Smoke Bellew Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE STAMPEDE TO SQUAW CREEK TWO months after Smoke Bellew and Shorty went after moose for a grub-stake, they were back in the Elkhorn saloon at Dawson. The hunting was done, the meat hauled in and sold for two dollars and a half a pound, and between them they possessed three thousand dollars in gold dust and a good team of dogs. They had played in luck. Despite the fact that the gold-rush had driven the game a hundred miles or more into the mountains, they had within half that distance bagged four moose in a narrow canyon. The mystery of the strayed animals was no greater than the luck of their killers, for within the day four famished Indian families, reporting no game in three days' journey back, camped beside them. Meat was traded for starving dogs, and after a week of feeding Smoke and Shorty harnessed the animals and began freighting the meat to the eager Dawson market. The problem of the two men now was to turn their gold-dust into food. The current price for flour and beans was a dollar and a half a pound, but the difficulty was to find a seller. Dawson was in the throes of famine. Hundreds of men, with money but no food, had been compelled to leave the country. Manyhad gone down the river on the last water, and many more, with barely enough food to last, had walked the six hundred miles over the ice to Dyea. Smoke met Shorty in the warm saloon, and found the latter jubilant. " Life ain't no punkins without whiskey an' sweet- enin'," was Shorty's greeting, as he pulled lumps of ice from his thawing mustache and flung them rattling onto the floor. " An' I sure just got eighteen pounds of that same sweetenin'. The geezer only charged three dollars a pound for it. What luck did you have?" " I, too, have not been idle," Smoke answered with pride. " I bo...Read More