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title: Part IV
class: part
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### The Enemy of His Kind

Had there been in White Fang’s nature any possibility, no matter
how remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such possibility
was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team.
For now the dogs hated him—hated him for the extra meat bestowed
upon him by Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied favours
he received; hated him for that he fled always at the head of the team,
his waving brush of a tail and his perpetually retreating hind-quarters
for ever maddening their eyes.

And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader
was anything but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away
before the yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had
thrashed and mastered, was almost more than he could endure. But
endure it he must, or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire
to perish out. The moment Mit-sah gave his order for the start,
that moment the whole team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward
at White Fang.

There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah
would throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only
remained to him to run away. He could not encounter that howling
horde with his tail and hind-quarters. These were scarcely fit
weapons with which to meet the many merciless fangs. So run away
he did, violating his own nature and pride with every leap he made,
and leaping all day long.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having
that nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of
a hair, made to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the
direction of its growth and growing into the body—a rankling,
festering thing of hurt. And so with White Fang. Every urge
of his being impelled him to spring upon the pack that cried at his
heels, but it was the will of the gods that this should not be; and
behind the will, to enforce it, was the whip of cariboo-gut with its
biting thirty-foot lash. So White Fang could only eat his heart
in bitterness and develop a hatred and malice commensurate with the
ferocity and indomitability of his nature.

If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
creature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually
marred and scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left
his own marks upon the pack. Unlike most leaders, who, when camp
was made and the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection,
White Fang disdained such protection. He walked boldly about the
camp, inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in
the day. In the time before he was made leader of the team, the
pack had learned to get out of his way. But now it was different.
Excited by the day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the
insistent iteration on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away,
mastered by the feeling of mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not
bring themselves to give way to him. When he appeared amongst
them, there was always a squabble. His progress was marked by
snarl and snap and growl. The very atmosphere he breathed was
surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase the
hatred and malice within him.

When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
obeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs.
All of them would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables
turned. Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in
his hand. So the dogs came to understand that when the team stopped
by order, White Fang was to be let alone. But when White Fang
stopped without orders, then it was allowed them to spring upon him
and destroy him if they could. After several experiences, White
Fang never stopped without orders. He learned quickly. It
was in the nature of things, that he must learn quickly if he were to
survive the unusually severe conditions under which life was vouchsafed
him.

But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp.
Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the
previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned over
again, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greater
consistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between themselves
and him a difference of kind—cause sufficient in itself for hostility.
Like him, they were domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated
for generations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them
the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring.
But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild.
He symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed
their teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers
of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark
beyond the camp-fire.

But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
together. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise
he would have killed them, one by one, in a night. As it was,
he never had a chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off its
feet, but the pack would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver
the deadly throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole
team drew together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among
themselves, but these were forgotten when trouble was brewing with White
Fang.

On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang.
He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided
tight places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround
him. While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog
among them capable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth
with the same tenacity that he clung to life. For that matter,
life and footing were synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack,
and none knew it better than White Fang.

So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they
were, softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow
of man’s strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable.
The clay of him was so moulded. He declared a vendetta against
all dogs. And so terribly did he live this vendetta that Grey
Beaver, fierce savage himself, could not but marvel at White Fang’s
ferocity. Never, he swore, had there been the like of this animal;
and the Indians in strange villages swore likewise when they considered
the tale of his killings amongst their dogs.

When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked amongst
the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the Rockies,
and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the vengeance
he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspecting dogs.
They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his attack
without warning. They did not know him for what he was, a lightning-flash
of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged and challenging,
while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries, snapping into
action like a steel spring, was at their throats and destroying them
before they knew what was happening and while they were yet in the throes
of surprise.

He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never
wasted his strength, never tussled. He was in too quickly for
that, and, if he missed, was out again too quickly. The dislike
of the wolf for close quarters was his to an unusual degree. He
could not endure a prolonged contact with another body. It smacked
of danger. It made him frantic. He must be away, free, on
his own legs, touching no living thing. It was the Wild still
clinging to him, asserting itself through him. This feeling had
been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his puppyhood.
Danger lurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever the trap, the
fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
him.

In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against
him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himself
untouched in either event. In the natural course of things there
were exceptions to this. There were times when several dogs, pitching
on to him, punished him before he could get away; and there were times
when a single dog scored deeply on him. But these were accidents.
In the main, so efficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.

Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time
and distance. Not that he did this consciously, however.
He did not calculate such things. It was all automatic.
His eyes saw correctly, and the nerves carried the vision correctly
to his brain. The parts of him were better adjusted than those
of the average dog. They worked together more smoothly and steadily.
His was a better, far better, nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination.
When his eyes conveyed to his brain the moving image of an action, his
brain without conscious effort, knew the space that limited that action
and the time required for its completion. Thus, he could avoid
the leap of another dog, or the drive of its fangs, and at the same
moment could seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver
his own attack. Body and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism.
Not that he was to be praised for it. Nature had been more generous
to him than to the average animal, that was all.

It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon.
Grey Beaver had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the
Yukon in the late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the
western outlying spurs of the Rockies. Then, after the break-up
of the ice on the Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that
stream to where it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the
Artic circle. Here stood the old Hudson’s Bay Company fort;
and here were many Indians, much food, and unprecedented excitement.
It was the summer of 1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going
up the Yukon to Dawson and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles
from their goal, nevertheless many of them had been on the way for a
year, and the least any of them had travelled to get that far was five
thousand miles, while some had come from the other side of the world.

Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached
his ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of
gut-sewn mittens and moccasins. He would not have ventured so
long a trip had he not expected generous profits. But what he
had expected was nothing to what he realised. His wildest dreams
had not exceeded a hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand per
cent. And like a true Indian, he settled down to trade carefully
and slowly, even if it took all summer and the rest of the winter to
dispose of his goods.

It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men.
As compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another
race of beings, a race of superior gods. They impressed him as
possessing superior power, and it is on power that godhead rests.
White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp
generalisation that the white gods were more powerful. It was
a feeling, nothing more, and yet none the less potent. As, in
his puppyhood, the looming bulks of the tepees, man-reared, had affected
him as manifestations of power, so was he affected now by the houses
and the huge fort all of massive logs. Here was power. Those
white gods were strong. They possessed greater mastery over matter
than the gods he had known, most powerful among which was Grey Beaver.
And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god among these white-skinned ones.

To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not conscious
of them. Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that
animals act; and every act White Fang now performed was based upon the
feeling that the white men were the superior gods. In the first
place he was very suspicious of them. There was no telling what
unknown terrors were theirs, what unknown hurts they could administer.
He was curious to observe them, fearful of being noticed by them.
For the first few hours he was content with slinking around and watching
them from a safe distance. Then he saw that no harm befell the
dogs that were near to them, and he came in closer.

In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them. His wolfish
appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one
another. This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and
when they tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away.
Not one succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well that they
did not.

White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods—not more
than a dozen—lived at this place. Every two or three days
a steamer (another and colossal manifestation of power) came into the
bank and stopped for several hours. The white men came from off
these steamers and went away on them again. There seemed untold
numbers of these white men. In the first day or so, he saw more
of them than he had seen Indians in all his life; and as the days went
by they continued to come up the river, stop, and then go on up the
river out of sight.

But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount
to much. This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those
that came ashore with their masters. They were irregular shapes
and sizes. Some were short-legged—too short; others were
long-legged—too long. They had hair instead of fur, and
a few had very little hair at that. And none of them knew how
to fight.

As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang’s province to
fight with them. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them
a mighty contempt. They were soft and helpless, made much noise,
and floundered around clumsily trying to accomplish by main strength
what he accomplished by dexterity and cunning. They rushed bellowing
at him. He sprang to the side. They did not know what had
become of him; and in that moment he struck them on the shoulder, rolling
them off their feet and delivering his stroke at the throat.

Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in
the dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian
dogs that waited. White Fang was wise. He had long since
learned that the gods were made angry when their dogs were killed.
The white men were no exception to this. So he was content, when
he had overthrown and slashed wide the throat of one of their dogs,
to drop back and let the pack go in and do the cruel finishing work.
It was then that the white men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily
on the pack, while White Fang went free. He would stand off at
a little distance and look on, while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts
of weapons fell upon his fellows. White Fang was very wise.

But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang
grew wise with them. They learned that it was when a steamer first
tied to the bank that they had their fun. After the first two
or three strange dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men hustled
their own animals back on board and wrecked savage vengeance on the
offenders. One white man, having seen his dog, a setter, torn
to pieces before his eyes, drew a revolver. He fired rapidly,
six times, and six of the pack lay dead or dying—another manifestation
of power that sank deep into White Fang’s consciousness.

