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
6