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,