 him, but upon the man that stood in the doorway.
    »You may be a number one, tip-top minin' expert, all right all right,« the
dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, »but you missed the chance of your life
when you was a boy an' didn't run off an' join a circus.«
    White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not leap
away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back of his neck
with long, soothing strokes.
    It was the beginning of the end for White Fang - the ending of the old life
and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was dawning. It
required much thinking and endless patience on the part of Weedon Scott to
accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang it required nothing less than a
revolution. He had to ignore the urges and promptings of instinct and reason,
defy experience, give the lie to life itself.
    Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that he
now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he now
abandoned himself. In short, when all things were considered, he had to achieve
an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved at the time he came
voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Gray Beaver as his lord. At that time
he was a mere puppy, soft from the making, without form, ready for the thumb of
circumstance to begin its work upon him. But now it was different. The thumb of
circumstance had done its work only too well. By it he had been formed and
hardened into the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable.
To accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the
plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become tough
and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an adamantine
texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and
all his instincts and axioms had crystallized into set rules, cautions,
dislikes, and desires.
    Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance that
pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and remoulding it
into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb. He had gone to the roots
of White Fang's nature, and with kindness touched to life potencies that had
languished and well-nigh perished. One such potency was love
