“Don’t be fishing for compliments, you won’t get them from me. You’ll have to work a little harder for them in Seattle, too, so you might as well get used to it. Competition there, you’ll find.”

“Darling Bridie, it’s too late for you to try to break me down. You three have been working like slaves to build me up ever since I was born.”

“It’s terrible any more how pleased you are with yourself, these days. Still and all you’ve come through these years pretty well, considering you’ve been reared by three old things, and all of Baranof and most of Alaska. It’s a wonder you didn’t turn out unbearable. Next thing you’ll be what Thor calls a rounded character. I hope not. Everybody ought to have anyway one slab side.”

The three had given her all they had. From Thor she had absorbed a knowledge of the humanities; the habit of reading, a feeling for nature and for history. From him, too, she had learned to use her mind and her muscles; practical things such as cooking, and how to handle a gun; later, how to set a stick of type in the gritty little print shop of the Northern Light.

Czar, in benevolently practical terms—or so it seemed—stressed the value of money, of power, of position, of security. To Christine he imparted surprisingly cynical advice.

“Making friends of people like those will never get you anywhere.” He might be speaking of Paul and Addie Barnett, or Ott Decker, or the young half-breed Eskimo, Ross Guildenstern. He might have been tempted to include Thor and Bridie, but he was smart enough not to risk that.

“I don’t want them to get me anywhere. I just love them.”

“That’s a childish way to talk.”

“I don’t chose friends,” she said, very grand, “for what they can do for me.”

He could have said, If it weren’t for me you’d be nobody, if it weren’t for my money and my connections and my brains you’d be behind the counter in the Five-and-Dime at best. But he was too canny for that. He had his plans for her, as clear-cut as the blueprints by which he had achieved the Kennedy Block, the Baranof Daily Lode, the Ice Palace.

“You’re going to meet people who are people. Not riffraff nobody knows about. You know some of them already. Dave Husack and his wife. And Sid Kleet. You’ll meet the cream.” Then, mildly, almost as an afterthought, “And young people, like Dave’s son Bay.”

She laughed then, and came over to him and hugged him, her fresh young cheek against the lined one. “You’re an old-fashioned darling. You’re not trying to marry off your granddaughter to the Seattle rich and mighty, are you, Gramp?”

“He can have his pick of any girl in Seattle. Or New York or Washington, for that matter. You’ll be lucky if he takes you to the drugstore for a Coke.”

“I don’t like Cokes,” Chris retorted, somewhat maliciously.