White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he
was shrewd enough to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing
of the white men’s dogs had been a diversion. After a time
it became his occupation. There was no work for him to do.
Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting wealthy. So White Fang
hung around the landing with the disreputable gang of Indian dogs, waiting
for steamers. With the arrival of a steamer the fun began.
After a few minutes, by the time the white men had got over their surprise,
the gang scattered. The fun was over until the next steamer should
arrive.

But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang.
He did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was
even feared by it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked
the quarrel with the strange dog while the gang waited. And when
he had overthrown the strange dog the gang went in to finish it.
But it is equally true that he then withdrew, leaving the gang to receive
the punishment of the outraged gods.

It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels. All
he had to do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself.
When they saw him they rushed for him. It was their instinct.
He was the Wild—the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing,
the thing that prowled in the darkness around the fires of the primeval
world when they, cowering close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts,
learning to fear the Wild out of which they had come, and which they
had deserted and betrayed. Generation by generation, down all
the generations, had this fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures.
For centuries the Wild had stood for terror and destruction. And
during all this time free licence had been theirs, from their masters,
to kill the things of the Wild. In doing this they had protected
both themselves and the gods whose companionship they shared.

And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting
down the gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White
Fang to experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy
him. They might be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear
of the Wild was theirs just the same. Not alone with their own
eyes did they see the wolfish creature in the clear light of day, standing
before them. They saw him with the eyes of their ancestors, and
by their inherited memory they knew White Fang for the wolf, and they
remembered the ancient feud.

All of which served to make White Fang’s days enjoyable.
If the sight of him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better
for him, so much the worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate
prey, and as legitimate prey he looked upon them.

Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair
and fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the
lynx. And not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by
the persecution of Lip-lip and the whole puppy pack. It might
have been otherwise, and he would then have been otherwise. Had
Lip-lip not existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the other
puppies and grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs.
Had Grey Beaver possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might
have sounded the deeps of White Fang’s nature and brought up to
the surface all manner of kindly qualities. But these things had
not been so. The clay of White Fang had been moulded until he
became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy
of all his kind.

### The Mad God

A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon. These men
had been long in the country. They called themselves Sour-doughs,
and took great pride in so classifying themselves. For other men,
new in the land, they felt nothing but disdain. The men who came
ashore from the steamers were newcomers. They were known as _chechaquos_,
and they always wilted at the application of the name. They made
their bread with baking-powder. This was the invidious distinction
between them and the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made their bread from
sour-dough because they had no baking-powder.

All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the fort
disdained the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief.
Especially did they enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers’
dogs by White Fang and his disreputable gang. When a steamer arrived,
the men of the fort made it a point always to come down to the bank
and see the fun. They looked forward to it with as much anticipation
as did the Indian dogs, while they were not slow to appreciate the savage
and crafty part played by White Fang.

But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the sport.
He would come running at the first sound of a steamboat’s whistle;
and when the last fight was over and White Fang and the pack had scattered,
he would return slowly to the fort, his face heavy with regret.
Sometimes, when a soft southland dog went down, shrieking its death-cry
under the fangs of the pack, this man would be unable to contain himself,
and would leap into the air and cry out with delight. And always
he had a sharp and covetous eye for White Fang.

This man was called “Beauty” by the other men of the
fort. No one knew his first name, and in general he was known
in the country as Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty.
To antithesis was due his naming. He was pre-eminently unbeautiful.
Nature had been niggardly with him. He was a small man to begin
with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly
meagre head. Its apex might be likened to a point. In fact,
in his boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he had
been called “Pinhead.”

Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward
it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead.
Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread
his features with a lavish hand. His eyes were large, and between
them was the distance of two eyes. His face, in relation to the
rest of him, was prodigious. In order to discover the necessary
area, Nature had given him an enormous prognathous jaw. It was
wide and heavy, and protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest
on his chest. Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness
of the slender neck, unable properly to support so great a burden.

This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination. But
something lacked. Perhaps it was from excess. Perhaps the
jaw was too large. At any rate, it was a lie. Beauty Smith
was known far and wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling cowards.
To complete his description, his teeth were large and yellow, while
the two eye-teeth, larger than their fellows, showed under his lean
lips like fangs. His eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature
had run short on pigments and squeezed together the dregs of all her
tubes. It was the same with his hair, sparse and irregular of
growth, muddy-yellow and dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting
out of his face in unexpected tufts and bunches, in appearance like
clumped and wind-blown grain.

In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay
elsewhere. He was not responsible. The clay of him had been
so moulded in the making. He did the cooking for the other men
in the fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery. They did not despise
him. Rather did they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one
tolerates any creature evilly treated in the making. Also, they
feared him. His cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back
or poison in their coffee. But somebody had to do the cooking,
and whatever else his shortcomings, Beauty Smith could cook.

This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious
prowess, and desired to possess him. He made overtures to White
Fang from the first. White Fang began by ignoring him. Later
on, when the overtures became more insistent, White Fang bristled and
bared his teeth and backed away. He did not like the man.
The feel of him was bad. He sensed the evil in him, and feared
the extended hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech. Because
of all this, he hated the man.

With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood.
The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction
and surcease from pain. Therefore, the good is liked. The
bad stands for all things that are fraught with discomfort, menace,
and hurt, and is hated accordingly. White Fang’s feel of
Beauty Smith was bad. From the man’s distorted body and
twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes,
came emanations of the unhealth within. Not by reasoning, not
by the five senses alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses,
came the feeling to White Fang that the man was ominous with evil, pregnant
with hurtfulness, and therefore a thing bad, and wisely to be hated.

White Fang was in Grey Beaver’s camp when Beauty Smith first
visited it. At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he
came in sight, White Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle.
He had been lying down in an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly,
and, as the man arrived, slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge
of the camp. He did not know what they said, but he could see
the man and Grey Beaver talking together. Once, the man pointed
at him, and White Fang snarled back as though the hand were just descending
upon him instead of being, as it was, fifty feet away. The man
laughed at this; and White Fang slunk away to the sheltering woods,
his head turned to observe as he glided softly over the ground.

Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog. He had grown rich with
his trading and stood in need of nothing. Besides, White Fang
was a valuable animal, the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and
the best leader. Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the
Mackenzie nor the Yukon. He could fight. He killed other
dogs as easily as men killed mosquitoes. (Beauty Smith’s
eyes lighted up at this, and he licked his thin lips with an eager tongue).
No, White Fang was not for sale at any price.

But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians. He visited Grey
Beaver’s camp often, and hidden under his coat was always a black
bottle or so. One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of
thirst. Grey Beaver got the thirst. His fevered membranes
and burnt stomach began to clamour for more and more of the scorching
fluid; while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant, permitted
him to go any length to obtain it. The money he had received for
his furs and mittens and moccasins began to go. It went faster
and faster, and the shorter his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his
temper.

In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone. Nothing
remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that
grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew. Then it
was that Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White
Fang; but this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and
Grey Beaver’s ears were more eager to hear.

“You ketch um dog you take um all right,” was his last
word.

The bottles were delivered, but after two days. “You
ketch um dog,” were Beauty Smith’s words to Grey Beaver.

White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh
of content. The dreaded white god was not there. For days
his manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more
insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to avoid
the camp. He did not know what evil was threatened by those insistent
hands. He knew only that they did threaten evil of some sort,
and that it was best for him to keep out of their reach.

But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to
him and tied a leather thong around his neck. He sat down beside
White Fang, holding the end of the thong in his hand. In the other
hand he held a bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above
his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises.

An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with
the ground foreran the one who approached. White Fang heard it
first, and he was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver still
nodded stupidly. White Fang tried to draw the thong softly out
of his master’s hand; but the relaxed fingers closed tightly and
Grey Beaver roused himself.

Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang. He
snarled softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment
of the hands. One hand extended outward and began to descend upon
his head. His soft snarl grew tense and harsh. The hand
continued slowly to descend, while he crouched beneath it, eyeing it
malignantly, his snarl growing shorter and shorter as, with quickening
breath, it approached its culmination. Suddenly he snapped, striking
with his fangs like a snake. The hand was jerked back, and the
teeth came together emptily with a sharp click. Beauty Smith was
frightened and angry. Grey Beaver clouted White Fang alongside
the head, so that he cowered down close to the earth in respectful obedience.

White Fang’s suspicious eyes followed every movement.
He saw Beauty Smith go away and return with a stout club. Then
the end of the thong was given over to him by Grey Beaver. Beauty
Smith started to walk away. The thong grew taut. White Fang
resisted it. Grey Beaver clouted him right and left to make him
get up and follow. He obeyed, but with a rush, hurling himself
upon the stranger who was dragging him away. Beauty Smith did
not jump away. He had been waiting for this. He swung the
club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down
upon the ground. Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval.
Beauty Smith tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply
and dizzily to his feet.

