the one vital point. Again it was not a process of
reason but the cumulative effect of things that had happened, and were
happening. He had scented menace when first he had given warning of the
nearness of pursuers, and this menace was no longer an elusive and
unseizable thing that had merely stirred the fires of his hatred. It
was now a near and physical fact. He had tried to run away from
it--with the woman--but it had followed and was overtaking him, and the
yelping dogs were challenging him to fight as they had challenged him
from the day he was old enough to take his own part. And now he had
something to fight for. His intelligence gripped the fact that one
sledge was running away from the other, and that the sledge which was
running away was his sledge--and that for his sledge he must fight.

He waited, almost squarely in the trail. There was no longer the
slinking, club-driven attitude of a creature at bay in the manner in
which he stood in the path of his enemies. He had risen out of his
serfdom. The stinging slash of the whip and his dread of it were gone.
Standing there in the starlight with his magnificent head thrown up and
the muscles of his huge body like corded steel, the passing spirit of
Shan Tung would have taken him for Tao, the Great Dane. He was not
excited--and yet he was filled with a mighty desire--more than that, a
tremendous purpose. The yelping excitement of the oncoming Eskimo dogs
no longer urged him to turn aside to avoid their insolent bluster, as
he would have turned aside yesterday or the day before. The voices of
his old masters no longer sent him slinking out of their way, a growl
in his throat and his body sagging with humiliation and the rage of his
slavery. He stood like a rock, his broad chest facing them squarely,
and when he saw the shadows of them racing up out of the star-mist an
eighth of a mile away, it was not a growl but a whine that rose in his
throat, a whine of low and repressed eagerness, of a great yearning
about to be fulfilled. Two hundred yards--a hundred--eighty--not until
the dogs were less than fifty from him did he move. And then, like a
rock hurled by a mighty force, he was at them.

He met the onrushing weight of the pack breast to breast. There was no
warning. Neither men nor dogs had seen the waiting shadow. The crash
sent the lead-dog back with Wapi's great fangs in his throat, and in an
instant the fourteen dogs behind had piled over them, tangled in thei