"Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain;

Again from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain."

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing,

not alone for himself, but for every tide- water dog, strong of muscle and with warm,

long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.

Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and

because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands

of men were rushing into the Northland.

These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles

by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.

Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley.

Judge Miller's place, it was called.

It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses

could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides.

The house was approached by gravelled driveways which wound about through wide-

spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars.

At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front.

There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-

clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape

arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches.

Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank

where Judge Miller's boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot

afternoon.

And over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born, and here he had lived the

four years of his life.

It was true, there were other dogs, There could not but be other dogs on so vast a

place, but they did not count.

They came and went, resided in the populous kennels, or lived obscurely in the recesses

of the house after the fashion of Toots, the Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the Mexican

hairless,--strange creatures that rarely

put nose out of doors or set foot to ground.

On the other hand, there were the fox terriers, a score of them at least, who

yelped fearful promises at Toots and Ysabel looking out of the windows at them and

protected by a legion of housemaids armed with brooms and mops.

But Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel- dog.

The whole realm was his.

He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge's sons; he escorted

Mollie and Alice, the Judge's daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on

wintry nights he lay at the Judge's feet

before the roaring library fire; he carried the Judge's grandsons on his back, or

rolled them in the grass, and guarded their footsteps through wild adventures down to

the fountain in the stable yard, and even

beyond, where the paddocks were, and the berry patches.

Among the terriers he stalked imperiously, and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored,

for he was king,--king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller's

place, humans included.

His father, Elmo, a huge St. Bernard, had been the Judge's inseparable companion, and

Buck bid fair to follow in the way of his father.

He was not so large,--he weighed only one hundred and forty pounds,--for his mother,

Shep, had been a Scotch shepherd dog.

Nevertheless, one hundred and forty pounds, to which was added the dignity that comes

of good living and universal respect, enabled him to carry himself in right royal

fashion.

During the four years since his puppyhood he had lived the life of a sated

aristocrat; he had a fine pride in himself, was even a trifle egotistical, as country

gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular situation.

But he had saved himself by not becoming a mere pampered house-dog.

Hunting and kindred outdoor delights had kept down the fat and hardened his muscles;

and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of water had been a tonic and a

health preserver.

And this was the manner of dog Buck was in the fall of 1897, when the Klondike strike

dragged men from all the world into the frozen North.

But Buck did not read the newspapers, and he did not know that Manuel, one of the

gardener's helpers, was an undesirable acquaintance.

Manuel had one besetting sin.

He loved to play Chinese lottery. Also, in his gambling, he had one besetting

weakness--faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain.

For to play a system requires money, while the wages of a gardener's helper do not lap

over the needs of a wife and numerous progeny.

The Judge was at a meeting of the Raisin Growers' Association, and the boys were

busy organizing an athletic club, on the memorable night of Manuel's treachery.

No one saw him and Buck go off through the orchard on what Buck imagined was merely a

stroll.

And with the exception of a solitary man, no one saw them arrive at the little flag

station known as College Park. This man talked with Manuel, and money

chinked between them.

"You might wrap up the goods before you deliver 'm," the stranger said gruffly, and

Manuel doubled a piece of stout rope around Buck's neck under the collar.

"Twist it, an' you'll choke 'm plentee," said Manuel, and the stranger grunted a

ready affirmative. Buck had accepted the rope with quiet

dignity.

To be sure, it was an unwonted performance: but he had learned to trust in men he knew,

and to give them credit for a wisdom that outreached his own.

But when the ends of the rope were placed in the stranger's hands, he growled

menacingly.

He had merely intimated his displeasure, in his pride believing that to intimate was to

command. But to his surprise the rope tightened

around his neck, shutting off his breath.

In quick rage he sprang at the man, who met him halfway, grappled him close by the

throat, and with a deft twist threw him over on his back.

Then the rope tightened mercilessly, while Buck struggled in a fury, his tongue

lolling out of his mouth and his great chest panting futilely.

Never in all his life had he been so vilely treated, and never in all his life had he

been so angry.

But his strength ebbed, his eyes glazed, and he knew nothing when the train was

flagged and the two men threw him into the baggage car.

The next he knew, he was dimly aware that his tongue was hurting and that he was

being jolted along in some kind of a conveyance.

The hoarse shriek of a locomotive whistling a crossing told him where he was.

He had travelled too often with the Judge not to know the sensation of riding in a

baggage car.

He opened his eyes, and into them came the unbridled anger of a kidnapped king.

The man sprang for his throat, but Buck was too quick for him.

His jaws closed on the hand, nor did they relax till his senses were choked out of

him once more.

"Yep, has fits," the man said, hiding his mangled hand from the baggageman, who had

been attracted by the sounds of struggle. "I'm takin' 'm up for the boss to 'Frisco.

