Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same time
calling him. White Fang came to him, not with a great bound, yet
quickly. He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he drew near,
his eyes took on a strange expression. Something, an incommunicable
vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light and shone forth.
“He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!” Matt
commented.
Weedon Scott did not hear. He was squatting down on his heels, face to
face with White Fang and petting him—rubbing at the roots of the ears,
making long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders, tapping
the spine gently with the balls of his fingers. And White Fang was
growling responsively, the crooning note of the growl more pronounced
than ever.
But that was not all. What of his joy, the great love in him, ever
surging and struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding a new
mode of expression. He suddenly thrust his head forward and nudged his
way in between the master’s arm and body. And here, confined, hidden
from view all except his ears, no longer growling, he continued to
nudge and snuggle.
The two men looked at each other. Scott’s eyes were shining.
“Gosh!” said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, “I always
insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at ’m!”
With the return of the love-master, White Fang’s recovery was rapid.
Two nights and a day he spent in the cabin. Then he sallied forth. The
sled-dogs had forgotten his prowess. They remembered only the latest,
which was his weakness and sickness. At the sight of him as he came out
of the cabin, they sprang upon him.
“Talk about your rough-houses,” Matt murmured gleefully, standing in
the doorway and looking on.
“Give ’m hell, you wolf! Give ’m hell!—an’ then some!”
White Fang did not need the encouragement. The return of the
love-master was enough. Life was flowing through him again, splendid
and indomitable. He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an expression
of much that he felt and that otherwise was without speech. There could
be but one ending. The team dispersed in ignominious defeat, and it was
not until after dark that the dogs came sneaking back, one by one, by
meekness and humility signifying their fealty to White Fang.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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