Boston Marathon. He had eaten his steaks -- why, he had a thick steak that morning in Westerly -- and he had his Cokes and his ginger ales.

He was driven up to Hopkinton in the morning, he paid his dollar to enter, and he saw his mother's face as he ran.

She had died the year before, but not the inspiration, nor the memories, so many of them.

Remember the time he wanted to fish, but there wasn't enough money in the house to buy a hook, and his mother took some twine and a safety pin, scooted young Tarzan out the door with orders for a branch, and fashioned him a fishing pole?

And proud he was when he came back home with a fishing "branch" heavy with salmon.

Mischievous, a prankster, happy-go-lucky -- myth has it that he dived into the Natick reservoir to cool off in one Marathon -- Brown was all of those, but he also remembered his mother's words.

"They're making fun of you . . . show them!" And he did, right from the start, setting a Marathon record at every checkpoint, Framingham, Natick, Wellesley, Auburndale.

And Johnny Kelley was a half-mile behind as Brown headed up the Newton hills. Brown looked fresh heading up the hills and felt it.

"I was fresh as a daisy," he said. "I knew if I could get over the first hill, there was only one more to climb." But Kelley was Kelley, and courage oozed from him.

Kelley took off after Brown with the strangest of strategies -- making his move at Brown going up the Newton hills, of all places -- finally catching him at Hammond Street.

Brown first learned of this when he felt the pat on his rump. Kelley -- out of respect or out of disdain -- patted Brown's rear end as he passed him.

"It was if he was saying he was leaving the Indian in the dust," Brown thought and told his wife and children many a time, many a year afterward. No Irishman should pat, was the lesson for Kelley. (Kelley, for his part, recalled patting Brown on the shoulder as he passed him. "I wasn't trying to be a wise guy," he once said.)

Whoosh! Leave the Indian in the dust? Brown again rocketed off, zooming past Kelley by Coolidge Corner, weakening himself so much that he had stopped to a walk by Kenmore Square.

But Brown was the leader, Brown was the winner and Brown qualified for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Adolf Hitler would take almost as much notice of the American Indian as he would of Jesse Owens, the American black.

The next morning, the Boston newspapers wrote: "Ellison Myers (Tarzan) Brown, a full-blooded Narragansett, stalked upon the warpath yesterday . . . {and} racing the panting palefaces into the smoldering macadam behind him, the Rhode Island redskin won the 40th annual BAA Marathon in 2 hours, 33 minutes and 40 4/5th seconds." Three years later, the champion ran again in the 1939 Boston Marathon.

Once again, it cost $1 to enter. But, when Tarzan Brown reached Hopkinton, he did not have a dollar. Another runner had to pay his entry fee.

Brown won the '39 event in a driving, cold rain, breaking all marathon records at the time.

Brown accepted his bowl of stew and the laurel wreath. When he reached the changing area at Boston University, his champion's laurel wreath was stolen; he would return home to his tribal lands with nothing. Brown then told the waiting reporters, "I hope that my victory in this run will get me a steady job.

Walter Young got a job as a policeman after he won the Marathon a couple of years ago.

I would like to do the same." The next morning, the Boston newspapers wrote: "None of his war-like antecedents ever progressed more purposefully over some long-forgotten warpath than did the wild-gaited `Tarzan' while the heavens wept for his 188 hapless opponents yesterday." In the 1930s, Tarzan Brown was an American celebrity.

Trophies and honors and media attention fell on this American Indian who was America's best marathoner. Tarzan Brown went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin with Jesse Owens; he went to Hopkinton with Johnny Kelley. And he died with nothing. Only a few of his trophies are left, mainly the unwanted ones from the unknown 10-mile races. The good ones Tarzan Brown "had to hock," said wife Ethel.

"He hocked them to buy food." Scrapbooks? Gone. Ribbons and memorabilia and plaques and honors? Virtually all gone. Pictures, too. "Everything was in a box," his daughter said, "and one day he dragged the box out into the living room and set it afire. I don't know why . . . that was my dad's personality."

In 1975, on a hot August night, a 61-year-old Indian put his head down to rest out back of the Blue Sands bar at Misquamicut State Beach, a mecca for vacationers from Rhode Island and Connecticut.

A few hundred yards away, the nephew of this Indian was in the beach recreation hall with other family members.

"Just doing what we always had done," said Russell Spears, the nephew, "going to Misquamicut for an enjoyable time.

It was a night for fun. No trouble." Tarzan Brown was tired that night, recalled Spears. Brown rested and then slept on the sands behind the Blue Sands bar.

"We wanted to go down to the rec hall," said Spears. "Tarzan said he wanted to stay and rest. He said, `Come back and get me when you're ready to go home.' 

"Misquamicut" is Narragansett for "place of the red fish" or "place to take the red fish." Tarzan Brown, like so many of his ancestors for centuries, knew Misquamicut so well, for he had fished for salmon there hundreds of times, as Narragansetts always did.

Close by Misquamicut was Watch Hill, the society beach, but Misquamicut for the last century was the beach of the common white man, particularly youths.