A crack dog-doctor there thinks that he can cure 'm."

Concerning that night's ride, the man spoke most eloquently for himself, in a little

shed back of a saloon on the San Francisco water front.

"All I get is fifty for it," he grumbled; "an' I wouldn't do it over for a thousand,

cold cash."

His hand was wrapped in a bloody handkerchief, and the right trouser leg was

ripped from knee to ankle. "How much did the other mug get?" the

saloon-keeper demanded.

"A hundred," was the reply. "Wouldn't take a sou less, so help me."

"That makes a hundred and fifty," the saloon-keeper calculated; "and he's worth

it, or I'm a squarehead."

The kidnapper undid the bloody wrappings and looked at his lacerated hand.

"If I don't get the hydrophoby--" "It'll be because you was born to hang,"

laughed the saloon-keeper.

"Here, lend me a hand before you pull your freight," he added.

Dazed, suffering intolerable pain from throat and tongue, with the life half

throttled out of him, Buck attempted to face his tormentors.

But he was thrown down and choked repeatedly, till they succeeded in filing

the heavy brass collar from off his neck. Then the rope was removed, and he was flung

into a cagelike crate.

There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride.

He could not understand what it all meant. What did they want with him, these strange

men?

Why were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate?

He did not know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity.

Several times during the night he sprang to his feet when the shed door rattled open,

expecting to see the Judge, or the boys at least.

But each time it was the bulging face of the saloon-keeper that peered in at him by

the sickly light of a tallow candle.

And each time the joyful bark that trembled in Buck's throat was twisted into a savage

growl.

But the saloon-keeper let him alone, and in the morning four men entered and picked up

the crate.

More tormentors, Buck decided, for they were evil-looking creatures, ragged and

unkempt; and he stormed and raged at them through the bars.

They only laughed and poked sticks at him, which he promptly assailed with his teeth

till he realized that that was what they wanted.

Whereupon he lay down sullenly and allowed the crate to be lifted into a wagon.

Then he, and the crate in which he was imprisoned, began a passage through many

hands.

Clerks in the express office took charge of him; he was carted about in another wagon;

a truck carried him, with an assortment of boxes and parcels, upon a ferry steamer; he

was trucked off the steamer into a great

railway depot, and finally he was deposited in an express car.

For two days and nights this express car was dragged along at the tail of shrieking

locomotives; and for two days and nights Buck neither ate nor drank.

In his anger he had met the first advances of the express messengers with growls, and

they had retaliated by teasing him.

When he flung himself against the bars, quivering and frothing, they laughed at him

and taunted him.

They growled and barked like detestable dogs, mewed, and flapped their arms and

crowed.

It was all very silly, he knew; but therefore the more outrage to his dignity,

and his anger waxed and waxed.

He did not mind the hunger so much, but the lack of water caused him severe suffering

and fanned his wrath to fever-pitch.

For that matter, high-strung and finely sensitive, the ill treatment had flung him

into a fever, which was fed by the inflammation of his parched and swollen

throat and tongue.

He was glad for one thing: the rope was off his neck.

That had given them an unfair advantage; but now that it was off, he would show

them.

They would never get another rope around his neck.

Upon that he was resolved.

For two days and nights he neither ate nor drank, and during those two days and nights

of torment, he accumulated a fund of wrath that boded ill for whoever first fell foul

of him.

His eyes turned blood-shot, and he was metamorphosed into a raging fiend.

So changed was he that the Judge himself would not have recognized him; and the

express messengers breathed with relief when they bundled him off the train at

Seattle.

Four men gingerly carried the crate from the wagon into a small, high-walled back

yard.

A stout man, with a red sweater that sagged generously at the neck, came out and signed

the book for the driver.

That was the man, Buck divined, the next tormentor, and he hurled himself savagely

against the bars. The man smiled grimly, and brought a

hatchet and a club.

"You ain't going to take him out now?" the driver asked.

"Sure," the man replied, driving the hatchet into the crate for a pry.

There was an instantaneous scattering of the four men who had carried it in, and

from safe perches on top the wall they prepared to watch the performance.

Buck rushed at the splintering wood, sinking his teeth into it, surging and

wrestling with it.

Wherever the hatchet fell on the outside, he was there on the inside, snarling and

growling, as furiously anxious to get out as the man in the red sweater was calmly

intent on getting him out.

"Now, you red-eyed devil," he said, when he had made an opening sufficient for the

passage of Buck's body. At the same time he dropped the hatchet and

shifted the club to his right hand.

And Buck was truly a red-eyed devil, as he drew himself together for the spring, hair

bristling, mouth foaming, a mad glitter in his blood-shot eyes.

Straight at the man he launched his one hundred and forty pounds of fury,

surcharged with the pent passion of two days and nights.