He did not rush a second time. One smash from the club was
sufficient to convince him that the white god knew how to handle it,
and he was too wise to fight the inevitable. So he followed morosely
at Beauty Smith’s heels, his tail between his legs, yet snarling
softly under his breath. But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye on him,
and the club was held always ready to strike.

At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed.
White Fang waited an hour. Then he applied his teeth to the thong,
and in the space of ten seconds was free. He had wasted no time
with his teeth. There had been no useless gnawing. The thong
was cut across, diagonally, almost as clean as though done by a knife.
White Fang looked up at the fort, at the same time bristling and growling.
Then he turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver’s camp. He
owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible god. He had given
himself to Grey Beaver, and to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.

But what had occurred before was repeated—with a difference.
Grey Beaver again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned
him over to Beauty Smith. And here was where the difference came
in. Beauty Smith gave him a beating. Tied securely, White
Fang could only rage futilely and endure the punishment. Club
and whip were both used upon him, and he experienced the worst beating
he had ever received in his life. Even the big beating given him
in his puppyhood by Grey Beaver was mild compared with this.

Beauty Smith enjoyed the task. He delighted in it. He
gloated over his victim, and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the
whip or club and listened to White Fang’s cries of pain and to
his helpless bellows and snarls. For Beauty Smith was cruel in
the way that cowards are cruel. Cringing and snivelling himself
before the blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself, in turn,
upon creatures weaker than he. All life likes power, and Beauty
Smith was no exception. Denied the expression of power amongst
his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated
the life that was in him. But Beauty Smith had not created himself,
and no blame was to be attached to him. He had come into the world
with a twisted body and a brute intelligence. This had constituted
the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by the world.

White Fang knew why he was being beaten. When Grey Beaver tied
the thong around his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty
Smith’s keeping, White Fang knew that it was his god’s will
for him to go with Beauty Smith. And when Beauty Smith left him
tied outside the fort, he knew that it was Beauty Smith’s will
that he should remain there. Therefore, he had disobeyed the will
of both the gods, and earned the consequent punishment. He had
seen dogs change owners in the past, and he had seen the runaways beaten
as he was being beaten. He was wise, and yet in the nature of
him there were forces greater than wisdom. One of these was fidelity.
He did not love Grey Beaver, yet, even in the face of his will and his
anger, he was faithful to him. He could not help it. This
faithfulness was a quality of the clay that composed him. It was
the quality that was peculiarly the possession of his kind; the quality
that set apart his species from all other species; the quality that
has enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come in from the open and be
the companions of man.

After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort.
But this time Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick. One does
not give up a god easily, and so with White Fang. Grey Beaver
was his own particular god, and, in spite of Grey Beaver’s will,
White Fang still clung to him and would not give him up. Grey
Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him, but that had no effect upon him.
Not for nothing had he surrendered himself body and soul to Grey Beaver.
There had been no reservation on White Fang’s part, and the bond
was not to be broken easily.

So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang
applied his teeth to the stick that held him. The wood was seasoned
and dry, and it was tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely
get his teeth to it. It was only by the severest muscular exertion
and neck-arching that he succeeded in getting the wood between his teeth,
and barely between his teeth at that; and it was only by the exercise
of an immense patience, extending through many hours, that he succeeded
in gnawing through the stick. This was something that dogs were
not supposed to do. It was unprecedented. But White Fang
did it, trotting away from the fort in the early morning, with the end
of the stick hanging to his neck.

He was wise. But had he been merely wise he would not have
gone back to Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him. But
there was his faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third
time. Again he yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck
by Grey Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim him. And
this time he was beaten even more severely than before.

Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip.
He gave no protection. It was no longer his dog. When the
beating was over White Fang was sick. A soft southland dog would
have died under it, but not he. His school of life had been sterner,
and he was himself of sterner stuff. He had too great vitality.
His clutch on life was too strong. But he was very sick.
At first he was unable to drag himself along, and Beauty Smith had to
wait half-an-hour for him. And then, blind and reeling, he followed
at Beauty Smith’s heels back to the fort.

But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove
in vain, by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it
was driven. After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver
departed up the Porcupine on his long journey to the Mackenzie.
White Fang remained on the Yukon, the property of a man more than half
mad and all brute. But what is a dog to know in its consciousness
of madness? To White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible,
god. He was a mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of
madness; he knew only that he must submit to the will of this new master,
obey his every whim and fancy.

### The Reign of Hate

Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend.
He was kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty
Smith teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments.
The man early discovered White Fang’s susceptibility to laughter,
and made it a point after painfully tricking him, to laugh at him.
This laughter was uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the
god pointed his finger derisively at White Fang. At such times
reason fled from White Fang, and in his transports of rage he was even
more mad than Beauty Smith.

Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal
a ferocious enemy. He now became the enemy of all things, and
more ferocious than ever. To such an extent was he tormented,
that he hated blindly and without the faintest spark of reason.
He hated the chain that bound him, the men who peered in at him through
the slats of the pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that snarled
malignantly at him in his helplessness. He hated the very wood
of the pen that confined him. And, first, last, and most of all,
he hated Beauty Smith.

But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang.
One day a number of men gathered about the pen. Beauty Smith entered,
club in hand, and took the chain off from White Fang’s neck.
When his master had gone out, White Fang turned loose and tore around
the pen, trying to get at the men outside. He was magnificently
terrible. Fully five feet in length, and standing two and one-half
feet at the shoulder, he far outweighed a wolf of corresponding size.
From his mother he had inherited the heavier proportions of the dog,
so that he weighed, without any fat and without an ounce of superfluous
flesh, over ninety pounds. It was all muscle, bone, and sinew-fighting
flesh in the finest condition.

The door of the pen was being opened again. White Fang paused.
Something unusual was happening. He waited. The door was
opened wider. Then a huge dog was thrust inside, and the door
was slammed shut behind him. White Fang had never seen such a
dog (it was a mastiff); but the size and fierce aspect of the intruder
did not deter him. Here was some thing, not wood nor iron, upon
which to wreak his hate. He leaped in with a flash of fangs that
ripped down the side of the mastiff’s neck. The mastiff
shook his head, growled hoarsely, and plunged at White Fang. But
White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always evading and eluding,
and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and leaping out again
in time to escape punishment.

The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an
ecstasy of delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed
by White Fang. There was no hope for the mastiff from the first.
He was too ponderous and slow. In the end, while Beauty Smith
beat White Fang back with a club, the mastiff was dragged out by its
owner. Then there was a payment of bets, and money clinked in
Beauty Smith’s hand.

White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men
around his pen. It meant a fight; and this was the only way that
was now vouchsafed him of expressing the life that was in him.
Tormented, incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there was
no way of satisfying that hate except at the times his master saw fit
to put another dog against him. Beauty Smith had estimated his
powers well, for he was invariably the victor. One day, three
dogs were turned in upon him in succession. Another day a full-grown
wolf, fresh-caught from the Wild, was shoved in through the door of
the pen. And on still another day two dogs were set against him
at the same time. This was his severest fight, and though in the
end he killed them both he was himself half killed in doing it.

In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush-ice
was running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and
White Fang on a steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson. White
Fang had now achieved a reputation in the land. As “the
Fighting Wolf” he was known far and wide, and the cage in which
he was kept on the steam-boat’s deck was usually surrounded by
curious men. He raged and snarled at them, or lay quietly and
studied them with cold hatred. Why should he not hate them?
He never asked himself the question. He knew only hate and lost
himself in the passion of it. Life had become a hell to him.
He had not been made for the close confinement wild beasts endure at
the hands of men. And yet it was in precisely this way that he
was treated. Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars
to make him snarl, and then laughed at him.

They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the
clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature.
Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another
animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself
and lived, and at no expense of the spirit. Possibly Beauty Smith,
arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of breaking White Fang’s
spirit, but as yet there were no signs of his succeeding.

If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the
two of them raged against each other unceasingly. In the days
before, White Fang had had the wisdom to cower down and submit to a
man with a club in his hand; but this wisdom now left him. The
mere sight of Beauty Smith was sufficient to send him into transports
of fury. And when they came to close quarters, and he had been
beaten back by the club, he went on growling and snarling, and showing
his fangs. The last growl could never be extracted from him.
No matter how terribly he was beaten, he had always another growl; and
when Beauty Smith gave up and withdrew, the defiant growl followed after
him, or White Fang sprang at the bars of the cage bellowing his hatred.

