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. Many had 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' sweetenin'," was Shorty's
greeting, as he pulled lumps of ice from his thawing moustache and
flung them rattling on 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 bought
fifty pounds of flour. And there's a man up on Adam Creek says
he'll let me have fifty pounds more to-morrow."

"Great! We'll sure live till the river opens. Say, Smoke, them
dogs of ourn is the goods. A dog-buyer offered me two hundred
apiece for the five of them. I told him nothin' doin'. They sure