White Fang

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.