When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore.
But he still lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men.
He was exhibited as “the Fighting Wolf,” and men paid fifty
cents in gold dust to see him. He was given no rest. Did
he lie down to sleep, he was stirred up by a sharp stick—so that
the audience might get its money’s worth. In order to make
the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a rage most of the time.
But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in which he lived.
He was regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and this was borne
in to him through the bars of the cage. Every word, every cautious
action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his own terrible
ferocity. It was so much added fuel to the flame of his fierceness.
There could be but one result, and that was that his ferocity fed upon
itself and increased. It was another instance of the plasticity
of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure of environment.

In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal.
At irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was taken
out of his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town.
Usually this occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the
mounted police of the Territory. After a few hours of waiting,
when daylight had come, the audience and the dog with which he was to
fight arrived. In this manner it came about that he fought all
sizes and breeds of dogs. It was a savage land, the men were savage,
and the fights were usually to the death.

Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the
other dogs that died. He never knew defeat. His early training,
when he fought with Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in good
stead. There was the tenacity with which he clung to the earth.
No dog could make him lose his footing. This was the favourite
trick of the wolf breeds—to rush in upon him, either directly
or with an unexpected swerve, in the hope of striking his shoulder and
overthrowing him. Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and Labrador dogs,
huskies and Malemutes—all tried it on him, and all failed.
He was never known to lose his footing. Men told this to one another,
and looked each time to see it happen; but White Fang always disappointed
them.

Then there was his lightning quickness. It gave him a tremendous
advantage over his antagonists. No matter what their fighting
experience, they had never encountered a dog that moved so swiftly as
he. Also to be reckoned with, was the immediateness of his attack.
The average dog was accustomed to the preliminaries of snarling and
bristling and growling, and the average dog was knocked off his feet
and finished before he had begun to fight or recovered from his surprise.
So often did this happen, that it became the custom to hold White Fang
until the other dog went through its preliminaries, was good and ready,
and even made the first attack.

But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang’s favour,
was his experience. He knew more about fighting than did any of
the dogs that faced him. He had fought more fights, knew how to
meet more tricks and methods, and had more tricks himself, while his
own method was scarcely to be improved upon.

As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights. Men despaired
of matching him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to pit
wolves against him. These were trapped by the Indians for the
purpose, and a fight between White Fang and a wolf was always sure to
draw a crowd. Once, a full-grown female lynx was secured, and
this time White Fang fought for his life. Her quickness matched
his; her ferocity equalled his; while he fought with his fangs alone,
and she fought with her sharp-clawed feet as well.

But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang. There
were no more animals with which to fight—at least, there was none
considered worthy of fighting with him. So he remained on exhibition
until spring, when one Tim Keenan, a faro-dealer, arrived in the land.
With him came the first bull-dog that had ever entered the Klondike.
That this dog and White Fang should come together was inevitable, and
for a week the anticipated fight was the mainspring of conversation
in certain quarters of the town.

### The Clinging Death

Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.

For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack. He stood
still, ears pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange
animal that faced him. He had never seen such a dog before.
Tim Keenan shoved the bull-dog forward with a muttered “Go to
it.” The animal waddled toward the centre of the circle,
short and squat and ungainly. He came to a stop and blinked across
at White Fang.

There were cries from the crowd of, “Go to him, Cherokee!
Sick ’m, Cherokee! Eat ’m up!”

But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight. He turned his head
and blinked at the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump
of a tail good-naturedly. He was not afraid, but merely lazy.
Besides, it did not seem to him that it was intended he should fight
with the dog he saw before him. He was not used to fighting with
that kind of dog, and he was waiting for them to bring on the real dog.

Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both
sides of the shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of the
hair and that made slight, pushing-forward movements. These were
so many suggestions. Also, their effect was irritating, for Cherokee
began to growl, very softly, deep down in his throat. There was
a correspondence in rhythm between the growls and the movements of the
man’s hands. The growl rose in the throat with the culmination
of each forward-pushing movement, and ebbed down to start up afresh
with the beginning of the next movement. The end of each movement
was the accent of the rhythm, the movement ending abruptly and the growling
rising with a jerk.

This was not without its effect on White Fang. The hair began
to rise on his neck and across the shoulders. Tim Keenan gave
a final shove forward and stepped back again. As the impetus that
carried Cherokee forward died down, he continued to go forward of his
own volition, in a swift, bow-legged run. Then White Fang struck.
A cry of startled admiration went up. He had covered the distance
and gone in more like a cat than a dog; and with the same cat-like swiftness
he had slashed with his fangs and leaped clear.

The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick
neck. He gave no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed
after White Fang. The display on both sides, the quickness of
the one and the steadiness of the other, had excited the partisan spirit
of the crowd, and the men were making new bets and increasing original
bets. Again, and yet again, White Fang sprang in, slashed, and
got away untouched, and still his strange foe followed after him, without
too great haste, not slowly, but deliberately and determinedly, in a
businesslike sort of way. There was purpose in his method—something
for him to do that he was intent upon doing and from which nothing could
distract him.

His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose.
It puzzled White Fang. Never had he seen such a dog. It
had no hair protection. It was soft, and bled easily. There
was no thick mat of fur to baffle White Fang’s teeth as they were
often baffled by dogs of his own breed. Each time that his teeth
struck they sank easily into the yielding flesh, while the animal did
not seem able to defend itself. Another disconcerting thing was
that it made no outcry, such as he had been accustomed to with the other
dogs he had fought. Beyond a growl or a grunt, the dog took its
punishment silently. And never did it flag in its pursuit of him.

Not that Cherokee was slow. He could turn and whirl swiftly
enough, but White Fang was never there. Cherokee was puzzled,
too. He had never fought before with a dog with which he could
not close. The desire to close had always been mutual. But
here was a dog that kept at a distance, dancing and dodging here and
there and all about. And when it did get its teeth into him, it
did not hold on but let go instantly and darted away again.

But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat.
The bull-dog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added protection.
White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee’s wounds
increased. Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and slashed.
He bled freely, but showed no signs of being disconcerted. He
continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for the moment baffled,
he came to a full stop and blinked at the men who looked on, at the
same time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his willingness
to fight.

In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping
his trimmed remnant of an ear. With a slight manifestation of
anger, Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of
the circle White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly
grip on White Fang’s throat. The bull-dog missed by a hair’s-breadth,
and cries of praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger
in the opposite direction.

The time went by. White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling,
leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage. And still the
bull-dog, with grim certitude, toiled after him. Sooner or later
he would accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would win the battle.
In the meantime, he accepted all the punishment the other could deal
him. His tufts of ears had become tassels, his neck and shoulders
were slashed in a score of places, and his very lips were cut and bleeding—all
from these lightning snaps that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding.

Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his
feet; but the difference in their height was too great. Cherokee
was too squat, too close to the ground. White Fang tried the trick
once too often. The chance came in one of his quick doublings
and counter-circlings. He caught Cherokee with head turned away
as he whirled more slowly. His shoulder was exposed. White
Fang drove in upon it: but his own shoulder was high above, while he
struck with such force that his momentum carried him on across over
the other’s body. For the first time in his fighting history,
men saw White Fang lose his footing. His body turned a half-somersault
in the air, and he would have landed on his back had he not twisted,
catlike, still in the air, in the effort to bring his feet to the earth.
As it was, he struck heavily on his side. The next instant he
was on his feet, but in that instant Cherokee’s teeth closed on
his throat.

It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but
Cherokee held on. White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly
around, trying to shake off the bull-dog’s body. It made
him frantic, this clinging, dragging weight. It bound his movements,
restricted his freedom. It was like the trap, and all his instinct
resented it and revolted against it. It was a mad revolt.
For several minutes he was to all intents insane. The basic life
that was in him took charge of him. The will to exist of his body
surged over him. He was dominated by this mere flesh-love of life.
All intelligence was gone. It was as though he had no brain.
His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the flesh to exist
and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for movement
was the expression of its existence.

Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying
to shake off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat.
The bull-dog did little but keep his grip. Sometimes, and rarely,
he managed to get his feet to the earth and for a moment to brace himself
against White Fang. But the next moment his footing would be lost
and he would be dragging around in the whirl of one of White Fang’s
mad gyrations. Cherokee identified himself with his instinct.
He knew that he was doing the right thing by holding on, and there came
to him certain blissful thrills of satisfaction. At such moments
he even closed his eyes and allowed his body to be hurled hither and
thither, willy-nilly, careless of any hurt that might thereby come to
it. That did not count. The grip was the thing, and the
grip he kept.