Youths from Rhode Island and youths from Connecticut were in the parking lot. A fight broke out, as they sometimes did at Misquamicut between young men from competing states.

The noise of the fight awoke the 61-year-old Indian from his slumber, Spears theorizes. The young men from Connecticut were getting the worst of the battle.

"I remember thinking, `Their only hope is to make a run for it,' " recalled Spears. Which they did, running to their vehicle and rushing to hurry away from danger.

The 61-year-old Indian, still half groggy, walked down the road toward where his nephew and other family members were.

"He probably heard the noise and he was walking down the road to see what it was," said Spears.

"That's when it happened." The young men sped off in their vehicle. The Indian was run over. "He wasn't dead when they first ran him over," Spears thought then. "But the kids panicked, they backed up and ran him over again. That's what killed him."

The next day, the Boston newspapers wrote: "Ellison M. (Tarzan) Brown, 61, who competed in the 1936 Olympics and twice won the Boston Marathon, was killed yesterday when he was run over by a car in the parking lot of a bar.

Police said Brown was struck by {a man from Middletown, Conn.}.

Police said the incident occurred after Brown and {the man} had an argument. Brown was a Narragansett Indian who began distance running during the Depression and . . . " Old-timers who remembered the Narragansett Indian clucked their tongues knowingly.

"An Indian . . . a bar . . . an argument . . . an accident . . . death." Every stereotype was there, the ones that Brown sometimes seemed to beckon and the ones that followed him seemingly every day on his Marathon run through life. The Narragansett Indians, who had just met in their annual August "pau-wau" on their tribal lands in Charlestown a few weeks before Tarzan Brown's death, gathered again for his funeral. "He was the greatest of our tribe," said great-nephew John Brown.

"Tarzan was on the cutting edge of the Narragansetts. Tarzan had some of the old magic. He was the greatest since Conanchet." All Narragansetts knew. Conanchet was the great sachem of the Narragansetts from three centuries earlier.

Just as all Narragansetts knew, that exactly 300 years earlier, in 1675, not too many miles from where Tarzan Brown put his head down for the last time, hundreds and hundreds of Narragansetts were wiped out in the Great Swamp in what is now South Kingstown, R.I., by English settlers from the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Connecticut colonies.

"Your histories call it the Great Swamp Battle," said John Brown. "We call it the Great Swamp Massacre, for that's what it was . . . a massacre."

By the early 1700s, the Narragansetts were down to 25,000 from what some believe were as many as 150,000 or more.

By 1975, 300 years after the Great Swamp Massacre, they were down to 600-700 or so.

And the greatest of them all, in those intervening three centuries, Tarzan Brown, was dead on a Rhode Island beach road.

"He could eat glass, he could make himself disappear, he could run like the wind," said John Brown.

"Tarzan Brown was the best of the Narragansetts." It wasn't true that Brown got his nickname after his first race, a 10-miler in West Warwick, R.I., when the 18-year-old ran through his running shoes, finished barefoot, got blisters on his toes and then a massive infection from the blisters.

"In those days, the doctor came to your house," recalled Grace Spears, Tarzan's younger sister. "Here was Tarzan with a massive swelling in his groin -- the infection had spread all the way up his leg -- and the doctor was going to lance it.

Now there was nothing for the pain, and I remember the doctor saying, `Tarzan, what you got to do is scream like you're in the jungle.

And as much as you want to, because this is going to hurt.'

We were peeking in the room and I heard one scream, but then my aunt shut the door in my face." Long before then, Ellison Myers Brown had been known as Tarzan.

Brown had spent his earliest years in Alton, one of those tiny villages that dot the wilderness of southwestern Rhode Island. "He was 11 and 12 years old and he was always running and swimming and then he was always diving out of the trees when he went swimming," his sister recalled fondly. "He even had me doing it, diving out of the trees, and I was only 9. Tarzan was always in the movies then, swinging in the trees, and all those boys in Alton gave Ellison the name Tarzan."

And the stories flowed as smoothly as Tarzan ran. How one day another sister came running into the Brown house, screaming to her mother that Tarzan was running through the village only in his underpants and . . . "My mother never could find Ellison," Grace Spears went on. "That's because he was always running, running when he was 9 and 10 and 11 years old.

I remember one time when he was running in his underpants and my mother told my sister to catch him and she almost caught him . . . but you know where you make that turn toward {the village of} Carolina, Tarzan just took off on her. And she never saw him again. He'd gotten his second wind."

Tarzan Brown was running toward Carolina because that's where Chief Stanton lived, another great Narragansett runner of an earlier generation, the 1920s.

Chief Horatio Stanton hadn't started competing until his mid-20s, which was too late, but he was being trained by Thomas (Tippy) Salimeno of Westerly. "Chief Stanton didn't start until too late and he didn't have a future," recalled Salimeno. "But he was so good at training, and I remember one time I told Chief Stanton to meet me at a ballfield about 12 miles from Westerly.

I told him it would be a good workout for him. When he arrived, there was a boy with him and he told me the boy had run the 12 miles with him. The Chief told me that boy was a prospect." That boy, of course, was Tarzan Brown. Life was simple, if hard. There was a one-room schoolhouse for grades 1-8.

