“I don’t hate you. Though I know if it wasn’t for you my wife would likely be alive today, and my daughter, too, and I’d probably have other grandchildren for my old age.”

“That’s not the reason. It goes deeper than that. You can’t forgive me for having shown you the way to success. You want to believe you started yourself, as everyone else believes. Can’t you ever forget that I showed you the way? Even if it turned out that you made it a destructive way for Alaska?”

Lines of hatred carved themselves on Czar’s face, they curved from his nostrils to his lips, they were imbedded between his eyes. “You’re just evading the issue. I only know you’re not a fit person to have any guidance of my granddaughter. Bridie, here, that’s different. I know about her, I went to the trouble of looking up her past, she was a decent enough girl, her family in Ireland were decent people, she trained and nursed in a hospital in England, like she said, she nursed in Seattle, she came here and took care of those girls with the smallpox—well, she was only doing her work, after that she conducted herself in this town in a decent—–”

“You’ll stop right there, Czar Kennedy, sitting there and acting like you’re God! You with your banks and your newspaper and your buildings and your money. And your Outside crowd. I’m a decent person, is it! Well, you ain’t.”

Mildly, Thor interrupted Bridie’s tirade. “Why this sudden change, Czar? We’ve shared Christine’s upbringing, with Bridie as ballast, all through her childhood.”

“It doesn’t matter so much what you tell a child. A child’s way of life isn’t so important. She’s a young lady now—–”

“Oh, Czar, Czar! Once you’ve baked a cake, you know, you can’t take the eggs or the milk out of it or the flour or the butter or the spice. They’re baked in, they’re ingredients of the whole, they’re in forever, until the actual thing itself is destroyed. Human beings are like that, too. Everything that goes in stays in. Christine is almost baked by this time, there’s only the icing to put on, plain or fancy.”

“Oh, I’m sick of you and your talk, Storm, for years and years and years. Now listen. I’m going to make it impossible for you to have anything to say about my daughter’s child. I’ll tell you now, frankly, I’ve been getting a line on you, they got as far as Minnesota and then it quit. But they’re working on it. No matter how far and how long and how much money it takes.”

Thor nodded reminiscently as though surveying with pleasure a serene past. “Yes, I came to Minnesota and I worked in the wheat fields and in the woods, lumbering, with all the other Swenskys, as they called us—Norwegians like myself, and Danes and Swedes. All Scandinavians were Swenskys in America, I found. It wasn’t a bad life for a young fellow. Everything was big—the lakes and the hills and the fields and the forests. But I hadn’t come to America just for that, so I started across country, across this enormous land, from the North to the East, to Midwest, to West, to Northwest. A fine journey. I had been in the countries of Europe, many of them. But this took my breath away, I had hoped it would be like this, and it was. Then I heard about this new Alaska land. Alaska was what I wanted, a new world not yet begun, or scarcely. That’s how we met. And well met, Czar, no matter what you say. It brought us Christine.”