White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out. He could
do nothing, and he could not understand. Never, in all his fighting,
had this thing happened. The dogs he had fought with did not fight
that way. With them it was snap and slash and get away, snap and
slash and get away. He lay partly on his side, panting for breath.
Cherokee still holding his grip, urged against him, trying to get him
over entirely on his side. White Fang resisted, and he could feel
the jaws shifting their grip, slightly relaxing and coming together
again in a chewing movement. Each shift brought the grip closer
to his throat. The bull-dog’s method was to hold what he
had, and when opportunity favoured to work in for more. Opportunity
favoured when White Fang remained quiet. When White Fang struggled,
Cherokee was content merely to hold on.

The bulging back of Cherokee’s neck was the only portion of
his body that White Fang’s teeth could reach. He got hold
toward the base where the neck comes out from the shoulders; but he
did not know the chewing method of fighting, nor were his jaws adapted
to it. He spasmodically ripped and tore with his fangs for a space.
Then a change in their position diverted him. The bull-dog had
managed to roll him over on his back, and still hanging on to his throat,
was on top of him. Like a cat, White Fang bowed his hind-quarters
in, and, with the feet digging into his enemy’s abdomen above
him, he began to claw with long tearing-strokes. Cherokee might
well have been disembowelled had he not quickly pivoted on his grip
and got his body off of White Fang’s and at right angles to it.

There was no escaping that grip. It was like Fate itself, and
as inexorable. Slowly it shifted up along the jugular. All
that saved White Fang from death was the loose skin of his neck and
the thick fur that covered it. This served to form a large roll
in Cherokee’s mouth, the fur of which well-nigh defied his teeth.
But bit by bit, whenever the chance offered, he was getting more of
the loose skin and fur in his mouth. The result was that he was
slowly throttling White Fang. The latter’s breath was drawn
with greater and greater difficulty as the moments went by.

It began to look as though the battle were over. The backers
of Cherokee waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds. White
Fang’s backers were correspondingly depressed, and refused bets
of ten to one and twenty to one, though one man was rash enough to close
a wager of fifty to one. This man was Beauty Smith. He took
a step into the ring and pointed his finger at White Fang. Then
he began to laugh derisively and scornfully. This produced the
desired effect. White Fang went wild with rage. He called
up his reserves of strength, and gained his feet. As he struggled
around the ring, the fifty pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat,
his anger passed on into panic. The basic life of him dominated
him again, and his intelligence fled before the will of his flesh to
live. Round and round and back again, stumbling and falling and
rising, even uprearing at times on his hind-legs and lifting his foe
clear of the earth, he struggled vainly to shake off the clinging death.

At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog promptly
shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of the fur-folded
flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever. Shouts of
applause went up for the victor, and there were many cries of “Cherokee!”
“Cherokee!” To this Cherokee responded by vigorous
wagging of the stump of his tail. But the clamour of approval
did not distract him. There was no sympathetic relation between
his tail and his massive jaws. The one might wag, but the others
held their terrible grip on White Fang’s throat.

It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators.
There was a jingle of bells. Dog-mushers’ cries were heard.
Everybody, save Beauty Smith, looked apprehensively, the fear of the
police strong upon them. But they saw, up the trail, and not down,
two men running with sled and dogs. They were evidently coming
down the creek from some prospecting trip. At sight of the crowd
they stopped their dogs and came over and joined it, curious to see
the cause of the excitement. The dog-musher wore a moustache,
but the other, a taller and younger man, was smooth-shaven, his skin
rosy from the pounding of his blood and the running in the frosty air.

White Fang had practically ceased struggling. Now and again
he resisted spasmodically and to no purpose. He could get little
air, and that little grew less and less under the merciless grip that
ever tightened. In spite of his armour of fur, the great vein
of his throat would have long since been torn open, had not the first
grip of the bull-dog been so low down as to be practically on the chest.
It had taken Cherokee a long time to shift that grip upward, and this
had also tended further to clog his jaws with fur and skin-fold.

In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising
into his brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed
at best. When he saw White Fang’s eyes beginning to glaze,
he knew beyond doubt that the fight was lost. Then he broke loose.
He sprang upon White Fang and began savagely to kick him. There
were hisses from the crowd and cries of protest, but that was all.
While this went on, and Beauty Smith continued to kick White Fang, there
was a commotion in the crowd. The tall young newcomer was forcing
his way through, shouldering men right and left without ceremony or
gentleness. When he broke through into the ring, Beauty Smith
was just in the act of delivering another kick. All his weight
was on one foot, and he was in a state of unstable equilibrium.
At that moment the newcomer’s fist landed a smashing blow full
in his face. Beauty Smith’s remaining leg left the ground,
and his whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned over backward
and struck the snow. The newcomer turned upon the crowd.

“You cowards!” he cried. “You beasts!”

He was in a rage himself—a sane rage. His grey eyes seemed
metallic and steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd. Beauty
Smith regained his feet and came toward him, sniffling and cowardly.
The new-comer did not understand. He did not know how abject a
coward the other was, and thought he was coming back intent on fighting.
So, with a “You beast!” he smashed Beauty Smith over backward
with a second blow in the face. Beauty Smith decided that the
snow was the safest place for him, and lay where he had fallen, making
no effort to get up.

“Come on, Matt, lend a hand,” the newcomer called the
dog-musher, who had followed him into the ring.

Both men bent over the dogs. Matt took hold of White Fang,
ready to pull when Cherokee’s jaws should be loosened. This
the younger man endeavoured to accomplish by clutching the bulldog’s
jaws in his hands and trying to spread them. It was a vain undertaking.
As he pulled and tugged and wrenched, he kept exclaiming with every
expulsion of breath, “Beasts!”

The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting
against the spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the newcomer
lifted his head from his work for a moment and glared at them.

“You damn beasts!” he finally exploded, and went back
to his task.

“It’s no use, Mr. Scott, you can’t break ’m
apart that way,” Matt said at last.

The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.

“Ain’t bleedin’ much,” Matt announced.
“Ain’t got all the way in yet.”

“But he’s liable to any moment,” Scott answered.
“There, did you see that! He shifted his grip in a bit.”

The younger man’s excitement and apprehension for White Fang
was growing. He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again
and again. But that did not loosen the jaws. Cherokee wagged
the stump of his tail in advertisement that he understood the meaning
of the blows, but that he knew he was himself in the right and only
doing his duty by keeping his grip.

“Won’t some of you help?” Scott cried desperately
at the crowd.

But no help was offered. Instead, the crowd began sarcastically
to cheer him on and showered him with facetious advice.

“You’ll have to get a pry,” Matt counselled.

The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver,
and tried to thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog’s jaws.
He shoved, and shoved hard, till the grating of the steel against the
locked teeth could be distinctly heard. Both men were on their
knees, bending over the dogs. Tim Keenan strode into the ring.
He paused beside Scott and touched him on the shoulder, saying ominously:

“Don’t break them teeth, stranger.”

“Then I’ll break his neck,” Scott retorted, continuing
his shoving and wedging with the revolver muzzle.

“I said don’t break them teeth,” the faro-dealer
repeated more ominously than before.

But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work. Scott never
desisted from his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:

“Your dog?”

The faro-dealer grunted.

“Then get in here and break this grip.”

“Well, stranger,” the other drawled irritatingly, “I
don’t mind telling you that’s something I ain’t worked
out for myself. I don’t know how to turn the trick.”

“Then get out of the way,” was the reply, “and
don’t bother me. I’m busy.”

Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further
notice of his presence. He had managed to get the muzzle in between
the jaws on one side, and was trying to get it out between the jaws
on the other side. This accomplished, he pried gently and carefully,
loosening the jaws a bit at a time, while Matt, a bit at a time, extricated
White Fang’s mangled neck.

“Stand by to receive your dog,” was Scott’s peremptory
order to Cherokee’s owner.

The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on Cherokee.

“Now!” Scott warned, giving the final pry.

The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.

“Take him away,” Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged
Cherokee back into the crowd.

White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up. Once
he gained his feet, but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he
slowly wilted and sank back into the snow. His eyes were half
closed, and the surface of them was glassy. His jaws were apart,
and through them the tongue protruded, draggled and limp. To all
appearances he looked like a dog that had been strangled to death.
Matt examined him.

“Just about all in,” he announced; “but he’s
breathin’ all right.”

Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White
Fang.

“Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?” Scott asked.

The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang, calculated
for a moment.

“Three hundred dollars,” he answered.

“And how much for one that’s all chewed up like this
one?” Scott asked, nudging White Fang with his foot.

“Half of that,” was the dog-musher’s judgment.
Scott turned upon Beauty Smith.

“Did you hear, Mr. Beast? I’m going to take your
dog from you, and I’m going to give you a hundred and fifty for
him.”

He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.

Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the
proffered money.

“I ain’t a-sellin’,” he said.

“Oh, yes you are,” the other assured him. “Because
I’m buying. Here’s your money. The dog’s
mine.”

Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.

Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike. Beauty
Smith cowered down in anticipation of the blow.

