“Uh-huh. You going to pay a visit to those royal relatives you spun that tale about! Up there in Norway, in the Swensky country? Valhalla, you used to call it. Valhalla. Old Thor, the god from Valhalla.”

“I might at that. Valhalla. That’s just about the idea, Czar. You’ve just about hit it.”

Now the ice mass broke with a crash. The fine gray eyes were almost white, the color drained from the cheeks, leaving them clay. “Listen to me, old crackpot! You’re fixing up this place for Christine. You think she’ll come back here to live. Well, stop kidding yourself. She isn’t coming back. Not yet, anyway. She’s marrying Bay Husack and she may come back to Alaska at that, for a spell, but she’ll be the wife of the Governor of Alaska. And then the Senator from the state of Washington. And then the First Lady of the Land. The wife of the President of the United States maybe twenty years from now, maybe even less. So you can stop rubbing that old kindling wood and making out like you’re fixing up this shack for rental.”

Thor went on rubbing the wood lightly, he even breathed on it a little and then resumed his rubbing and cocked his head, gazing critically at the glow of the spot on which he was working as though to compare it in rich color and sheen to the section next it.

He straightened his big frame, he glanced meditatively out of the window to the water beyond. “Little Christine in the White House. First Lady. She’d be refreshing, but she wouldn’t fall in with the ideas of your crowd. There hasn’t been a President’s wife since—or before—Eleanor Roosevelt that had the courage to be herself. Franklin’s wife showed them there was more to being the President’s wife than giving dinners to stuffed shirts and stuffed bodices. Bodices. I’m caught with an old-fashioned word, they don’t use it any more, I’m told. They don’t use the gold service much any more there either, I’m told.”

Czar turned to leave. “Gabble on, gabble on. Half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t think you do, either.”

“Could be. Could be, Czar. But it’s cheap at the price. Outside I’d have to pay a psychoanalyst fifty dollars an hour to sit and listen to me gabble. I don’t pay you a cent. Thanks, pardner. And when I gabble to myself it comes even cheaper. In fact, I gain by it, if the truth were known.”

27

CHRISTINE STORM was The Fashion. No matter what she said now, they laughed uproariously, admiringly. “Did you hear Chris Storm’s crack?”

Certainly Christine had not meant this to be. In the beginning she had merely been honest. She had had no intention of startling them with her replies to questions. A strange new world. Only a few hours’ plane distance from Baranof, this city of Seattle, this city of New York, this city of San Francisco, Paris, London, Rome. But a world lay between. And especially, in the beginning, Seattle.