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.

****

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