"Jack London. The Call of the Wild (Сборник из 7 рассказов на англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

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,
and he hurled himself savagely against the bars. The man smiled
grimly, and brought a hatchet and a club.


"You ain't going to take him out now?" the driver asked.


"Sure," the man replied, driving the hatchet into the crate for a
pry.


There was an instantaneous scattering of the four men who had
carried it in, and from safe perches on top the wall they prepared
to watch the performance.


Buck rushed at the splintering wood, sinking his teeth into it,
surging and wrestling with it. Wherever the hatchet fell on the
outside, he was there on the inside, snarling and growling, as
furiously anxious to get out as the man in the red sweater was
calmly intent on getting him out.


"Now, you red-eyed devil," he said, when he had made an opening
sufficient for the passage of Buck's body. At the same time he
dropped the hatchet and shifted the club to his right hand.