“Uh-huh,” the hustling young newcomer would say, decently polite but twitching. “Big deal those days getting around this deep freeze. Sure must have been tough going.”

He would be off and out the door and into his snub-nosed baby-blue convertible at the curb.

Czar Kennedy and Thor Storm actually were of this vintage. But there the resemblance ended. Perhaps these two had been born equipped with biological luxuries more lavish than those found in the average man. Glands, or some such mysteries. Pituitaries that functioned more superbly; endocrine secretions; genes; dynamos. Whatever the superior power, these two still functioned expertly, each in his own fashion. Their names were magic in the Territory and known to many even Outside. They had been able to take in their stride this strange new frightening world from which their vintage colleagues shrank in dismay, or at which they marveled like children.

The young newcomers to Alaska neither shrank nor marveled. They took their world for granted. Seven hours to span the thousands of miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific. “Watch it, fellas.” They grinned. “That’ll be covered-wagon stuff. They get those jets revved up you can do it in three hours, or maybe two. Zrrrrp! Like that.”

Waylaid by one of his nostalgic contemporaries, Czar Kennedy had schooled himself to the appearance of interested listener. Politic, suave, it was his business to keep the Territory quiescent, uninformed. His head a little to one side in the attitude of listening, the battered hat pushed back on the luxuriant wavy white hair, the fine eyes gently humorous and understanding, he would occasionally nod his head in agreement and utter a low wordless hum of appreciation. The professional charmer, the shrewd operator, he heard practically nothing that the garrulous oldster was saying, and cared less. He rarely even bothered to travel Outside, preferring the adulation of his kingdom to the Stateside competition in Seattle’s office buildings overlooking the magnificent bay, or the buzzing low-voiced lunch tables of the Senate restaurant in Washington D.C. All this he chose to leave to the younger tougher lower-echelon Boys.

Thor Storm listened. He not only listened, he set it down for future generations. Even in her very early girlhood he had tried to impress Chris with the importance of some of these fantastic tales of Alaska, so garrulously told and considered so boring by the young.

“Just listen to them a little now and then, Christine,” he counseled her. “Nobody pays any attention to their talk. Nobody hears them any more, except me—and maybe Bridie Ballantyne. But she’s too flighty to get its importance. They’re trying to tell you something valuable.”

Pertly she would say, “I don’t see why it’s so important. Anyway, it’s all in those books by Rex Beach and Jack London and those, and they sound kind of dated.”

“The truth isn’t dated. Pretty soon they’ll all be gone. Me, too. And Czar. It’s unbelievable that they got here at all. It isn’t so much what they did. It’s the result of what they did. It’s like those daubings and carvings in the caves in Spain, and in the Roman crypts and the Egyptian underground tombs. They’re crude, but they’re history, talking. They’re like the old minstrels, the storytellers. They’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, don’t jerk away from me like that, I’m trying to tell you something you ought to know and remember for a time when I won’t be here.’ Someday, Christine, if we can beat off the vultures, this part of the world is going to be so important that just to say you’re an Alaskan will be bragging.”