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out, without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent
spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail of
the bar.

Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor yelp, but a
something which is best described as a roar, and they saw Buck's body
rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton's throat. The man
saved his life by instinctively throwing out his arm, but was hurled
backward to the floor with Buck on top of him. Buck loosed his teeth
from the flesh of the arm and drove in again for the throat. This time
the man succeeded only in partly blocking, and his throat was torn open.
Then the crowd was upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a surgeon
checked the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling furiously,
attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of hostile
clubs. A "miners' meeting," called on the spot, decided that the dog had
sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged. But his reputation was
made, and from that day his name spread through every camp in Alaska.

Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton's life in
quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long and narrow
poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty-Mile Creek. Hans
and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing with a thin Manila rope from
tree to tree, while Thornton remained in the boat, helping its descent
by means of a pole, and shouting directions to the shore. Buck, on the
bank, worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off
his master.

At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged rocks
jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while Thornton
poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank with the end in
his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the ledge. This it did,
and was flying down-stream in a current as swift as a mill-race, when
Hans checked it with the rope and checked too suddenly. The boat flirted
over and snubbed in to the bank bottom up, while Thornton, flung sheer
out of it, was carried down-stream toward the worst part of the rapids,
a stretch of wild water in which no swimmer could live.

Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three hundred
yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. When he felt
him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the bank, swimming with all his
splendid strength. But the progress shoreward was slow; the progress
down-stream amazingly rapid. From below came the fatal roaring where the
wild current went wilder and was rent in shreds and spray by the rocks
which thrust through like the teeth of an enormous comb. The suck of the
water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was frightful,
and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible. He scraped furiously
over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third with crushing
force. He clutched its slippery top with both hands, releasing Buck, and
above the roar of the churning water shouted: "Go, Buck! Go!"

Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream, struggling
desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard Thornton's command
repeated, he partly reared out of the water, throwing his head high, as
though for a last look, then turned obediently toward the bank. He swam
powerfully and was dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the very point
where swimming ceased to be possible and destruction began.

They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock in the face
of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and they ran as fast as
they could up the bank to a point far above where Thornton was hanging
on. They attached the line with which they had been snubbing the boat to
Buck's neck and shoulders, being careful that it should neither strangle
him nor impede his swimming, and launched him into the stream. He struck
out boldly, but not straight enough into the stream. He discovered the
mistake too late, when Thornton was abreast of him and a bare half-dozen
strokes away while he was being carried helplessly past.

Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a boat. The
rope thus tightening on him in the sweep of the current, he was jerked
under the surface, and under the surface he remained till his body
struck against the bank and he was hauled out. He was half drowned, and
Hans and Pete threw themselves upon him, pounding the breath into him
and the water out of him. He staggered to his feet and fell down. The
faint sound of Thornton's voice came to them, and though they could not
make out the words of it, they knew that he was in his extremity. His
master's voice acted on Buck like an electric shock, He sprang to his
feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of his previous
departure.

Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again he struck
out, but this time straight into the stream. He had miscalculated once,
but he would not be guilty of it a second time. Hans paid out the rope,
permitting no slack, while Pete kept it clear of coils. Buck held on
till he was on a line straight above Thornton; then he turned, and with
the speed of an express train headed down upon him. Thornton saw him
coming, and, as Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the whole
force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed with both arms
around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope around the tree, and
Buck and Thornton were jerked under the water. Strangling, suffocating,
sometimes one uppermost and sometimes the other, dragging over the
jagged bottom, smashing against rocks and snags, they veered in to the
bank.

Thornton came to, belly downward and being violently propelled back
and forth across a drift log by Hans and Pete. His first glance was for
Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless body Nig was setting up a
howl, while Skeet was licking the wet face and closed eyes. Thornton was
himself bruised and battered, and he went carefully over Buck's body,
when he had been brought around, finding three broken ribs.

"That settles it," he announced. "We camp right here." And camp they
did, till Buck's ribs knitted and he was able to travel.

That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, not so heroic,
perhaps, but one that put his name many notches higher on the totem-pole
of Alaskan fame. This exploit was particularly gratifying to the three
men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished, and were
enabled to make a long-desired trip into the virgin East, where miners
had not yet appeared. It was brought about by a conversation in the
Eldorado Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of their favorite dogs.
Buck, because of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton
was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one man
stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and
walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his dog; and a third,
seven hundred.

"Pooh! pooh!" said John Thornton; "Buck can start a thousand pounds."

"And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?" demanded
Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven hundred vaunt.

"And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards," John
Thornton said coolly.

"Well," Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all could
hear, "I've got a thousand dollars that says he can't. And there it
is." So saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the size of a bologna
sausage down upon the bar.

Nobody spoke. Thornton's bluff, if bluff it was, had been called. He
could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face. His tongue had
tricked him. He did not know whether Buck could start a thousand pounds.
Half a ton! The enormousness of it appalled him. He had great faith in
Buck's strength and had often thought him capable of starting such a
load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it, the eyes
of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting. Further, he had no
thousand dollars; nor had Hans or Pete.

"I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound sacks of
flour on it," Matthewson went on with brutal directness; "so don't let

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