CHAPTER V--THE SLEEPING WOLF

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. Straight-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.

On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay
very quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message
it bore of a strange god's presence. And to his ears came sounds of the
strange god's movements. White Fang burst into no furious outcry. It
was not his way. The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked
White Fang, for he had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body.
He followed silently. In the Wild he had hunted live meat that was
infinitely timid, and he knew the advantage of surprise.

The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened,
and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched and
waited. 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 ascent.

Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl
anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the
spring that landed him 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 crashed to the floor. White
Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise, was in again with
the slashing fangs.

Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a
score of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man's voice
screamed once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and
growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and
glass.

But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The
struggle had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened
household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out
an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling
through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle.
But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of
the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature struggling sorely for
air.

Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall were
flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, 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 gaping 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 as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated in a
vain effort to wag. Weedon Scott patted him, and his throat rumbled an
acknowledging growl. But it was a weak growl at best, and it quickly
ceased. His eyelids drooped and went shut, and his whole body seemed to
relax and flatten out upon the floor.

"He's all in, poor devil," muttered the master.

"We'll see about that," asserted the Judge, as he started for 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 is a large likelihood of 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 that might be of help to him," Judge
Scott exclaimed. "Never mind expense. Put him under the X-ray--anything.
Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor Nichols. No
reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must have the advantage
of every chance."

The surgeon smiled indulgently. "Of course I understand. He deserves
all that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a
human being, 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 indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves
undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten
thousand denied him by the surgeon.

The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he
had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived
sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.
Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life
without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from
the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.
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 inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of
him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that
of old belonged to all creatures.

Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and
bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and
dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of
Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him.
Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees
of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip
and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.

He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the
months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips
of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying "Ra!
Raa!" when they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together
like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith
and the fights he had fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in
his sleep, and they that looked on said that his dreams were bad.

But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered--the
clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a
squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain,
screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when he
challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it would
rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric
car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside the pen,
men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He watched the
door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and thrust in
upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times this
occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as
ever.

Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were
taken off. It was a gala 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," which name was taken up with acclaim and
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 cunning,
and all the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame
because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods in
the service he owed them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to
arise and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back
and forth.

"The Blessed Wolf!" chorused the women.

Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.

"Out of your own mouths be it," he said. "Just as I contended right
along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He's a wolf."

"A Blessed Wolf," amended the Judge's wife.

"Yes, Blessed Wolf," agreed the Judge. "And henceforth that shall be my
name for him."

"He'll have to learn to walk again," said the surgeon; "so he might as
well start in right now. It won't hurt him. Take him outside."

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

Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into
White Fang's muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge through
them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway, lay Collie, a
half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.

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

The puppy sprawled 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 jowl. 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, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his weakness
asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side,
as he watched the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling toward him, to
Collie's great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to clamber and
tumble over him. At first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a
trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness. This passed away
as the puppies' antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut
patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.



***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG***