In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered. The master’s voice was sufficient.By it White Fang knew whether he did right or not.By it he trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions.It was the compass by which he steered and learned to chart the manners of a new land and life.
In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog. All other animals lived in the Wild,and were, when not too formidable, lawful spoil for any dog.All his days White Fang had foraged among the live things for food.It did not enter his head that in the Southland it was otherwise.But this he was to learn early in his residence in Santa Clara Valley.Sauntering around the corner of the house in the early morning,he came upon a chicken that had escaped from the chicken-yard.White Fang’s natural impulse was to eat it. A couple of bounds,a flash of teeth and a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the adventurous fowl.It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked his chops and decided that such fare was good.
Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the stables.One of the grooms ran to the rescue. He did not know White Fang’s breed,so for weapon he took a light buggy-whip. At the first cut of the whip,White Fang left the chicken for the man. A club might have stopped White Fang, but not a whip.Silently, without flinching, he took a second cut in his forward rush,and as he leaped for the throat the groom cried out, “My God!” and staggered backward. He dropped the whip and shielded his throat with his arms. In consequence,his forearm was ripped open to the bone.
The man was badly frightened. It was not so much White Fang’s ferocity as it was his silence that unnerved the groom.Still protecting his throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm,he tried to retreat to the barn. And it would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared on the scene.As she had saved Dick’s life, she now saved the groom’s.She rushed upon White Fang in frenzied wrath. She had been right.She had known better than the blundering gods. All her suspicions were justified.Here was the ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.
The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before Collie’s wicked teeth,or presented his shoulder to them and circled round and round. But Collie did not give over,as was her wont, after a decent interval of chastisement. On the contrary,she grew more excited and angry every moment, until, in the end,White Fang flung dignity to the winds and frankly fled away from her across the fields.
“He’ll learn to leave chickens alone,” the master said.“But I can’t give him the lesson until I catch him in the act.”
Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than the master had anticipated.White Fang had observed closely the chicken-yards and the habits of the chickens.In the night-time, after they had gone to roost,he climbed to the top of a pile of newly hauled lumber.From there he gained the roof of a chicken-house,passed over the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside. A moment later he was inside the house, and the slaughter began.
In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white Leghorn hens,laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes. He whistled to himself, softly,first with surprise, and then, at the end, with admiration.His eyes were likewise greeted by White Fang,but about the latter there were no signs of shame nor guilt. He carried himself with pride,as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious.There was about him no consciousness of sin.The master’s lips tightened as he faced the disagreeable task.Then he talked harshly to the unwitting culprit,and in his voice there was nothing but godlike wrath. Also,he held White Fang’s nose down to the slain hens, and at the same time cuffed him soundly.
White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again. It was against the law, and he had learned it.Then the master took him into the chicken-yards. White Fang’s natural impulse,when he saw the live food fluttering about him and under his very nose, was to spring upon it.He obeyed the impulse, but was checked by the master’s voice.They continued in the yards for half an hour. Time and again the impulse surged over White Fang,and each time, as he yielded to it, he was checked by the master’s voice.Thus it was he learned the law, and ere he left the domain of the chickens,he had learned to ignore their existence.
“You can never cure a chicken-killer.” Judge Scott shook his head sadly at luncheon table,when his son narrated the lesson he had given White Fang.“Once they’ve got the habit and the taste of blood . . .” Again he shook his head sadly.
But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he challenged finally.“I’ll lock White Fang in with the chickens all afternoon.”
“But think of the chickens,” objected the judge.
“And furthermore,” the son went on, “for every chicken he kills,I’ll pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.”
“But you should penalise father, too,” interposed Beth.
Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around the table.Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
“All right.” Weedon Scott pondered for a moment. “And if,at the end of the afternoon White Fang hasn’t harmed a chicken,for every ten minutes of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to say to him,gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were sitting on the bench and solemnly passing judgment,‘White Fang, you are smarter than I thought.’”
From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance. But it was a fizzle.Locked in the yard and there deserted by the master, White Fang lay down and went to sleep.Once he got up and walked over to the trough for a drink of water. The chickens he calmly ignored.So far as he was concerned they did not exist. At four o’clock he executed a running jump,gained the roof of the chicken-house and leaped to the ground outside,whence he sauntered gravely to the house. He had learned the law. And on the porch,before the delighted family, Judge Scott, face to face with White Fang, said slowly and solemnly,sixteen times, “White Fang, you are smarter than I thought.”
