FIVE STAR WESTERN NEWS:

A HORDE OF FOOLS:
A North-Western Story by James David Buchanan

Coming in November!

It was as the result of a drawing sponsored by the Congregational Church in Bent Creek, Vermont, that Callie Fisk got her chance. The church was badly in need of funds, as was the whole community, and like many other small towns around America, it had been decided to send a native son up to the gold fields in the Klondike. In return for a stake, including passage money and a prospector's outfit, the lucky adventurer chosen in the drawing was to send back both the stake and ten percent of the fortune that was virtually guaranteed.

Callie's father was opposed to his daughter, or any female, attempting anything like prospecting alone in the Klondike. He was unimpressed with the minister's assurance that according to all reports God's bounty was lying thick upon the ground and ready for the taking. The drawing was open for women, young or old, because the Spanish-American War was requiring the enlistment of so many of the fine young men to fight off the perfidious Spaniards that Ephraim Fisk's blasphemous objections were overruled.

What protection Callie got upon arrival in the Alaska Territory came first from Claude Emmett, a notorious highwayman whose method of "mining" gold by-passed every kind of labor, except holding up at gunpoint miners loaded down with gold on their way back to the States. Emmett is known only as the Blue Parka Man.

Then there is Sergeant Clarence McDonald, a straight-arrow officer in Her Majesty's Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who is making a one-man war of attrition against all of the greedy Americans trying to push across the Alaskan border into Canada in pursuit of gold. He has even taken to shooting on sight anyone he catches trying to cross the border.

This considerable impediment appears at first sufficient to keep Callie and the Blue Parka Man on the Alaskan side, in Daughton, as it's known on maps, but everyone else calls simply Dogtown. However, that is before the Swope clan descends on Dogtown, to administer the law and to confiscate both the gold and the lives of the miners. Lynching for the Swopes is the quickest way to get what they want. In this struggle, an alliance between Callie, the Blue Parka Man, and the Mountie may not be enough to insure survival.