s teeth. But bit by bit, whenever
the chance offered, he was getting more of the loose skin and fur in his
mouth. The result was that he was slowly throttling White Fang. The
latter's breath was drawn with greater and greater difficulty as the
moments went by.

It began to look as though the battle were over. The backers of Cherokee
waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds. White Fang's backers were
correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to one and twenty to
one, though one man was rash enough to close a wager of fifty to one.
This man was Beauty Smith. He took a step into the ring and pointed his
finger at White Fang. Then he began to laugh derisively and scornfully.
This produced the desired effect. White Fang went wild with rage. He
called up his reserves of strength, and gained his feet. As he struggled
around the ring, the fifty pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat,
his anger passed on into panic. The basic life of him dominated him
again, and his intelligence fled before the will of his flesh to live.
Round and round and back again, stumbling and falling and rising, even
uprearing at times on his hind-legs and lifting his foe clear of the
earth, he struggled vainly to shake off the clinging death.

At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog promptly
shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of the fur-
folded flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever. Shouts of
applause went up for the victor, and there were many cries of "Cherokee!"
"Cherokee!" To this Cherokee responded by vigorous wagging of the stump
of his tail. But the clamour of approval did not distract him. There
was no sympathetic relation between his tail and his massive jaws. The
one might wag, but the others held their terrible grip on White Fang's
throat.

It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators. There was a
jingle of bells. Dog-mushers' cries were heard. Everybody, save Beauty
Smith, looked apprehensively, the fear of the police strong upon them.
But they saw, up the trail, and not down, two men running with sled and
dogs. They were evidently coming down the creek from some prospecting
trip. At sight of the crowd they stopped their dogs and came over and
joined it, curious to see the cause of the excitement. The dog-musher
wore a moustache, but the other, a taller and younger man, was smooth-
shaven, his skin rosy from the pounding of