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. He was not only in the geographical Southland, bu in the Southland of life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a flower in good soil.

And yet he was different from other dogs, as though the Wild still was in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

He never played with other dogs. He could not like them, they had always been his enemies. Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion, because he aroused in them their instinctive fear of the Wild. But he tolerated them.

But there was one problem in White Fang’s life—Collie. She never gave him a moment’s peace. She had never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and believed that his intentions were bad. She became a policeman following him everywhere. His favourite way of ignoring her was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep. This always silenced her.

With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He had learned control, and he knew the law. He achieved calmness and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived in a hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk everywhere around him.

He missed the snow without knowing it. Sometimes, when he suffered from the sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland. But it didn’t produce much effect upon him.

White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and the crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of expressing his love. Yet he discovered a third way. He had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter made him frantic with rage. But he could not be angry with the love-master, and when that god laughed at him good-naturedly, he was tolerant. He could feel the stinging of the old anger as it rose up in him, but it fought against love. He could not be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he was dignified, and the master laughed more. Then he tried to be more dignified, and the master laughed more 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—more love than humour—came into his eyes. He had learned to laugh.

Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return he pretended to be angry, bristling, growling, clipping his teeth together. But he never forgot himself. Those snaps were always on the empty air. At the end of such a romp, they broke off suddenly and stood several feet apart, looking at each other. And then, just as suddenly they began to laugh. Then the master embraced him, while White Fang crooned 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 not playful. The fact that he allowed the master these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving here and loving there. He loved only one person, wholeheartedly, and refused to cheapen himself or his love.

The master went out on horseback a lot, and to accompany him was one of White Fang’s main duties. There were no sleds in the Southland, and he could not be a sled-dog, so he showed his loyalty in the new way, by running with the master’s horse.

Once the master was trying to teach his horse the method of opening and closing gates without the rider’s dismounting. 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 away. It grew more nervous and excited every moment. White Fang watched anxiously until he could contain himself no longer, so he sprang in front of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.

The horse ran across the pasture. Suddenly a jackrabbit leaped under its feet. The horse stumbled, the master fell and apparently broke his leg. White Fang sprang in a rage at the throat of the offending horse, but was stopped by the master’s voice.

“Home! Go home!” the master commanded.

White Fang did not want to leave. The master thought of writing a note, but had no pencil and paper in his pockets. Again he commanded White Fang to go home.

The latter regarded him wistfully, started going, then returned and whined softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he listened with painful attention.

“That’s all right, old fellow, you just run home. Go home and tell them what’s happened to me. Home with you, you wolf. Go home!”

White Fang knew the meaning of “home” and he knew it was the master’s will that he should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he stopped and looked back over his shoulder.

“Go home!” came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.

The family was on the porch, when White Fang arrived. He came to 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 blocked his way. He growled and tried to push by them.

“I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,” their mother said. “I fear that he will hurt them unexpectedly someday.”

Growling savagely, White Fang sprang, overturning the boy and the girl. The mother called them and comforted them, telling them not to bother White Fang.

“A wolf is a wolf!” commented Judge Scott.

“But he is not all wolf,” objected Beth, standing for her brother in his absence.

“He just supposes that there is some part of dog in White Fang; but he knows nothing about it,” said the judge. “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 fabric tore away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.

He had ceased growling and stood, head up, looking into their faces. His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he tried to verbalize something.

“I hope he is not going mad,” said Weedon’s mother. “I told Weedon that I was afraid the warm climate would be bad for an Arctic animal.”

“He’s trying to speak, I believe,” Beth announced.

At this moment speech came to White Fang, and he barked.

“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.

As 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, and she did not hurt him anymore. He forgot that she had been his biggest problem, and when she ran and played around him he tried to be playful and becoming no more than ridiculous.

One day she led him off on a long chase 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 a thing deeper than all the laws he had learned, than his love for the master, than the very will to live. When, in the moment of his hesitation, Collie called him, 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 wrote of the escape of a convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He was born mad, and his life made him even madder. In short, he was a beast.

Punishment failed to break his spirit. Its only effect was to make him fiercer. Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings 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 boy in San Francisco—soft clay in the hands of society.

In prison Jim Hall killed a guard who had treated him cruelly. After this, he lived in the separate cell for three years. He never left this cell. He never saw the sky or the sunshine. He was buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no one. He hated all things. For weeks and months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating his very soul.

And then he escaped. He killed more guards to do so, and he took their weapons. A price of gold was upon his head. Farmers, bloodhounds, detectives—all tried to find him. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to college. Sometimes people saw him, and tried to catch, but in vain.

And then Jim Hall disappeared. In the meantime the newspapers at Sierra Vista were read not so much with interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. And Judge Scott knew that in his last days of his work as judge Jim Hall had stood before him and received sentence. And in open court-room, before all men, Jim Hall had promised that the day would come when he would revenge the Judge that sentenced him.