“I’ve got my rights,” he whimpered.

“You’ve forfeited your rights to own that dog,”
was the rejoinder. “Are you going to take the money? or
do I have to hit you again?”

“All right,” Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity
of fear. “But I take the money under protest,” he
added. “The dog’s a mint. I ain’t a-goin’
to be robbed. A man’s got his rights.”

“Correct,” Scott answered, passing the money over to
him. “A man’s got his rights. But you’re
not a man. You’re a beast.”

“Wait till I get back to Dawson,” Beauty Smith threatened.
“I’ll have the law on you.”

“If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I’ll
have you run out of town. Understand?”

Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.

“Understand?” the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.

“Yes,” Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, sir,” Beauty Smith snarled.

“Look out! He’ll bite!” some one shouted,
and a guffaw of laughter went up.

Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher,
who was working over White Fang.

Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups, looking
on and talking. Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.

“Who’s that mug?” he asked.

“Weedon Scott,” some one answered.

“And who in hell is Weedon Scott?” the faro-dealer demanded.

“Oh, one of them crackerjack minin’ experts. He’s
in with all the big bugs. If you want to keep out of trouble,
you’ll steer clear of him, that’s my talk. He’s
all hunky with the officials. The Gold Commissioner’s a
special pal of his.”

“I thought he must be somebody,” was the faro-dealer’s
comment. “That’s why I kept my hands offen him at
the start.”

### The Indomitable

“It’s hopeless,” Weedon Scott confessed.

He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who
responded with a shrug that was equally hopeless.

Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched chain,
bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the sled-dogs.
Having received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted
by means of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang alone;
and even then they were lying down at a distance, apparently oblivious
of his existence.

“It’s a wolf and there’s no taming it,” Weedon
Scott announced.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Matt objected.
“Might be a lot of dog in ’m, for all you can tell.
But there’s one thing I know sure, an’ that there’s
no gettin’ away from.”

The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide
Mountain.

“Well, don’t be a miser with what you know,” Scott
said sharply, after waiting a suitable length of time. “Spit
it out. What is it?”

The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his
thumb.

“Wolf or dog, it’s all the same—he’s ben
tamed ’ready.”

“No!”

“I tell you yes, an’ broke to harness. Look close
there. D’ye see them marks across the chest?”

“You’re right, Matt. He was a sled-dog before Beauty
Smith got hold of him.”

“And there’s not much reason against his bein’
a sled-dog again.”

“What d’ye think?” Scott queried eagerly.
Then the hope died down as he added, shaking his head, “We’ve
had him two weeks now, and if anything he’s wilder than ever at
the present moment.”

“Give ’m a chance,” Matt counselled. “Turn
’m loose for a spell.”

The other looked at him incredulously.

“Yes,” Matt went on, “I know you’ve tried
to, but you didn’t take a club.”

“You try it then.”

The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal.
White Fang watched the club after the manner of a caged lion watching
the whip of its trainer.

“See ’m keep his eye on that club,” Matt said.
“That’s a good sign. He’s no fool. Don’t
dast tackle me so long as I got that club handy. He’s not
clean crazy, sure.”

As the man’s hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled
and snarled and crouched down. But while he eyed the approaching
hand, he at the same time contrived to keep track of the club in the
other hand, suspended threateningly above him. Matt unsnapped
the chain from the collar and stepped back.

White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free. Many months
had gone by since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith, and
in all that period he had never known a moment of freedom except at
the times he had been loosed to fight with other dogs. Immediately
after such fights he had always been imprisoned again.

He did not know what to make of it. Perhaps some new devilry
of the gods was about to be perpetrated on him. He walked slowly
and cautiously, prepared to be assailed at any moment. He did
not know what to do, it was all so unprecedented. He took the
precaution to sheer off from the two watching gods, and walked carefully
to the corner of the cabin. Nothing happened. He was plainly
perplexed, and he came back again, pausing a dozen feet away and regarding
the two men intently.

“Won’t he run away?” his new owner asked.

Matt shrugged his shoulders. “Got to take a gamble.
Only way to find out is to find out.”

“Poor devil,” Scott murmured pityingly. “What
he needs is some show of human kindness,” he added, turning and
going into the cabin.

He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang.
He sprang away from it, and from a distance studied it suspiciously.

“Hi-yu, Major!” Matt shouted warningly, but too late.

Major had made a spring for the meat. At the instant his jaws
closed on it, White Fang struck him. He was overthrown.
Matt rushed in, but quicker than he was White Fang. Major staggered
to his feet, but the blood spouting from his throat reddened the snow
in a widening path.

“It’s too bad, but it served him right,” Scott
said hastily.

But Matt’s foot had already started on its way to kick White
Fang. There was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation.
White Fang, snarling fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards,
while Matt stooped and investigated his leg.

“He got me all right,” he announced, pointing to the
torn trousers and undercloths, and the growing stain of red.

“I told you it was hopeless, Matt,” Scott said in a discouraged
voice. “I’ve thought about it off and on, while not
wanting to think of it. But we’ve come to it now.
It’s the only thing to do.”

As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw
open the cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.

“Look here, Mr. Scott,” Matt objected; “that dog’s
ben through hell. You can’t expect ’m to come out
a white an’ shinin’ angel. Give ’m time.”

“Look at Major,” the other rejoined.

The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog. He had sunk down
on the snow in the circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.

“Served ’m right. You said so yourself, Mr. Scott.
He tried to take White Fang’s meat, an’ he’s dead-O.
That was to be expected. I wouldn’t give two whoops in hell
for a dog that wouldn’t fight for his own meat.”

“But look at yourself, Matt. It’s all right about
the dogs, but we must draw the line somewhere.”

“Served me right,” Matt argued stubbornly. “What’d
I want to kick ’m for? You said yourself that he’d
done right. Then I had no right to kick ’m.”

“It would be a mercy to kill him,” Scott insisted.
“He’s untamable.”

“Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin’
chance. He ain’t had no chance yet. He’s just
come through hell, an’ this is the first time he’s ben loose.
Give ’m a fair chance, an’ if he don’t deliver the
goods, I’ll kill ’m myself. There!”

“God knows I don’t want to kill him or have him killed,”
Scott answered, putting away the revolver. “We’ll
let him run loose and see what kindness can do for him. And here’s
a try at it.”

He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and
soothingly.

“Better have a club handy,” Matt warned.

Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang’s
confidence.

White Fang was suspicious. Something was impending. He
had killed this god’s dog, bitten his companion god, and what
else was to be expected than some terrible punishment? But in
the face of it he was indomitable. He bristled and showed his
teeth, his eyes vigilant, his whole body wary and prepared for anything.
The god had no club, so he suffered him to approach quite near.
The god’s hand had come out and was descending upon his head.
White Fang shrank together and grew tense as he crouched under it.
Here was danger, some treachery or something. He knew the hands
of the gods, their proved mastery, their cunning to hurt. Besides,
there was his old antipathy to being touched. He snarled more
menacingly, crouched still lower, and still the hand descended.
He did not want to bite the hand, and he endured the peril of it until
his instinct surged up in him, mastering him with its insatiable yearning
for life.

Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any snap
or slash. But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of
White Fang, who struck with the certainty and swiftness of a coiled
snake.

Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and
holding it tightly in his other hand. Matt uttered a great oath
and sprang to his side. White Fang crouched down, and backed away,
bristling, showing his fangs, his eyes malignant with menace.
Now he could expect a beating as fearful as any he had received from
Beauty Smith.

“Here! What are you doing?” Scott cried suddenly.

Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.

“Nothin’,” he said slowly, with a careless calmness
that was assumed, “only goin’ to keep that promise I made.
I reckon it’s up to me to kill ’m as I said I’d do.”

“No you don’t!”

“Yes I do. Watch me.”

As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was
now Weedon Scott’s turn to plead.

“You said to give him a chance. Well, give it to him.
We’ve only just started, and we can’t quit at the beginning.
It served me right, this time. And—look at him!”

White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was
snarling with blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the dog-musher.

“Well, I’ll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!” was
the dog-musher’s expression of astonishment.

“Look at the intelligence of him,” Scott went on hastily.
“He knows the meaning of firearms as well as you do. He’s
got intelligence and we’ve got to give that intelligence a chance.
Put up the gun.”

“All right, I’m willin’,” Matt agreed, leaning
the rifle against the woodpile.

“But will you look at that!” he exclaimed the next moment.

White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling. “This
is worth investigatin’. Watch.”

Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang snarled.
He stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang’s lifted lips descended,
covering his teeth.

“Now, just for fun.”

Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder.
White Fang’s snarling began with the movement, and increased as
the movement approached its culmination. But the moment before
the rifle came to a level on him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner
of the cabin. Matt stood staring along the sights at the empty
space of snow which had been occupied by White Fang.

