Again he yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck by Grey Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim him.
And this time he was beaten even more severely than before.
Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip.
He gave no protection.
It was no longer his dog.
When the beating was over White Fang was sick.
A soft southland dog would have died under it, but not he.
His school of life had been sterner, and he was himself of sterner stuff.
He had too great vitality. His clutch on life was too strong.
But he was very sick.
At first he was unable to drag himself along, and Beauty Smith had to wait half-an-hour for him.
And then, blind and reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith’s heels back to the fort.
But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove in vain, by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it was driven.
After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver departed up the Porcupine on his long journey to the Mackenzie.
White Fang remained on the Yukon, the property of a man more than half mad and all brute.
But what is a dog to know in its consciousness of madness?
To White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible, god.
He was a mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of madness; he knew only that he must submit to the will of this new master, obey his every whim and fancy.
CHAPTER III—THE REIGN OF HATE
Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend.
He was kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty Smith teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments.
The man early discovered White Fang’s susceptibility to laughter, and made it a point after painfully tricking him, to laugh at him.
This laughter was uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the god pointed his finger derisively at White Fang.
At such times reason fled from White Fang, and in his transports of rage he was even more mad than Beauty Smith.
Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal a ferocious enemy.
He now became the enemy of all things, and more ferocious than ever.
To such an extent was he tormented, that he hated blindly and without the faintest spark of reason.
He hated the chain that bound him, the men who peered in at him through the slats of the pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that snarled malignantly at him in his helplessness.
He hated the very wood of the pen that confined him.
And, first, last, and most of all, he hated Beauty Smith.
But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang.
One day a number of men gathered about the pen.
Beauty Smith entered, club in hand, and took the chain off from White Fang’s neck.
When his master had gone out, White Fang turned loose and tore around the pen, trying to get at the men outside.
He was magnificently terrible.
Fully five feet in length, and standing two and one-half feet at the shoulder, he far outweighed a wolf of corresponding size.
From his mother he had inherited the heavier proportions of the dog, so that he weighed, without any fat and without an ounce of superfluous flesh, over ninety pounds.
It was all muscle, bone, and sinew-fighting flesh in the finest condition.
The door of the pen was being opened again.
White Fang paused.
Something unusual was happening. He waited.
The door was opened wider.
Then a huge dog was thrust inside, and the door was slammed shut behind him.
White Fang had never seen such a dog (it was a mastiff); but the size and fierce aspect of the intruder did not deter him.
Here was some thing, not wood nor iron, upon which to wreak his hate.
He leaped in with a flash of fangs that ripped down the side of the mastiff’s neck.
The mastiff shook his head, growled hoarsely, and plunged at White Fang.
But White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always evading and eluding, and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and leaping out again in time to escape punishment.
The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an ecstasy of delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed by White Fang.
There was no hope for the mastiff from the first. He was too ponderous and slow. In the end, while Beauty Smith beat White Fang back with a club, the mastiff was dragged out by its owner.