[Previous page]...Gray 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 Gray 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 was bristling with recognition while Gray 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 Gray
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. Gray 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 Gray Beaver. Beauty Smith started to
walk away. The thong grew taut. White Fang resisted it. Gray 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. Gray 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 Gray Beaver's camp. He owed no
allegiance to this strange and terrible god. He had given himself to
Gray Beaver, and to Gray Beaver he considered he still belonged.
But what had occurred before was repeated- with a difference. Gray
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 Gray 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 sniveling 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 Gray 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 Gray
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 had 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. Gray Beaver was his own particular
god, and, in spite of Gray Beaver's will, White Fang still clung to
him and would not give him up. Gray Beaver had betrayed and forsaken
him, but that had no effect upon him. Not for nothing had he
surrendered himself body and soul to Gray 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 at 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 Gray 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 Gray
Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim him. And this time he was
beaten even more severely than before.
Gray Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man yielded 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 on
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, Gray 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.
CHAPTER THREE.
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 from off 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 something, 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 forwa...
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