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.