[Previous page]...n diverted,
and, recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He
aroused in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted
him always with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the
other hand, learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon
them. His naked fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious,
rarely failing to send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its
haunches.
But there was one trial in White Fang's life- Collie. She never gave
him a moment's peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She
defied all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White
Fang. Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She
had never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently
held to the belief that his intentions were bad. She found him
guilty before the act, and treated him accordingly. She became a
pest to him, like a policeman following him around the stable and
the grounds, and, if he even so much as glanced curiously at a
pigeon or chicken, bursting into an outcry of indignation and wrath.
His favorite way of ignoring her was to lie down, with his head on his
forepaws, and pretend sleep. This always dumbfounded and silenced her.
With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White
Fang. He had learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He
achieved a staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no
longer lived in a hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did
not lurk everywhere about him. In time, the unknown, as a thing of
terror and menace ever impending, faded away. Life was soft and
easy. It flowed along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by the
way.
He missed the snow without being aware of it. 'An unduly long
summer' would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it
was, he merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the
same fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from
the sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland. Their only
effect upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless
without his knowing what was the matter.
White Fang had never been demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and
the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way
of expressing his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third
way. He had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods.
Laughter had affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage.
But he did not have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and
when that god elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering
way, he was nonplussed. He could feel the pricking and stinging of the
old anger as it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against
love. He could not be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he
was dignified, and the master laughed the harder. Then he tried to
be more dignified, and the master laughed harder than before. In the
end, the master laughed him out of his dignity. His jaws slightly
parted, his lips lifted a little, a quizzical expression that was more
love than humor came into his eyes. He had learned to laugh.
Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down
and rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In
return he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and
clipping his teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of
deadly intention. But he never forgot himself. Those snaps were always
delivered on the empty air. At the end of such a romp, when blow and
cuff and snap and snarl were fast and furious, they would break off
suddenly and stand several feet apart, glaring at each other. And
then, just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they
would begin to laugh. This would always culminate with the master's
arms going around White Fang's neck and shoulders while the latter
crooned and growled his love-song.
But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it.
He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl
and bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the
master these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog,
loving here and loving there, everybody's property for a romp and good
time. He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his
love.
The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany
him was one of White Fang's chief duties in life. In the Northland
he had evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there
were no sleds in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their
backs. So he rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the
master's horse. The longest day never played White Fang out. His was
the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless, and effortless, and at the end
of fifty miles he would come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
other mode of expression- remarkable in that he did it but twice in
all his life. The first time occurred when the master was trying to
teach a spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing
gates without the rider's dismounting. Time and again and many times
he ranged the horse up to the gate in the effort to close it, and each
time the horse 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 forelegs 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 were 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 the 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 center 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 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 encyclopedia 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 and
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 FIVE.
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
characterized 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 c...
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