The Hand of Fate #18 (June 1953) featured a one-page Northern called “A Hand of Fate Mystery #22”. The author and artist are not known.
This one pager sums up quickly what other comics draw out to five or more pages. The moral is always the same: evil is paid for in the end. This one is a little different in that no suggestion is made as to how it happens. That’s the Mystery of the title, I suppose. (A more quick-witted bad guy would have suggested he was a hero for bringing his partner’s body back for burial.)
Like the EC Comic’s “Comes the Dawn” we have that old chestnut again, the miner who kills his partner so he can have all the gold. In another post I suggested this stereotypical plot came from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a gold-mining Western of sorts by B. Traven.
I’ve been trying to find what story or author might have set this idea in the Klondike. Jack London would be a likely candidate since he is the author most associated with the era. Yet I have not found one. Rex Beach has a story called “The Weight of Obligation” (Semi-Monthly Magazine Section, 1913) where the relationship between two partners slowly unravels. It isn’t gold that does it but the fact that one man saved the other’s life. Until that “obligation” is repaid, the partnership is broken. At this point (and this may change with more research) in most stories about the Klondike, the bonds of partnership are strong and don’t get betrayed. Supernatural retribution also seems to be missing. It seems that is a more popular cliche of the horror comics like Hand of Fate.
Actual rivalries over gold continue today in the news. Strange stories of the Yukon are still happening.