But Czar Kennedy—there was a man they could understand. A picturesque and romantic figure from youth to old age, he had a quiet word and a smile for everyone. To look at him, Baranof boasted, you’d think he didn’t have one penny to rub against another. In appearance a composite of Shakespearian character actor, way-down-East cracker-barrel philosopher, fresh-water college professor, with, perhaps, just a dash of Mississippi River gambler. From this mixture he emerged handsome, approachable, benign, somewhat scholarly. He never read a book.

You sometimes saw him eating his breakfast at the drugstore soda counter, you’d never know he owned the building, lived in the best house in town, had that Swede Gus there could cook him anything he wanted for breakfast from fish to omelet. Sometimes he secretly paid for the breakfast of a boy or girl there at the counter, and he would vanish before they had finished their meal.

“No charge,” the counterman would say to this one.

“What do you mean, no charge! You giving away this morning?”

“Party paid for your breakfast. Told me to say you’re his guest this morning.”

This pleased and impressed some, but it rather annoyed others. Strangely enough—or perhaps not so strangely—the least solvent were the most annoyed. It downgraded them. “What does he think this is! A Salvation Army soup kitchen! Giving out with two bits to make himself feel good?” One morning at eight o’clock Addie Barnett caught him at the coffee counter. It was Northern Light weekly press day, and she had been at the office since five A.M. In a spirit of pure mischief she had quietly paid the counterman for Czar’s breakfast and had slipped away to station herself, unseen, behind the revolving bookrack. The counterman rather enjoyed going into the customary routine. In reverse, this time.

“No charge, Mr. Kennedy.”

“How’s that?” sharply.

“Party paid for your breakfast. Said you’re their guest this morning.”

Rarely caught off guard, Czar now was in a temper. “You can’t do that. I don’t like it, understand!”

“Oh? Well, you do it.”

“That’s different.”

The counterman was a newcomer to Baranof. “Yeah? How do you figure that?”

Addie Barnett ran the story in next week’s Northern Light.

The two old men had been young vital men when first they had met so casually aboard the battered argosy that dumped them on Alaska’s gold-flecked sands. Tall tales of romance descriptive of vessels such as this were popular in the turn of the twentieth century. There was nothing picturesque about the rusty hulk that shoved off from Seattle toward the strait of Juan de Fuca, through days and white nights of wildly magnificent scenery.