“Men,” Bridie Ballantyne said, reflectively. “Men men men. There’s always been too many of them here in Alaska. In comparison, that is.”

“Are there?” Chris had said, rather naïvely, at sixteen. “Are there? I’d never noticed.”

“You’ll notice when you get to Seattle, all right. Not that you won’t always have plenty of beaux. Anywhere. But here there’s never been enough women to go around, always twenty men to every woman and I guess that gave us a puffed-up notion of our importance. Not that I had an easy time of it when I came here, a girl. Easy! I thought I’d die. But the most of the men here were over-polite then, and are to this day—to the women, I mean. Those days, next to gold, and maybe food and drink, why, women were the most precious article, you might say. You’re going to find men acting different, Outside. Outside it’s more women than men. Any woman, those days in Alaska, who wasn’t cross-eyed, pockmarked and mustached, was precious. Come to think of it, even that didn’t stop Ideal Hackers. And it’s a living description of Ideal.”

“What a name—Ideal! Was that really her name?”

“Ida. She was one of the girls on the Line, she was so downright scrambled-looking they nicknamed her Ideal.”

“That was mean.”

“No, she loved it. Eyes, complexion, mustache and all, she could have had her pick of a dozen men. I heard she was bowlegged in the bargain, but lucky for her women wore long skirts those days, trailing the mud and the dust and the snow, whichever.”

“What happened to her, poor thing?”

“You don’t have to be weeping for Ideal. She married Hermie Hackers and settled down to housekeeping, smug as you please, and next thing you know Hermie got in with the copper crowd round 1906. Now Ideal’s a widow, lives in one of those Nob Hill hotels in San Francisco, a whole suite, they say her living room’s forty feet long with a view of the Golden Gate. She looks twenty years younger than she did fifty years ago. Got her eyes straightened when the money first began to pour in, got her skin peeled like a banana, got her face lifted and her mustache electrified off, I heard she even had her legs broken and reset, I wouldn’t put it past her. I hear she calls Seattle the provinces. And Alaska! Well, leave us not be sordid.”

“I love to hear you talk about those days,” Christine said as she had a hundred times before.

“It wasn’t so long ago, really, for all you’re only sixteen.”

Bridie gazed at the girl, thoughtfully, lovingly. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe you’ve been too much with us old ones—Czar and Thor and me, one pulling you one way, one heaving another direction, it’s a wonder your arms and legs aren’t out of joint, let alone your head.”

“What’s wrong with me!” the girl demanded, gaily. “I may not turn out to be the femme fatale that Ideal Hackers was but I’m not so awful, am I?”