426          THE CHICAGO RECORD'S
dent Weare's attention. All he wanted was a few thousand dollars to take himself and three or four brother
"detectives" to the Klondike country and there arrest a hundred or more notorious criminals for whom big rewards have been offered. He was positive, he said, that every one of those men who has a reward over his head is in the Klondike country at this minute waiting
to be arrested.
Other queer things brought out by the Klondike excitement were the barbers' syndicate, in which a number of barbers proposed to shave miners by the wholesale; a settlement company, which proposes to develop the farming possibilities of the gold region; a "frost cure" company, which wants to take a sure remedy for treating frost-bitten spots to the Klondikers; ear-muff traders; ice bicycle makers; bicycle skates, and all sorts of patent food preparations, guaranteed to last forever and to contain enough nutriment in small packages to keep a hungry miner going all the time.
A number of progressive Chicago gamblers, imbued
with the idea of gaining fabulous riches at the expense of the unsophisticated tenderfeet of the Klondike gold fields, have packed up their roulette wheels, faro layouts and other sure-thing games incidental to the paraphernalia of the sporting fraternity and departed for the land of the frozen north. Stories of untold riches exceeding in magnitude the time worn gold-brick game furnished food for thought to the manipulators of the elusive pea and chuckaluck, and in the future they will ply their vocation on the icy peaks adjacent to the city of Dawson.
The men interested in the new venture, becoming fearful of Chief Kipley's reform measures in Chicago, decided at a meeting held in a down-town saloon to cast off their crash suits and start with all possible haste to the place
. .*