“More of a landmark now, I suppose. Nobody living in it.”

“Nobody but just merely the granddaughter of old Czar Kennedy herself is living in it, that’s who. Christine Storm. Chris, everybody calls her. She lives there all alone.”

“Old maid?”

“Chris! Wait till you see her.”

“You sound kind of—wistful.”

“Damn right I am. Me and about a million other guys.”

“If her grandfather owns that big new place I should think she’d live there. You said everything modern—heat, elevators, restaurant, laundry and whatnot—right in the building. No kitchens, maybe—is that it?”

“Kitchens! You ought to see them. Modern as a jet, and aluminum trimmings enough to give you snow blindness. Chris is a good cook, too. She learned it off her Grandpa Storm, I guess. The Norwegians eat good. Bridie didn’t teach her much, Bridie’s too quick and slapdash for cooking. Real cooking, that is.”

“And this Chris lives in that beat-up old log cabin alone, huh? How old—that is—what’s her age, about?”

“Let’s see, old Czar’s up there in the seventies, and her Grandpa Thor Storm, too. Chris? She’s young. Some ways she’s like a kid, and other ways she’s old as her grandpas, and older than Bridie. Comes of being brought up by old people, I suppose.”

“You keep talking about grandfathers. Where’s the rest of her family?”

“That’s all the family she’s got. Just two grandfathers. Unless you count Bridie Ballantyne, and she’s no more relation to Chris than she is to everybody else in town. Bridie’s everybody’s aunt.”

“They all live together?”

“They all live separate. And they slice up Chris like that story about Solomon and the baby in the Bible.”

“They don’t get along, h’m? The old boys.”

“They’re what you’d call friendly enemies. They don’t think alike about anything, except they’re both crazy about Chris and crazy about Alaska. But in different ways, so they don’t agree about those, either. Czar Kennedy, he just about owns Baranof, and a big chunk of Alaska, besides. Everything he touches turns to gold, he never did have to pan for it even in the old days. Czar owns the daily paper, the Lode, it’s called. Kind of—well—conservative. Thor runs a weekly with Paul and Addie Barnett, it’s called the Northern Light, and boy, it certainly shines into the dark corners in Alaska and Seattle and even Washington D.C. They’re always battling, the two old boys, they’ve been battling for fifty years, folks here say who’ve known ’em that long.”

“Tough on the girl, I should think that would be.”

“Sure is. Sure was. But she had it tough from the day she was born. Thor’s son married Czar’s daughter, see. They’re both dead. The mother died when Chris was born—no use going into that, nobody believes it anyway, only Alaskans. Her father had his scalp torn off by a bear.”

“What are you giving me!”

“I don’t expect you to believe it.”

“Uh-huh. And this Bridie, I suppose she was spewed up by a whale, like Jonah or something.”