As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled andsnarled to advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-fourhours had passed since he had slashed open the hand that was nowbandaged and held up by a sling to keep the blood out of it. In the pastWhite Fang had experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehendedthat such a one was about to befall him. How could it be otherwise? Hehad committed what was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the holyflesh of a god, and of a white-skinned superior god at that. In the nature ofthings, and of intercourse with gods, something terrible awaited him.

　　The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothingdangerous in that. When the gods administered punishment they stood ontheir legs. Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no firearm. Andfurthermore, he himself was free. No chain nor stick bound him. He couldescape into safety while the god was scrambling to his feet. In themeantime he would wait and see.

　　The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang's snarlslowly dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased. Thenthe god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on WhiteFang's neck and the growl rushed up in his throat. But the god made nohostile movement, and went on calmly talking. For a time White Fanggrowled in unison with him, a correspondence of rhythm being establishedbetween growl and voice. But the god talked on interminably. He talked toWhite Fang as White Fang had never been talked to before. He talkedsoftly and soothingly, with a gentleness that somehow, somewhere,touched White Fang. In spite of himself and all the pricking warnings ofhis instinct, White Fang began to have confidence in this god. He had afeeling of security that was belied by all his experience with men.

　　After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin. White Fangscanned him apprehensively when he came out. He had neither whip norclub nor weapon. Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hidingsomething. He sat down as before, in the same spot, several feet away. Heheld out a small piece of meat. White Fang pricked his ears andinvestigated it suspiciously, managing to look at the same time both at themeat and the god, alert for any overt act, his body tense and ready tospring away at the first sign of hostility.

　　Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his nose apiece of meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong. StillWhite Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him withshort inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch it. The gods were all-wise, and there was no telling what masterful treachery lurked behind thatapparently harmless piece of meat. In past experience, especially indealing with squaws, meat and punishment had often been disastrouslyrelated.

　　In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang's feet.

　　He smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it. While he smelledit he kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened. He took the meat intohis mouth and swallowed it. Still nothing happened. The god was actuallyoffering him another piece of meat. Again he refused to take it from thehand, and again it was tossed to him. This was repeated a number of times.

　　But there came a time when the god refused to toss it. He kept it in hishand and steadfastly proffered it.

　　The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit,infinitely cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time came that hedecided to eat the meat from the hand. He never took his eyes from thegod, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened back and hairinvoluntarily rising and cresting on his neck. Also a low growl rumbled inhis throat as warning that he was not to be trifled with. He ate the meat,and nothing happened. Piece by piece, he ate all the meat, and nothinghappened. Still the punishment delayed.

　　He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking. In his voicewas kindness - something of which White Fang had no experiencewhatever. And within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise neverexperienced before. He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, asthough some need were being gratified, as though some void in his beingwere being filled. Then again came the prod of his instinct and thewarning of past experience. The gods were ever crafty, and they hadunguessed ways of attaining their ends.

　　Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god's hand, cunning tohurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head. But the god went ontalking. His voice was soft and soothing. In spite of the menacing hand,the voice inspired confidence. And in spite of the assuring voice, the handinspired distrust. White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings, impulses. Itseemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting,holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter-forces thatstruggled within him for mastery.

　　He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears. But heneither snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended. Nearer and nearerit came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down underit. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him.

　　Shrinking, almost shivering, he still managed to hold himself together. Itwas a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. Hecould not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at thehands 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. Andevery time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a cavernousgrowl surged in his throat. White Fang growled and growled with insistentwarning. By this means he announced that he was prepared to retaliate forany hurt he might receive. There was no telling when the god's ulteriormotive might be disclosed. At any moment that soft, confidence-inspiringvoice might break forth in a roar of wrath, that gentle and caressing handtransform itself into a vice-like grip to hold him helpless and administerpunishment.

　　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 hisinstinct. It restrained him, opposed the will of him toward personal liberty.

　　And yet it was not physically painful. On the contrary, it was evenpleasant, in a physical way. The patting movement slowly and carefullychanged to a rubbing of the ears about their bases, and the physicalpleasure even increased a little. Yet he continued to fear, and he stood onguard, expectant of unguessed evil, alternately suffering and enjoying asone 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 ofdirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan by thesight 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 freeto 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 walkedover to White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, thenslowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang's head, and resumed theinterrupted patting. White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixedsuspiciously, not upon the man that patted him, but upon the man thatstood 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 chanceof 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 leapaway from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back of hisneck with long, soothing strokes.

　　It was the beginning of the end for White Fang - the ending of the oldlife and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life wasdawning. It required much thinking and endless patience on the part ofWeedon Scott to accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang itrequired nothing less than a revolution. He had to ignore the urges andpromptings 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 thathe now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he nowabandoned himself. In short, when all things were considered, he had toachieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved at the timehe 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 nowit was different. The thumb of circumstance had done its work only toowell. By it he had been formed and hardened into the Fighting Wolf, fierceand implacable, unloving and unlovable. To accomplish the change waslike a reflux of being, and this when the plasticity of youth was no longerhis; when the fibre of him had become tough and knotty; when the warpand the woof of him had made of him an adamantine texture, harsh andunyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and all hisinstincts and axioms had crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes, anddesires.

　　Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstancethat pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard andremoulding it into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb. Hehad gone to the roots of White Fang's nature, and with kindness touched tolife potencies that had languished and well-nigh perished. One suchpotency was LOVE. It took the place of LIKE, which latter had been thehighest 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 itslowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though he was allowed toremain loose, because he liked this new god. This was certainly better thanthe life he had lived in the cage of Beauty Smith, and it was necessary thathe 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 earlyday when he turned his back on the Wild and crawled to Grey Beaver'sfeet to receive the expected beating. This seal had been stamped upon himagain, and ineradicably, on his second return from the Wild, when the longfamine 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 WeedonScott to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained. In acknowledgment of fealty,he proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his master'sproperty. He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs slept, and thefirst night-visitor to the cabin fought him off with a club until WeedonScott came to the rescue. But White Fang soon learned to differentiatebetween thieves and honest men, to appraise the true value of step andcarriage. The man who travelled, loud-stepping, the direct line to the cabindoor, he let alone - though he watched him vigilantly until the door openedand he received the endorsement of the master. But the man who wentsoftly, by circuitous ways, peering with caution, seeking after secrecy -that was the man who received no suspension of judgment from WhiteFang, and who went away abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity.

　　Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang - orrather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang. Itwas a matter of principle and conscience. He felt that the ill done WhiteFang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid. So he went outof his way to be especially kind to the Fighting Wolf. Each day he made ita point to caress and pet White Fang, and to do it at length.

　　At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.

　　But there was one thing that he never outgrew - his growling. Growl hewould, from the moment the petting began till it ended. But it was a growlwith a new note in it. A stranger could not hear this note, and to such astranger the growling of White Fang was an exhibition of primordialsavagery, nerve-racking and blood-curdling. But White Fang's throat hadbecome harsh- fibred from the making of ferocious sounds through themany years since his first little rasp of anger in the lair of his cubhood, andhe could not soften the sounds of that throat now to express the gentlenesshe felt. Nevertheless, Weedon Scott's ear and sympathy were fine enoughto catch the new note all but drowned in the fierceness - the note that wasthe faintest hint of a croon of content and that none but he could hea............