C
HAPTER
5.
T
HE
S
LEEPING
W
OLF
It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring escape of
a convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He had been ill-
made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had not been
helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of society. The
hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking sample of its
handiwork. He was a beast—a human beast, it is true, but nevertheless so
terrible a beast that he can best be characterised as carnivorous.
In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to
break his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but he
could not live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more harshly
society handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to make him
fiercer. Straight-jackets, starvation, and beatings and clubbings were the
wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but it was the treatment he received. It was
the treatment he had received from the time he was a little pulpy boy in a
San Francisco slum—soft clay in the hands of society and ready to be
formed into something.
It was during Jim Hall’s third term in prison that he encountered a guard that
was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him unfairly, lied about
him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted him. The difference between
them was that the guard carried a bunch of keys and a revolver. Jim Hall
had only his naked hands and his teeth. But he sprang upon the guard one
day and used his teeth on the other’s throat just like any jungle animal.
After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived there three
years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the roof. He never left this
cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine. Day was 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
196
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-
197
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-
198
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.
But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The
struggle had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened household
clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out an abyss of
blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through
water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle. But this,
too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of the
blackness save a heavy panting of some creature struggling sorely for air.
Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall were
flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand, cautiously
descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang had done his
work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and smashed furniture,
Dostları ilə paylaş: |