THE WHITE WOLF Read Online Free PDF Page A

moonlit winter’s walk along the banks of the Neshaminy, its waters gurgling and splashing over rocks; an early summer night when, sitting rigidly on the long, wide porch, she gazed out into the torrential rains. Night gave her a measure of peace; day left her without ease.
     
    Yet, if these differences between father and daughter were founded on similarities, there were more basic differences. Pierre was kind. She, fundamentally, was cruel. There was the time when, in childish passion, she had beaten a puppy mercilessly with her fists. And when the puppy cringed, she felt glad and beat it all the harder. Punished, she felt not the least sorry. She learned to control herself in time. Custom bade she must. But ever since, each time she saw a dog, she felt she’d met an enemy.
     
    “But why don't you like dogs?” Ann asked once.
     
    “Don’t know. I can’t stand them. Give me the creeps.”
     
    “Afraid of them?”
     
    “Perhaps.”
     
    She reserved another feeling for horses—contempt.
     
    “Curious,” Manning Trent said to Pierre one day when they were cantering along a saddle trail, “that Sara doesn’t ride. You like it so well. And so’d her mother. She’s got such a damned good build for it. too.”
     
    “Better than I have.” Pierre grinned, and touched his paunch. “Never could get her to look at a horse. Says her own legs are good enough for her.”
     
    “Ha. They’re good legs, all right,” Trent admitted. “But every man jack of you, and woman, too, was horsy.”
     
    “I know.”
     
    Pierre did not worry about it. He was tolerant to the point of indifference when it came to interfering with the likes and dislikes of others.
     
    Sara’s contempt for horses deepened to hatred for cattle and sheep and domestic livestock in general. There was the occasion when, visiting a neighboring farm, she’d inadvertently come upon the butchering of a pig. She didn’t turn away as most girls would. Instead, she stood and watched, experiencing a sadistic satisfaction as the animal, blood geysering from a vein, legs beating frantically, squealed in hysterical agony and died.
     
    She accepted cats and placed no faith in them. There was always one about. She knew it for what it was—treacherous, selfish, vicious. She never stroked it; but if it leaped into her bed at night, she permitted it to stay—kneading the pillow, ramming its head against hers in a false display of affection, singing its guttural, monotonous song. It was wild, and she felt cousin to it.
     
    But if the cat were cousin, other wild creatures—more fierce, more cruel—were blood sisters. How eagerly, as a girl, she had watched the lions and tigers at Fairmont Park snatch at their large chunks of raw meat.
     
    Mostly, however, on those visits to the zoo, she had spent time on end in the Reptile House. And there, fascinated, she would stand staring at the slim black cord of cobra as it slithered among its rocks or, its head rising like a rocket from its coil, spitting its venomous white poison at the glass that separated watcher and watched.
     
    She did not think of these things now. Almost beyond consciousness, she heard the station wagon rattling out of the yard and along the lane in the direction of the highway, carrying her father. The sound was lost in the picture of the previous night.
     
    Why were those adolescent longings, buried so long in her new love, re-emerging?
     
    Why should an immaculately attired, slender, lean-faced man with a trick mustache—a man who teetered precariously in his shoes even as he assumed an urbane air, a man lor whom she even felt repulsion—appear to be the spring which released them? What unearthly force could have drawn her to that house—that house which, objective honesty compelled her to admit, had never before entered her experience?

    Her left wrist burned where he had touched her. The fingers of her right hand caressed the spot. When she withdrew them, she looked at her