Jim was addicted to humor, and as there was a three-quarter-inch hole in the tank near the closed end right over the keg of gunpowder, the head of which had been removed, it occurred to him that he might make it somewhat interesting for the bear by lighting a piece of fuze and dropping it into the gunpowder. This he proceeded to do, and the bear proceeded to leave that tube after the manner of a cannon ball.
Hearing the report, and seeing a large volume of smoke, the townspeople, looking skyward and Jim-ward, were astonished at seeing a ton of grizzly hurtling outward from Jim’s place and descending upon them.
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.