White Fang
became frightened and backed and plunged away. It grew more nervous and
excited every moment. When it reared, the master put the spurs to it
and made it drop its fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it would begin
kicking with its hind-legs. White Fang watched the performance with
increasing anxiety until he could contain himself no longer, when he
sprang in front of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged
him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master’s
presence. A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly
under the horse’s feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth,
and a broken leg for the master, was the cause of it. White Fang sprang
in a rage at the throat of the offending horse, but was checked by the
master’s voice.
“Home! Go home!” the master commanded when he had ascertained his
injury.
White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of writing
a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper. Again he
commanded White Fang to go home.
The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
whined softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he
cocked his ears, and listened with painful intentness.
“That’s all right, old fellow, you just run along home,” ran the talk.
“Go on home and tell them what’s happened to me. Home with you, you
wolf. Get along home!”
White Fang knew the meaning of “home,” and though he did not understand
the remainder of the master’s language, he knew it was his will that he
should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he
stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
“Go home!” came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when
White Fang arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
“Weedon’s back,” Weedon’s mother announced.
The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet him.
He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him
against a rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to push
by them. Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
“I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,” she said. “I have
a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day.”
Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning the
boy and the girl. The mother called them to her and comforted them,
telling them not to bother White Fang.
“A wolf is a wolf!” commented Judge Scott. “There is no trusting one.”
“But he is not all wolf,” interposed Beth, standing for her brother in
his absence.
“You have only Weedon’s opinion for that,” rejoined the judge. “He
merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but as
he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his
appearance—”
He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him, growling
fiercely.
“Go away! Lie down, sir!” Judge Scott commanded.
White Fang turned to the love-master’s wife. She screamed with fright
as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail
fabric tore away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.
He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their
faces. His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he
struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself
of the incommunicable something that strained for utterance.
“I hope he is not going mad,” said Weedon’s mother. “I told Weedon that
I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic animal.”
“He’s trying to speak, I do believe,” Beth announced.
At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst
of barking.
“Something has happened to Weedon,” his wife said decisively.
They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
looking back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his
life he had barked and made himself understood.
After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra
Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that
he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held to the
same opinion, and proved it to everybody’s dissatisfaction by
measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various
works on natural history.
The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
Santa Clara Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang’s second
winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie’s
teeth were no longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and
a gentleness that prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot
that she had made life a burden to him, and when she disported herself
around him he responded solemnly, striving to be playful and becoming
no more than ridiculous.
One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land
into the woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and
White Fang knew it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door.
White Fang hesitated. But there was that in him deeper than all the law
he had learned, than the customs that had moulded him, than his love
for the master, than the very will to live of himself; and when, in the
moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and scampered off, he
turned and followed after. The master rode alone that day; and in the
woods, side by side, White Fang ran with Collie, as his mother, Kiche,
and old One Eye had run long years before in the silent Northland
forest.
CHAPTER V
THE SLEEPING WOLF
It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring
escape of a convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He
had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had
not been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of
society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking
sample of its handiwork. He was a beast—a human beast, it is true, but
nevertheless so terrible a beast that he can best be characterised as
carnivorous.
In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to
break his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but
he could not live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more
harshly society handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to
make him fiercer. Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and
clubbings were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but it was the
treatment he received. It was the treatment he had received from the
time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum—soft clay in the
hands of society and ready to be formed into something.
It was during Jim Hall’s third term in prison that he encountered a
guard that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him
unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted
him. The difference between them was that the guard carried a bunch of
keys and a revolver. Jim Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth.
But he sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth on the other’s
throat just like any jungle animal.
After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived
there three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the
roof. He never left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine.
Day was a twilight and night was a black silence. He was in an iron
tomb, buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When
his food was shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal. He hated
all things. For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe.
For weeks and months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating
his very soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of
fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
And then, one night, he escaped. The warders said it was impossible,
but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the
body of a dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through
the prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to
avoid noise.
He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards—a live arsenal that
fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society. A
heavy price of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him
with shot-guns. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to
college. Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went out
after him. A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his bleeding feet.
And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid fighting animals of society,
with telephone, and telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail
night and day.
Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or
stampeded through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth
reading the account at the breakfast table. It was after such
encounters that the dead and wounded were carted back to the towns, and
their places filled by men eager for the man-hunt.
And then Jim Hall disappeared. The bloodhounds vainly quested on the
lost trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by
armed men and compelled to identify themselves; while the remains of
Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountain-sides by greedy claimants
for blood-money.
In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much
with interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. Judge Scott
pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last
days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and received
sentence. And in open court-room, before all men, Jim Hall had
proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak vengeance on the
Judge that sentenced him.
For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he
was sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and police, of
“rail-roading.” Jim Hall was being “rail-roaded” to prison for a crime
he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions against him,
Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was
party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and
perjured, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim
Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely
ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and was
hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous
injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was
uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society
that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged
down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott
was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he
emptied the vials of his wrath and hurled the threats of his revenge
yet to come. Then Jim Hall went to his living death . . . and escaped.
Of all this White Fang knew nothing. But between him and Alice, the
master’s wife, there existed a secret. Each night, after Sierra Vista
had gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep in the big
hall. Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep
in the house; so each morning, early, she slipped down and let him out
before the family was awake.
On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay
very quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message
it bore of a strange god’s presence. And to his ears came sounds of the
strange god’s movements. White Fang burst into no furious outcry. It