In the Territory’s frenetic gold-rush days newcomers were not asked personal questions. It was not considered good manners, or even healthy. But someone, glancing at the signature, had said, facetiously, “Z? What’s that stand for? Zero? You sure come to the right place.”

Kennedy’s new-found friend, Thor Storm, had spoken up in his rather precious accent that was more British than American. “I say its stands for Czar—minus the C. Czar Alexander Second of Russia got seven million dollars for this icehouse. Let me introduce the new Czar who’s going to own it if his plans come true. Gentlemen, your new ruler! Czar Kennedy the First!”

Someone in the crowd pressing around the official table in the crude land office had summed up the speaker’s towering frame, the great shock of blond hair, the farseeing blue eyes of the seaman, together with the signature—Thor Storm—on the claim book’s page.

“Where did you come by that la-de-da talk, Swensky?”

The blue of Thor’s eyes had darkened to steel gray. “Ay yust come from Min-ne-so-ta,” he enunciated. There was a note in his voice that made his questioner shrink back a little into the crowd. “Thor is my name, after another big Swensky. He was a blacksmith, among other things. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He lived in a place much like this. Valhalla, it was called.”

But they didn’t know what he was talking about. Sometimes, after that, they used to refer to him as the blacksmith. No one remembered his prediction which, in a measure, came true. Baranof today boasted that Czar Kennedy was the only millionaire in Alaska. “That is, living in Alaska,” they sometimes added, cynically. “The Big Boys in Seattle and San Francisco and Washington, they just live off it.”

Through the years Czar Kennedy argued, always mildly, in that soft musical voice of his, that to be a millionaire in Alaska was impossible.

“We’re lucky,” he said, “if we’ve got a moose carcass to gnaw on and a parky to keep us from freezing. But just the same, I’d rather be a poor man in Alaska Territory than a rich man anywhere in the States.”

His contemporaries—old sourdoughs now of seventy or even eighty, with decades of hard-wrung years behind them—were guileless or admiring enough to believe his canny statement. Realistic young newcomers of, say, Ott Decker’s age, received this with guffaws.

“Loaded,” these stated, simply. “The old coot’s merely loaded with it. Who does he think he’s kidding with that mashed hat and those baggy pants and that twinkle in the eye? Hell, that’s no twinkle. That’s a glint, boy, same as gold.” A grudging note of admiration might creep in. “At that, you’ve got to hand it to old Czar. He takes what you’ve got, but he’s got what it takes, too. Most of those old sourdoughs haven’t done anything for fifty years but Remember When.”

The hordes of young husky construction workers; the thousands of Air-Based; the swarms of doctors, lawyers, engineers, salesmen, mechanics; all the venturesome Johnny-come-latelys were not interested in those who Remembered When. They were almost always polite and respectful to these oldsters, but definitely not interested. They thought the gold-rush days of the century’s turn were small stuff. They said, look, you can make more dust in one day promoting television sets or washing machines than those poor bastards made in a year scrabbling up those hills, freezing their tootsies and chewing bacon rind and boiling their boots for soup. And for what? Gold! It’s a laugh. They just about killed themselves clawing it out of the ground, and what happens! The guys in Washington stick it right back into the ground at Fort Knox. If you’d go into Kurnitz’s Clothing Store today and hand Ben a twenty-dollar gold piece for a pair of pants, why, they’d shove you into the hoosegow for breaking the law.