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.