[Previous page]... 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'd be everlastin'ly 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
that 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.
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 with 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.'
CHAPTER SIX.
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 in 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 injured 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 up
his ears and investigated it suspiciously, managing to look at the
same time both at the meat and the god, alert for any over tact, 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 involuntary 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 viselike 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 expressed 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, and 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 Gray 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 axio...
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