I am maundering a little. I meant only to tell you that I have gone on that journey we spoke of. My increasing thinness (or should that be decreasing?) was, as you suspected, illness. It would have been a long business still, and the pain was becoming too much for me. I thought of you and good Bridie nursing me nursing me through the months. Your money would be spent, and hers, and your precious energies and time. How foolish, how wasteful. This is better and cleaner and more civilized.

My work is done. The book is finished. But my work in my beloved Alaska is not finished. You must carry on with that. Not must. I wish to recall that word. I never have said must to you.

You are the most dear and lovely thing I have had in my life—you and freedom. I leave you all I have to leave. My Book. My love of Freedom. My belief in the Dignity and the Spirit of Man, as long as the Human Race shall persist, and in spite of the power and purpose of the Men of Destruction.

30

CZAR KENNEDY felt enormously light and exhilarated. He had felt that way for weeks, for months. He couldn’t account for it. It wasn’t the Alaska dry cool electric air. He was, God knows, accustomed to that by now. It wasn’t success. He had known the buoyant effects of that, too, for half a century and more. It wasn’t his fundamental health and vitality. He had always been well and forceful. It wasn’t even that he and Chris had come together again, grandfather and grandchild, and he had forgiven her—or as good as forgiven her—for her crazy outburst in the visitors’ gallery that time in Washington. Of course she hadn’t married Bayard Husack yet, or even said she might. But once he was set up in the Governor’s Mansion in Juneau, safe and soft, she’d fall into line without even knowing it, smart as she was—or thought she was. He, Czar Kennedy, was smarter. He was smarter than anyone in Baranof. Smarter than anyone in Alaska. Smarter than those big windbags in Seattle, yes, and in San Francisco and New York and Washington, too. Let them have the cashmere coats and yachts and the cars and the private planes and the girls and the three-hundred-dollar suits. The laugh would be on them when he died and they opened his will and saw that he had millions and—– But he wasn’t going to die. He felt strangely light and potent. He felt that he could do anything. He felt free and young and powerful.

Now when he awoke in the early morning his first almost unconscious sensation was like that he had had when he was a small boy and school was over for the summer. School was out there in the little Massachusetts town so many years ago, and he and one of the boys were going fishing. He had not been quite aware of what the lovely thing was that was going to happen, he wasn’t yet awake. What is it what is it? Something lovely is going to happen, something lovely has happened. And then he would remember though he never once admitted this to himself, once he was awake and fully conscious. He got up, smiling a little without knowing he was smiling, and rubbing his stomach and scratching in a kind of warm cosy reassuring comfort and satisfaction. He did not give it a name. But he knew.