From the shelter of the bush, Finn peered for a long while at the camp from which he had been driven; and as he peered his mind held a tumult of conflicting emotions. He saw the man gather twigs and light a fire, just as Bill had been wont to do. But he knew now that the man was not Bill. He heard the man growling and swearing to himself, just as a creature of the wild does sometimes over its meals. As a matter of fact, this particular man had been removed from a post that he liked and sent to this place, because Bill had left the district; and he was irritable and annoyed about it. Otherwise he probably would not have been so savage in driving Finn off. But the Wolfhound had no means of knowing these things.
All his life long, up till the time of his separation from the Master, Finn had been treated with uniform kindness and consideration, save during one very brief interval in Sussex. Then, for months, he had been treated with what seemed to him utterly purposeless and reasonless cruelty and ferocity. From that long-drawn-out martyrdom had sprung his deep-rooted mistrust of man. But it had been reserved for Wallaby Bill's successor to implant in Finn's mind the true spirit of the wild creature, by the simple process of driving him forth from the neighbourhood of civilization--such as it was--into the bush. Finn had been cruelly beaten; he had been tortured in the past. He had never until this evening been driven away from the haunts of men.
The writer of these lines remembers having once been driven himself, under a shower of sticks and stones, from a village of mountain-bred Moors who saw through his disguise. This being driven, hunted, shooed out into the open with blows and curses and scornful maledictions, is a singularly cowing sensation, at once humiliating and embittering. It is unlike any other kind of hostile treatment. It affected Finn more deeply and powerfully than any punishment could have affected him. Though infinitely less painful and terrible than the sort of interviews he had had with the Professor in his circus prison, it yet bit deeper into his soul, in a way; it produced an impression at least equally profound. He desired none of man's society, and during all the time that he had regarded the camp in that clearing as his home, he had never sought anything at man's hands, nor approached man more nearly than a distance of a dozen paces or so. But now he was savagely given to understand that even the neighbourhood of the camp was no place for him; that it was forbidden ground for him. He was driven out into the wild with contumely, and with the contemptuous sting of the blow of something flung at him. It was no longer a case of man courting him, while he carefully maintained an attitude of reserve and kept his distance. Man had set the distance, and definitely pronounced him an alien; driven him off. Man was actively hostile to him, would fling something at him on sight. Man declared war on him, and drove him out into the wild. Well, and what of the wild?