The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked
at his employer.

“I agree with you, Mr. Scott. That dog’s too intelligent
to kill.”

### The Love-Master

As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled
to advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-four
hours had passed since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged
and held up by a sling to keep the blood out of it. In the past
White Fang had experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehended that
such a one was about to befall him. How could it be otherwise?
He had committed what was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the
holy flesh of a god, and of a white-skinned superior god at that.
In the nature of things, and of intercourse with gods, something terrible
awaited him.

The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing
dangerous in that. When the gods administered punishment they
stood on their legs. Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no
firearm. And furthermore, he himself was free. No chain
nor stick bound him. He could escape into safety while the god
was scrambling to his feet. In the meantime he would wait and
see.

The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang’s
snarl slowly dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased.
Then the god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose
on White Fang’s neck and the growl rushed up in his throat.
But the god made no hostile movement, and went on calmly talking.
For a time White Fang growled in unison with him, a correspondence of
rhythm being established between growl and voice. But the god
talked on interminably. He talked to White Fang as White Fang
had never been talked to before. He talked softly and soothingly,
with a gentleness that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang.
In spite of himself and all the pricking warnings of his instinct, White
Fang began to have confidence in this god. He had a feeling of
security that was belied by all his experience with men.

After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin.
White Fang scanned him apprehensively when he came out. He had
neither whip nor club nor weapon. Nor was his uninjured hand behind
his back hiding something. He sat down as before, in the same
spot, several feet away. He held out a small piece of meat.
White Fang pricked his ears and investigated it suspiciously, managing
to look at the same time both at the meat and the god, alert for any
overt act, his body tense and ready to spring away at the first sign
of hostility.

Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his
nose a piece of meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing
wrong. Still White Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered
to him with short inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch
it. The gods were all-wise, and there was no telling what masterful
treachery lurked behind that apparently harmless piece of meat.
In past experience, especially in dealing with squaws, meat and punishment
had often been disastrously related.

In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang’s
feet. He smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it.
While he smelled it he kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened.
He took the meat into his mouth and swallowed it. Still nothing
happened. The god was actually offering him another piece of meat.
Again he refused to take it from the hand, and again it was tossed to
him. This was repeated a number of times. But there came
a time when the god refused to toss it. He kept it in his hand
and steadfastly proffered it.

The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit,
infinitely cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time
came that he decided to eat the meat from the hand. He never took
his eyes from the god, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened
back and hair involuntarily rising and cresting on his neck. Also
a low growl rumbled in his throat as warning that he was not to be trifled
with. He ate the meat, and nothing happened. Piece by piece,
he ate all the meat, and nothing happened. Still the punishment
delayed.

He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking.
In his voice was kindness—something of which White Fang had no
experience whatever. And within him it aroused feelings which
he had likewise never experienced before. He was aware of a certain
strange satisfaction, as though some need were being gratified, as though
some void in his being were being filled. Then again came the
prod of his instinct and the warning of past experience. The gods
were ever crafty, and they had unguessed ways of attaining their ends.

Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god’s hand,
cunning to hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head.
But the god went on talking. His voice was soft and soothing.
In spite of the menacing hand, the voice inspired confidence.
And in spite of the assuring voice, the hand inspired distrust.
White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings, impulses. It seemed
he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting,
holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter-forces that struggled
within him for mastery.

He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears.
But he neither snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended.
Nearer and nearer it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding
hair. He shrank down under it. It followed down after him,
pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering,
he still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this
hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not
forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands
of men. But it was the will of the god, and he strove to submit.

The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement.
This continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under
it. And every time the hand descended, the ears flattened down
and a cavernous growl surged in his throat. White Fang growled
and growled with insistent warning. By this means he announced
that he was prepared to retaliate for any hurt he might receive.
There was no telling when the god’s ulterior motive might be disclosed.
At any moment that soft, confidence-inspiring voice might break forth
in a roar of wrath, that gentle and caressing hand transform itself
into a vice-like grip to hold him helpless and administer punishment.

But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with
non-hostile pats. White Fang experienced dual feelings.
It was distasteful to his instinct. It restrained him, opposed
the will of him toward personal liberty. And yet it was not physically
painful. On the contrary, it was even pleasant, in a physical
way. The patting movement slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing
of the ears about their bases, and the physical pleasure even increased
a little. Yet he continued to fear, and he stood on guard, expectant
of unguessed evil, alternately suffering and enjoying as one feeling
or the other came uppermost and swayed him.

“Well, I’ll be gosh-swoggled!”

So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a
pan of dirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying
the pan by the sight of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.

At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back,
snarling savagely at him.

Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.

“If you don’t mind my expressin’ my feelin’s,
Mr. Scott, I’ll make free to say you’re seventeen kinds
of a damn fool an’ all of ’em different, an’ then
some.”

Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked
over to White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long,
then slowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang’s head,
and resumed the interrupted patting. White Fang endured it, keeping
his eyes fixed suspiciously, not upon the man that patted him, but upon
the man that stood in the doorway.

“You may be a number one, tip-top minin’ expert, all
right all right,” the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly,
“but you missed the chance of your life when you was a boy an’
didn’t run off an’ join a circus.”

White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not
leap away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back
of his neck with long, soothing strokes.

It was the beginning of the end for White Fang—the ending of
the old life and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly
fairer life was dawning. It required much thinking and endless
patience on the part of Weedon Scott to accomplish this. And on
the part of White Fang it required nothing less than a revolution.
He had to ignore the urges and promptings of instinct and reason, defy
experience, give the lie to life itself.

Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much
that he now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which
he now abandoned himself. In short, when all things were considered,
he had to achieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved
at the time he came voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey Beaver
as his lord. At that time he was a mere puppy, soft from the making,
without form, ready for the thumb of circumstance to begin its work
upon him. But now it was different. The thumb of circumstance
had done its work only too well. By it he had been formed and
hardened into the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and
unlovable. To accomplish the change was like a reflux of being,
and this when the plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre
of him had become tough and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him
had made of him an adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the
face of his spirit had become iron and all his instincts and axioms
had crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.

Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance
that pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and
remoulding it into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this
thumb. He had gone to the roots of White Fang’s nature,
and with kindness touched to life potencies that had languished and
well-nigh perished. One such potency was _love_. It
took the place of _like_, which latter had been the highest feeling
that thrilled him in his intercourse with the gods.

But this love did not come in a day. It began with _like_
and out of it slowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though
he was allowed to remain loose, because he liked this new god.
This was certainly better than the life he had lived in the cage of
Beauty Smith, and it was necessary that he should have some god.
The lordship of man was a need of his nature. The seal of his
dependence on man had been set upon him in that early day when he turned
his back on the Wild and crawled to Grey Beaver’s feet to receive
the expected beating. This seal had been stamped upon him again,
and ineradicably, on his second return from the Wild, when the long
famine was over and there was fish once more in the village of Grey
Beaver.

And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott
to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained. In acknowledgment of fealty,
he proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his master’s
property. He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs slept,
and the first night-visitor to the cabin fought him off with a club
until Weedon Scott came to the rescue. But White Fang soon learned
to differentiate between thieves and honest men, to appraise the true
value of step and carriage. The man who travelled, loud-stepping,
the direct line to the cabin door, he let alone—though he watched
him vigilantly until the door opened and he received the endorsement
of the master. But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways,
peering with caution, seeking after secrecy—that was the man who
received no suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away
abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity.

Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang—or
rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang.
It was a matter of principle and conscience. He felt that the
ill done White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid.
So he went out of his way to be especially kind to the Fighting Wolf.
Each day he made it a point to caress and pet White Fang, and to do
it at length.

At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.
But there was one thing that he never outgrew—his growling.
Growl he would, from the moment the petting began till it ended.
But it was a growl with a new note in it. A stranger could not
hear this note, and to such a stranger the growling of White Fang was
an exhibition of primordial savagery, nerve-racking and blood-curdling.
But White Fang’s throat had become harsh-fibred from the making
of ferocious sounds through the many years since his first little rasp
of anger in the lair of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds
of that throat now to express the gentleness he felt. Nevertheless,
Weedon Scott’s ear and sympathy were fine enough to catch the
new note all but drowned in the fierceness—the note that was the
faintest hint of a croon of content and that none but he could hear.

As the days went by, the evolution of _like_ into _love_
was accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it,
though in his consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested
itself to him as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning
void that clamoured to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest;
and it received easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence.
At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling satisfaction.
But when away from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void
in him sprang up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the
hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.

