White Fang emerged from the car. He was astonished. The nightmare city
was gone. The car had been to him no more than a room in a house, and
when he had entered it the city had been all around him. In the
interval the city had disappeared. The roar of it no longer dinned upon
his ears. Before him was smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy
with quietude. But he had little time to marvel at the transformation.
He accepted it as he accepted all the unaccountable doings and
manifestations of the gods. It was their way.
There was a carriage waiting. A man and a woman approached the master.
The woman’s arms went out and clutched the master around the neck—a
hostile act! The next moment Weedon Scott had torn loose from the
embrace and closed with White Fang, who had become a snarling, raging
demon.
“It’s all right, mother,” Scott was saying as he kept tight hold of
White Fang and placated him. “He thought you were going to injure me,
and he wouldn’t stand for it. It’s all right. It’s all right. He’ll
learn soon enough.”
“And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog is
not around,” she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the fright.
She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared
malevolently.
“He’ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,” Scott said.
He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his voice
became firm.
“Down, sir! Down with you!”
This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White
Fang obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
“Now, mother.”
Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
“Down!” he warned. “Down!”
White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back
and watched the hostile act repeated. But no harm came of it, nor of
the embrace from the strange man-god that followed. Then the
clothes-bags were taken into the carriage, the strange gods and the
love-master followed, and White Fang pursued, now running vigilantly
behind, now bristling up to the running horses and warning them that he
was there to see that no harm befell the god they dragged so swiftly
across the earth.
At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone
gateway and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut
trees. On either side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken here
and there by great sturdy-limbed oaks. In the near distance, in
contrast with the young-green of the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields
showed tan and gold; while beyond were the tawny hills and upland
pastures. From the head of the lawn, on the first soft swell from the
valley-level, looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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