But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and often brought him into disgrace.He had to learn that he must not touch the chickens that belonged to other gods.Then there were cats, and rabbits, and turkeys; all these he must let alone. In fact,when he had but partly learned the law,his impression was that he must leave all live things alone. Out in the back-pasture,a quail could flutter up under his nose unharmed.All tense and trembling with eagerness and desire, he mastered his instinct and stood still. He was obeying the will of the gods.
And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a jackrabbit and run it.The master himself was looking on and did not interfere. Nay,he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase.And thus he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits.In the end he worked out the complete law.Between him and all domestic animals there must be no hostilities. If not amity,at least neutrality must obtain. But the other animals—the squirrels, and quail, and cottontails,were creatures of the Wild who had never yielded allegiance to man.They were the lawful prey of any dog. It was only the tame that the gods protected,and between the tame deadly strife was not permitted.The gods held the power of life and death over their subjects,and the gods were jealous of their power.
Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of the Northland.And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation was control,restraint—a poise of self that was as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel.Life had a thousand faces, and White Fang found he must meet them all—thus, when he went to town,in to San Jose, running behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage stopped.Life flowed past him, deep and wide and varied, continually impinging upon his senses,demanding of him instant and endless adjustments and correspondences, and compelling him,almost always, to suppress his natural impulses.
There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach. This meat he must not touch.There were cats at the houses the master visited that must be let alone.And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him and that he must not attack. And then,on the crowded sidewalks there were persons innumerable whose attention he attracted.They would stop and look at him, point him out to one another, examine him, talk of him, and,worst of all, pat him. And these perilous contacts from all these strange hands he must endure.Yet this endurance he achieved. Furthermore, he got over being awkward and self-conscious.In a lofty way he received the attentions of the multitudes of strange gods.With condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other hand,there was something about him that prevented great familiarity.They patted him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own daring.
But it was not all easy for White Fang. Running behind the carriage in the outskirts of San Jose,he encountered certain small boys who made a practice of flinging stones at him.Yet he knew that it was not permitted him to pursue and drag them down.Here he was compelled to violate his instinct of self-preservation, and violate it he did,for he was becoming tame and qualifying himself for civilisation.
Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement.He had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play.But there is a certain sense of equity that resides in life,and it was this sense in him that resented the unfairness of his being permitted no defence against the stone-throwers.He forgot that in the covenant entered into between him and the gods they were pledged to care for him and defend him.But one day the master sprang from the carriage, whip in hand,and gave the stone-throwers a thrashing. After that they threw stones no more,and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
One other experience of similar nature was his. On the way to town,hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads,were three dogs that made a practice of rushing out upon him when he went by.Knowing his deadly method of fighting, the master had never ceased impressing upon White Fang the law that he must not fight.As a result, having learned the lesson well,White Fang was hard put whenever he passed the cross-roads saloon. After the first rush, each time,his snarl kept the three dogs at a distance but they trailed along behind,yelping and bickering and insulting him. This endured for some time.The men at the saloon even urged the dogs on to attack White Fang.One day they openly sicked the dogs on him. The master stopped the carriage.
“Go to it,” he said to White Fang.
But White Fang could not believe. He looked at the master, and he looked at the dogs.Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at the master.
The master nodded his head. “Go to them, old fellow. Eat them up.”
White Fang no longer hesitated. He turned and leaped silently among his enemies.All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling,a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies.The dust of the road arose in a cloud and screened the battle.But at the end of several minutes two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight.He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field. White Fang followed,sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed, swiftly and without noise,and in the centre of the field he dragged down and slew the dog.
With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word went up and down the valley,and men saw to it that their dogs did not molest the Fighting Wolf.
CHAPTER IV THE CALL OF KIND
The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the Southland,and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone was he in the geographical Southland,for he was in the Southland of life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him,and he flourished like a flower planted in good soil.
And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs.He knew the law even better than did the dogs that had known no other life,and he observed the law more punctiliously;but still there was about him a suggestion of lurking ferocity,as though the Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.
He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his kind was concerned,and lonely he would continue to live. In his puppyhood,under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in his fighting days with Beauty Smith,he had acquired a fixed aversion for dogs. The natural course of his life had been 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 hounds, and,if he even so much as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken,bursting into an outcry of indignation and wrath.His favourite way of ignoring her was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws,and pretend sleep. This always dumfounded 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 very 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,and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour 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 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.