White Fang was in the process of finding himself. In spite
of the maturity of his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould
that had formed him, his nature was undergoing an expansion. There
was a burgeoning within him of strange feelings and unwonted impulses.
His old code of conduct was changing. In the past he had liked
comfort and surcease from pain, disliked discomfort and pain, and he
had adjusted his actions accordingly. But now it was different.
Because of this new feeling within him, he ofttimes elected discomfort
and pain for the sake of his god. Thus, in the early morning,
instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would
wait for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god’s
face. At night, when the god returned home, White Fang would leave
the warm sleeping-place he had burrowed in the snow in order to receive
the friendly snap of fingers and the word of greeting. Meat, even
meat itself, he would forego to be with his god, to receive a caress
from him or to accompany him down into the town.

_Like_ had been replaced by _love_. And love was
the plummet dropped down into the deeps of him where like had never
gone. And responsive out of his deeps had come the new thing—love.
That which was given unto him did he return. This was a god indeed,
a love-god, a warm and radiant god, in whose light White Fang’s
nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.

But White Fang was not demonstrative. He was too old, too firmly
moulded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways. He
was too self-possessed, too strongly poised in his own isolation.
Too long had he cultivated reticence, aloofness, and moroseness.
He had never barked in his life, and he could not now learn to bark
a welcome when his god approached. He was never in the way, never
extravagant nor foolish in the expression of his love. He never
ran to meet his god. He waited at a distance; but he always waited,
was always there. His love partook of the nature of worship, dumb,
inarticulate, a silent adoration. Only by the steady regard of
his eyes did he express his love, and by the unceasing following with
his eyes of his god’s every movement. Also, at times, when
his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an awkward self-consciousness,
caused by the struggle of his love to express itself and his physical
inability to express it.

He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life.
It was borne in upon him that he must let his master’s dogs alone.
Yet his dominant nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash
them into an acknowledgment of his superiority and leadership.
This accomplished, he had little trouble with them. They gave
trail to him when he came and went or walked among them, and when he
asserted his will they obeyed.

In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt—as a possession of
his master. His master rarely fed him. Matt did that, it
was his business; yet White Fang divined that it was his master’s
food he ate and that it was his master who thus fed him vicariously.
Matt it was who tried to put him into the harness and make him haul
sled with the other dogs. But Matt failed. It was not until
Weedon Scott put the harness on White Fang and worked him, that he understood.
He took it as his master’s will that Matt should drive him and
work him just as he drove and worked his master’s other dogs.

Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with
runners under them. And different was the method of driving the
dogs. There was no fan-formation of the team. The dogs worked
in single file, one behind another, hauling on double traces.
And here, in the Klondike, the leader was indeed the leader. The
wisest as well as strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed
him and feared him. That White Fang should quickly gain this post
was inevitable. He could not be satisfied with less, as Matt learned
after much inconvenience and trouble. White Fang picked out the
post for himself, and Matt backed his judgment with strong language
after the experiment had been tried. But, though he worked in
the sled in the day, White Fang did not forego the guarding of his master’s
property in the night. Thus he was on duty all the time, ever
vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of all the dogs.

“Makin’ free to spit out what’s in me,” Matt
said one day, “I beg to state that you was a wise guy all right
when you paid the price you did for that dog. You clean swindled
Beauty Smith on top of pushin’ his face in with your fist.”

A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott’s grey eyes,
and he muttered savagely, “The beast!”

In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang. Without
warning, the love-master disappeared. There had been warning,
but White Fang was unversed in such things and did not understand the
packing of a grip. He remembered afterwards that his packing had
preceded the master’s disappearance; but at the time he suspected
nothing. That night he waited for the master to return.
At midnight the chill wind that blew drove him to shelter at the rear
of the cabin. There he drowsed, only half asleep, his ears keyed
for the first sound of the familiar step. But, at two in the morning,
his anxiety drove him out to the cold front stoop, where he crouched,
and waited.

But no master came. In the morning the door opened and Matt
stepped outside. White Fang gazed at him wistfully. There
was no common speech by which he might learn what he wanted to know.
The days came and went, but never the master. White Fang, who
had never known sickness in his life, became sick. He became very
sick, so sick that Matt was finally compelled to bring him inside the
cabin. Also, in writing to his employer, Matt devoted a postscript
to White Fang.

Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the
following:

“That dam wolf won’t work. Won’t eat.
Aint got no spunk left. All the dogs is licking him. Wants
to know what has become of you, and I don’t know how to tell him.
Mebbe he is going to die.”

It was as Matt had said. White Fang had ceased eating, lost
heart, and allowed every dog of the team to thrash him. In the
cabin he lay on the floor near the stove, without interest in food,
in Matt, nor in life. Matt might talk gently to him or swear at
him, it was all the same; he never did more than turn his dull eyes
upon the man, then drop his head back to its customary position on his
fore-paws.

And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and
mumbled sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang. He
had got upon his feet, his ears cocked towards the door, and he was
listening intently. A moment later, Matt heard a footstep.
The door opened, and Weedon Scott stepped in. The two men shook
hands. Then Scott looked around the room.

“Where’s the wolf?” he asked.

Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to
the stove. He had not rushed forward after the manner of other
dogs. He stood, watching and waiting.

“Holy smoke!” Matt exclaimed. “Look at ’m
wag his tail!”

Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same
time calling him. White Fang came to him, not with a great bound,
yet quickly. He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he
drew near, his eyes took on a strange expression. Something, an
incommunicable vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light
and shone forth.

“He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!”
Matt commented.

Weedon Scott did not hear. He was squatting down on his heels,
face to face with White Fang and petting him—rubbing at the roots
of the ears, making long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders,
tapping the spine gently with the balls of his fingers. And White
Fang was growling responsively, the crooning note of the growl more
pronounced than ever.

But that was not all. What of his joy, the great love in him,
ever surging and struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding
a new mode of expression. He suddenly thrust his head forward
and nudged his way in between the master’s arm and body.
And here, confined, hidden from view all except his ears, no longer
growling, he continued to nudge and snuggle.

The two men looked at each other. Scott’s eyes were shining.

“Gosh!” said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.

A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, “I
always insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at ’m!”

With the return of the love-master, White Fang’s recovery was
rapid. Two nights and a day he spent in the cabin. Then
he sallied forth. The sled-dogs had forgotten his prowess.
They remembered only the latest, which was his weakness and sickness.
At the sight of him as he came out of the cabin, they sprang upon him.

“Talk about your rough-houses,” Matt murmured gleefully,
standing in the doorway and looking on.

“Give ’m hell, you wolf! Give ’m hell!—an’
then some!”

White Fang did not need the encouragement. The return of the
love-master was enough. Life was flowing through him again, splendid
and indomitable. He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an expression
of much that he felt and that otherwise was without speech. There
could be but one ending. The team dispersed in ignominious defeat,
and it was not until after dark that the dogs came sneaking back, one
by one, by meekness and humility signifying their fealty to White Fang.

Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often.
It was the final word. He could not go beyond it. The one
thing of which he had always been particularly jealous was his head.
He had always disliked to have it touched. It was the Wild in
him, the fear of hurt and of the trap, that had given rise to the panicky
impulses to avoid contacts. It was the mandate of his instinct
that that head must be free. And now, with the love-master, his
snuggling was the deliberate act of putting himself into a position
of hopeless helplessness. It was an expression of perfect confidence,
of absolute self-surrender, as though he said: “I put myself into
thy hands. Work thou thy will with me.”

One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game
of cribbage preliminary to going to bed. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four
an’ a pair makes six,” Mat was pegging up, when there was
an outcry and sound of snarling without. They looked at each other
as they started to rise to their feet.

“The wolf’s nailed somebody,” Matt said.

A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.

“Bring a light!” Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.

Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying
on his back in the snow. His arms were folded, one above the other,
across his face and throat. Thus he was trying to shield himself
from White Fang’s teeth. And there was need for it.
White Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable
spot. From shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve,
blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms
themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood.

All this the two men saw in the first instant. The next instant
Weedon Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear.
White Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while
he quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master.

Matt helped the man to his feet. As he arose he lowered his
crossed arms, exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith. The dog-musher
let go of him precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who
has picked up live fire. Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight
and looked about him. He caught sight of White Fang and terror
rushed into his face.

At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow.
He held the lamp close to them, indicating them with his toe for his
employer’s benefit—a steel dog-chain and a stout club.

Weedon Scott saw and nodded. Not a word was spoken. The
dog-musher laid his hand on Beauty Smith’s shoulder and faced
him to the right about. No word needed to be spoken. Beauty
Smith started.

In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking
to him.

“Tried to steal you, eh? And you wouldn’t have
it! Well, well, he made a mistake, didn’t he?”

“Must ‘a’ thought he had hold of seventeen devils,”
the dog-musher sniggered.

White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled,
the hair slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing
in his throat.