Food failed to come up.

Snow came early, the thermometer never rose over fifty below zero for three straight months, and Lost City was an inferno of starvation and death.
You could go out and kill a man, then, and perhaps get away with it, Fingers.

But if you stole so much as a crust of bread or a single bean, you were taken to the edge of the camp and told to go! And that meant certain death--death from hunger and cold, more terrible than shooting or hanging, and for that reason it was the penalty for theft.
"Tatman wasn't a thief.

It was seeing his young wife slowly dying of hunger, and his horror at the thought of seeing her fall, as others were falling, a victim to scurvy, that made him steal.

He broke into a cabin in the dead of night and stole two cans of beans and a pan of potatoes, more precious than a thousand times their weight in gold.