The Call of the Wild: Klondike Cannibals, Vol. 2 Read Online Free Page A

when he did, they would discard him without a second thought. And he would slide into the pit of human misery.
    D isappear without a trace.
    It was a bitter pill, but Jack swallowed it. He quit the power plant immediately, deciding to let career go hang. He wanted to see more of the world, while he still could. The road offered Jack the same thing the sea did: a chance at greatness that was denied him at home.
    Since this first major lesson at the power plant, he’d seen it again and again: how the bosses harnessed a man’s courage and ambition to the machines of industry; how they ground him down, left him broken and sick, until many were sleeping on the streets, or riding the rails, or locked up in prison.
    By the time these men realized they’d been had—and many never did—they no longer had the strength to resist. And so generation after generation came and went, feeding the parasites who grew fat and useless on their lifeblood.
    But not Jack.
    He would break out of the cycle through his own superhuman will. Once free, he would help as many men as he could to follow.

*  *  *  *  *
    Eliza lived with her husband Captain James Shepard in a small house on a quiet, tree-lined street in Oakland.
    It was almost 8 pm when Jack arrived. He had to knock several times before his sister answered.
    “You’ve been drinking ,” Eliza said when she opened the door and saw the flush on his cheeks.
    Jack felt instantly guilty. He hated disappointing her. She was always making sacrifices for him: scraping together money to patch his clothes or pay for his books. She’d even bought him a bicycle so that he could meet with Mabel and her friends down at the library, or go for joyrides in the hills around the city.
    And now here he was: late for dinner, drunk, broker than ever.
    “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I ran into an old friend down on his luck. I couldn’t leave him…”
    She nodded coldly, her eyes searching his. “Come on in,” she said. “We’ve left you out some chicken and potatoes …”
    “Wait. Can we talk for a minute?”
    “No, Jack.”
    “But…”
    “No.”
    Without another word she turned around and walked back into the house. Jack quickly followed, pulling the door shut behind him.

*  *  *  *  *
    The library was small and lined with leather-bound books of military history.
    “How’s the Boy Socialist?” Captain Shepard asked, looking up from a well-worn volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as Eliza and Jack walked in. He was smoking tobacco out of his curved cherrywood pipe, and blowing circles of blue smoke in the air. Although the Captain’s military-style moustache was as black and finely oiled as ever, Jack noticed more streaks of grey in his mutton-chops than before.
    “Better ask the papers,” Jack said with a grin.
    Back in the spring Jack had been dubbed “the Boy Socialist” by the local press after his arrest for giving a soapbox speech down at the park near Tenth and Broadway. His brother-in-law had been teasing him about it ever since.
    It wasn’t like Jack had committed a serious crime: he’d only been exercising his constitutional right to free speech. In fact, that was what his speech had been about.
    Bu t try explaining irony to a billyclub.
    Captain Shepard was no socialist, but he admired the strength and fire of Jack’s convictions, and loved to debate and speculate with him. He stood up from his leather-upholstered reading chair.
    “Ha! Will you have a drink with me?”
    Jack could feel Eliza’s worried eyes upon him. “Sure,” he said. “Just one though.”
    “That’s my boy,” Captain Shepard said, walking stiffly over to the mahogany table in the corner where he kept several bottles of bourbon. He poured out two generous glasses. He handed Jack one, then took a large gulp of his own, swishing it around in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. “What’s it like down at the docks?”
    “Sheer madness. There are