“On the way up I said that this trip might be too rugged for you and you let me say it.”

“Maybe it will,” Bridie said, “wait and see.”

“Where’s Grampa?” Chris demanded, wrathfully.

“He’s probably downstairs with Papa,” Nancy said. “Look, if there’s anything you want, just ask Elinor or me, but now I’ve got to go and set the table.”

Contritely Chris said, “Let me help you—that is, I’d like to in just a minute, but first I want to say something to Grampa.”

Bridie shook her head. “Now, Chris, don’t go asking a lot of your questions, your Grampa’s busy. Wait till after dinner or tomorrow—–”

“I can’t wait,” Chris said, as a simple statement of fact. She was off down the hall to the stairway. The Tanagra-like figure of Leah Raffsky was there at the store counter, she was wrapping a large club of bologna sausage for a waiting Eskimo boy. Male voices and the scent of cigars led Chris to the open door of Isador Raffsky’s cluttered office. The two men sat, smoking, talking; relaxed to the point of aloofness. It was clear that Chris was not at the moment necessary to their well-being.

“I never saw you smoke a cigar before,” Chris exclaimed, inadquately.

Thor removed the cigar from between his lips and surveyed it with a detached admiration. “Isador’s private stock. I don’t get a chance at one like this very often. Just once a year, when I come up here.”

“Grampa Czar smokes cigars all the time.”

Isador Raffsky squinted up through the haze. “A cigar is special. Something special. You smoke a pipe alone, you smoke a cigarette alone. You smoke a cigar with a friend.”

Thor looked at the girl’s puzzled face, he knew the questioning look, he had never, since her early childhood, ignored it.

“Something you want to know, Christine?”

“Well, you’re busy—I thought maybe you’d be just walking around—–”

“If it’s about the Raffskys, just ask it. Isador’ll tell you anything you want to know, won’t you, Izzy?”

Chris was genuinely embarrassed. “Another time will do. Later.”

“Sit down sit down.” Isador indicated a chair by throwing its burden of papers to the floor. “So what you want to know? I came a boy here from Poland, I didn’t have a zloty. I ran around on a dog sled buying the stinking skins from the Eskimos, when I think what I paid them—well, those days it was different in Alaska. Say, Alaska! No different from other places. Vanderbilt was a fur trader, wasn’t he, and Astor, and all those dudes in the Hudson’s Bay Company, those pelts they traded had the same stink mine did. I could write a book about it, if I could write a book. Say, Thor, am I in your book, maybe?”

“Yes.”

“It ain’t all good. And it ain’t all bad. But good and bad, it’s history, we’re history, you and Bridie and me and all the old-timers. But it’s over now. Who knows Alaska, only us! My children are going to get an education because it’s going to be different. I can smell it. Not like me and Leah had it. It’s going to be another world.”