For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he was sentenced. It was “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 the evidence was faked, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim Hall, on the other hand, did not know that

Judge Scott was ignorant. To him, Judge Scott was the main figure there.

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. White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep in the house; so each morning, early, she came down and let him out before the family was awake.

On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay very quietly. And very quietly he smelled a strange god’s presence. And to his ears came sounds of the strange god’s movements. White Fang did not make a sound, it wasn’t his style. The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked White Fang. He followed silently. He knew the advantage of surprise.

The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened. Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the love-master’s dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The strange god’s foot lifted. He was beginning the go upstairs.

Then White Fang struck. He gave no warning, no snarl. He leaped and landed on the strange god’s back. White Fang clung with his fore-paws to the man’s shoulders, at the same time burying his fangs into the back of the man’s neck. He clung on for a moment, long enough to drag the god over backward. Together they fell on the floor. White Fang leaped aside, and, as the man struggled to rise, leaped again with the slashing fangs.

Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. There were revolver shots. A man’s voice screamed once in horror. There was a great snarling and growling, and crashing of furniture and glass.

But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the noise died away. The struggle had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened household gathered at the top of the staircase.

Weedon Scott turned on the light. Then he and Judge Scott, with revolvers in hand, cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man’s face upward. A wound in the throat explained the manner of his death.

“Jim Hall,” said Judge Scott, and father and son looked significantly at each other.

Then they turned to White Fang. He, too, was lying on his side. His eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look at them when they bent over him, and the tail was made a vain effort to wag. Weedon Scott patted him, and he gave an acknowledging growl. But it was a weak growl, and it quickly ceased. His eyes closed, and his whole body relaxed upon the floor.

“He’s dying, poor devil,” muttered the master.

“We’ll see about that,” said the Judge, as he went to the telephone.

“Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,” announced the surgeon, after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.

Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights. With the exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about the surgeon to hear his verdict.

“One broken hind-leg,” he went on. “Three broken ribs, one at least of which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his body. There can be internal injuries. He must have been jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through him. One chance in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn’t a chance in ten thousand.”

“But he mustn’t lose any chance,” Judge Scott exclaimed. “Never mind expense. Put him under the X-ray—anything. Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor Nichols. I hope you understand, doctor; he must have the advantage of every chance.”

The surgeon smiled. “Of course I understand. He deserves all that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a sick child. And don’t forget what I told you about temperature. I’ll be back at ten o’clock again.”

White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott’s suggestion of a trained nurse was declined by the girls, who took care of him themselves. And White Fang won his one chance in ten thousand which the surgeon had not given to him.

The surgeon should not be criticised for his misjudgement. All his life he had threated soft creatures of civilisation. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak die early. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang’s heritage, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh.

In plaster casts and bandages, White Fang slept a lot and dreamed much. All the ghosts of the past were with him. Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept to the knees of Grey Beaver to express his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip and all the puppy-pack, ran again through the silence, hunting in the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, with Mit-sah and Grey Beaver behind. He lived again with Beauty Smith, he fought and won. At such times he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and people said that his dreams were bad.

But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered—the monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal screaming lynxes. He lay in the bushes, waiting for a squirrel to come closer. Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an electric car. It was the same when he watched the hawk in the sky. It dropped upon him changing itself into the terrible, clanging electric car. Or again, he was in the pen of Beauty Smith. He waited for his antagonist to enter. The door opened, and there was the awful electric car. A thousand times this happened, and each time the terror was as great as ever.

Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were taken off. It was a great day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master’s wife called him the “Blessed Wolf,” and then all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.

He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their strength. He felt a little shame because of his weakness. So of this he made heroic efforts to arise and at last he stood on his four legs, swaying back and forth.

“The Blessed Wolf!” cried the women.

Judge Scott looked at them triumphantly. “Yes, no dog could have done what he did. He’s a wolf, as I’ve said.”

“A Blessed Wolf,” said Judge’s wife.

“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed he. “And since now that shall be my name for him.”

“He’ll have to learn to walk again,” said the surgeon; “so he can start right now. It won’t hurt him. Take him outside.”

And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista beside him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay down and rested for a while.

Then the procession went on. Strength was coming back to White Fang. They came to the stables, and there in the doorway lay Collie, with a half-dozen puppies playing about her in the sun.

White Fang looked and wondered. Collie snarled warningly at him, and he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe helped one puppy to go toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him that all was well. Collie, in the arms of one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.

The puppy stopped in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue of the puppy on his chops. White Fang’s tongue went out, he knew not why, and he licked the puppy’s face.

Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance. He was surprised at it.

Then his weakness mastered him, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side, while he watched the puppy. The other puppies came toward him, to Collie’s great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to climb on him. And so he lay with half-closed patient eyes, dozing in the sun.