And many a time after school, Tarzan would go fishing for trout or salmon or dig up that Rhode Island treat -- quahogs -- from the tidal flats or salt-water ponds. "I remember our teacher was Miss Merrill -- you know, from the Merrills up in Maine -- and one day she gave Tarzan a dollar," recalled Grace Spears.

"What happened was that Tarzan was very artistic and one day he'd drawn a book cover in charcoal and Miss Merrill loved it.

It was the same day that the superintendent of schools had come down from Westerly, Mr. McCoy, and he loved the drawing, too, and he took out a dollar and told her to give it to who had drawn in charcoal. Mr. McCoy wanted it for himself. Now that was when a dollar was a lot of money. Tarzan went home and gave it to our mother." So impressed was the superintendent that he made a special trip to Tarzan's house to convince his mother that her boy should go to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and the town would pay for it.

"But my mother wouldn't let him go," said Grace Spears. "My mother wanted her boy near her because she'd already lost a son in an accident. Nobody knew how well he could draw, but we did."

That chance gone, Tarzan would fish and scrimp and hunt and do masonry work, any odd job for an odd buck.

Money would be his nemesis for life and finding a job his hurdle. Fame came, but never fortune.

Even so, Tarzan Brown would laugh and joke and play the piano and the accordion and be a beacon for all. No one who met him, it is said, failed to like him. Long before drinking felled him later in life, Tarzan Brown could be counted upon to bring smiles to all faces. "That's because he was such a prankster," said Russell Spears, his brother-in-law. "He was always playing a joke on somebody, or should I say, everybody."

There was the prank in 1936 when Tarzan decided to marry Ethel Wilcox, daughter of the Narragansett tribe's medicine man. He invited his friend Russell and his sister Grace to come along as witnesses.

"And then he says, `Why don't you two get married?' " said Grace. "We hardly knew each other then," said Russell. "We'd only seen each other once or twice. But Tarzan was saying he wanted us to get married right then, all four of us." Russell Spears thought Tarzan was joking. He wasn't.

So all four were married within minutes of each other, witnessing each other's vows, and "59 years later," said Spears, "after Grace and I had 12 kids, 40 grandchildren and 46 great-grandchildren, I'd have to say we've had a wonderful life.

And I'd have to say that was a pretty good joke Tarzan talked us into." A mile or so off US Route 1 is an enclave of houses. A hand-painted sign nailed to a tree near one of the homes warns that this is "tribal land" of the Narragansetts, and that fishing and hunting by non-Narragansetts is not tolerated.

Inside the house of Ethel Brown is another sign, a stone one. It reads, "Ellison Myers Brown -- Olympics 1936 1940 -- Boston Marathon 1936 1939." Said Tarzan Brown's widow, "That's all the words I could afford. I didn't have money to put more words on it." Ethel Brown has story after story about the handsome young runner who proposed to her just before he left for the Berlin Olympics in 1936. "He ran two marathons in one day -- well, actually two marathons in 24 hours," she related, "and he won them both. But he came out of it with a terrible hernia, a double-strangulated hernia, and we always felt he had that hernia when he went to the Olympics."

Stories meld. It may have been that hernia that caused Brown to finish well back in the pack in Berlin, said his wife. It may have been taking up with the walkers just before the Olympics, "those heel-and-toe guys," his sister says, that caused him to change his stride and run so poorly. Or it may have been Tarzan Brown and other Americans being enticed to a party by Nazi Secret Service types the night before the race, as Brown's relatives say, that caused Brown's poor Olympic performance.

In 1948, Brown admitted to some drinking and fighting at the Olympics, but said it happened after the marathon, not before it. "I had a jam in Berlin, Germany," he said, "and it was a day or so after I ran the Olympic marathon in '36. I got celebrating a little and some men in white coats tried to put me out of the place. They didn't do too good, and the next thing I knew, a half-dozen guys in black shirts were after me. I guess they took care of me."

 Ethel Brown says time and again Tarzan Brown's problems with drink and work were highlighted to the detriment of the true loves of his life, his wife and family. "People would think that he didn't care too much about his wife and family, but they didn't know the true man," she says.

"He kept that hidden from the outside world." Brown stopped running competitively in 1944, and after that, life truly was a struggle. From time to time, newspaper reporters would find him, and once, in 1966, a Boston paper described him as "living in a tarpaper shack in the wilderness solitude of Charlestown."

But his nephew, Russell Spears, while acknowledging the difficult times, spoke lovingly of the times Tarzan would take him fishing and the long walks the two would take together through the old tribal lands. "He was always laughing," said the nephew. "He was full of life." Mrs. Brown is excited now because people from New York and Hollywood have been talking to her about making a movie of her husband's life.

Most of all, she says, she wants the true story of her husband told, that he was more than an Indian who drank and could not find steady jobs, that he was one of the world's best. On one side of Route 1 in Charlestown are the beaches, some of the most pristine on the East Coast. On the other side is King's Factory Road, a thoroughfare of homes in the trees, ancient ancestral land of the Narragansetts. There, one after another tell of Tarzan's life, that if he died penniless, he also died a rich man.