White Fang did it, trotting
away from the fort in the early morning, with the end of the stick
hanging to his neck.

He was wise. But had he been merely wise he would not have gone back to
Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him. But there was his
faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third time. 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