On Jim's return to the village that evening, he was surrounded by numerous interrogators regarding the bear. "Oh," he said, casually, "I found the bear in my shack, and just threw him out, that's all." THE JOKE WAS NOT ON THE CHINAMEN When the Alaskan gold excitement was at its height, a couple of adventurous spirits, prospectors from California, had expended several months of precious, good old summer-time and exhausted their resources in an endeavor to locate pay dirt by sinking a shaft into a narrow table of land which jutted out from a high mountain near its base. After thawing and grubbing and blasting through fifty feet of earth, with no gold in sight, they came upon solid ice underlying the cover of earth through which they had penetrated. They kept on, however, for several weeks more, in an endeavor to penetrate through the ice; but they found ice, and only ice, for another fifty feet. Then it was that it occurred to them to salt that ice with fine gold dust and sell out to some tenderfoot sucker. They very easily found the desired victims in two Chinamen, with evident ample means and sufficient lack of experience. The two prospectors had about a ton of dynamite on hand. This they lowered into the shaft and concealed it in a side drift just deep enough and big enough to hold it, calculating that the first shot fired by the Chinamen would set off the dynamite and, by completely demolishing the shaft, conceal their fraud. The first blast made by the Chinamen did explode the dynamite, which not only wrecked the shaft, but also lifted the whole jutting bit of tableland--ice, earth, everything--sending it--an avalanche--down the mountain slope several hundred feet, exposing a thick stratum of glacial detritus, under where the ice had been, so full of gold that it proved to be one of the richest finds ever made in Alaska. The one blast had made the Chinamen millionaires. CHINESE FIREWORKS During the gold-digging days of California, before there was a restriction imposed upon the immigration of Chinese, a big American sailing vessel, while in Chinese waters, had taken aboard a large cargo of fireworks and a few tons of gunpowder of a special brand, which was safely housed in the hold, while all the sleeping quarters except those occupied by the crew, and all available deck spaces, were filled with a cargo of coolies to man California mines. The vessel was one of those staunch, fast, sail-driven craft brought to their highest perfection in the shipyards of Maine just before the advent of the steamship. When the ship was about a day out on its homeward voyage, the captain learned, through his faithful Chinese cook, that a big part of the Chinamen that he had picked up were half-breed Malay and Chinese pirates who had taken passage for the sole purpose of capturing the ship for piratical purposes, and that they were armed to the teeth, so that resistance offered by his crew of only twelve would be utterly hopeless.