“Drove past your place the other day, Thor. See you’re making some improvements in your cabin. You fixing to get married, now Chris is off your hands?”

“Oh, sure, sure. I figure it’s about time for a young fellow like me to settle down.”

The town was curious about it. Chris had been away well over a year and in all that time she had not once returned to Baranof. At the end of her first year at Washington University she had gone to Europe for three months with a guided student group. Baranof was all but smothered by a chromatic snowstorm of post cards depicting kaleidoscopic cathedrals, châteaux, canals, castles, parks, forests, uniforms, restaurants, ruins.

“That old shack of yours must be about the oldest house in Baranof, they tell me. How old is it, anyway?”

“Only about fifty years. That isn’t old, really. Of course Baranof itself isn’t much older than that. But in this country—uh—I mean to say, fifty years isn’t old for a good sound building.”

“Ha! Good sound—I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Thor—no offense I hope—but I wouldn’t think that old log cabin would rate putting any more money into it. Not a dollar, I’d say. You’re even adding on a piece there at the back I see. Lots of old rat-ridden log cabins around town, I hear the City Council figures they’re unsightly and a hazard, they’re going to tear them down to make way for new modern buildings.”

“Too bad. Tourists might find them interesting.”

“Tourists! How many tourists do we have! Not enough to count, and never will have.”

“You’ll be surprised. All over the United States, things to be seen and studied—battlefields and Indian mounds and Spanish missions, and Paul Revere’s house, and that old opera house up high in the Rocky Mountains, and the iron lace-work of New Orleans—–”

“Yeh, yeh, sure, that’s right.”

They said that old Thor was a great old boy but getting kind of—–A circular motion here, with the forefinger, in the region of the forehead.

He was deft and clever with his hands and he went to work on his log cabin, situated there so near the water with a pleasant bit of land around it. He had little spare time, what with the Northern Light and the salmon-fishing season and the book on which he had been engaged (to Baranof’s fond amusement) for years and years. Must be bigger than the whole encyclopedia by now, Baranof said. He left the exterior weather-blackened logs much as they had been in actual appearance, though he treated them with a preservative. He added a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. He installed a furnace. The little bathroom was tiled and it shone with stainless metal. The kitchen was fitted with modern appliances. One small space that had been his sleeping room and living quarters—little more than a shed, really, at the rear, he kept as it was, untouched. His iron bed, his chair, the washstand; a little splayfooted iron stove; his guns, his fishing tackle, his cherished specimens, his books books books on rough shelves, in boxes, on chairs, tables, the floor. Except for his battered and dated typewriter the room might have been—was, in fact—exactly as he had occupied it, the young blond earnest giant of half a century ago. A saucepan on the stove, a chamber pot under the camp bed; a calendar on the wall, a half-bald fur parka on the hook.