Curiously enough, it was from Bridie as well as from Thor that the girl had got her sense of history, her feeling for background, for beginnings. Few young people had it, but then, few girls, as Bridie succinctly put it, had three old crocks instead of a young father and mother to bring her up. It was from Bridie, too, as well as from Thor, that she had got a sense of comradeship with the world. Perhaps the very remoteness and aloneness of the land and its people had somehow, paradoxically, been responsible for this.

Every matron in Baranof attempted to have a hand in the girl’s upbringing; and certainly every unattached widow or spinster, with an eye out for the widowered Thor or Czar, yearned over her. But it was Bridie who took over, Bridie was for Chris her Juliet’s Nurse, social guide and fashion mentor. It was Bridie who said, “I don’t care what the other kids are doing, you’ll wear your fur parky as long as it’s zero. Now don’t make me have to tell your grampas.”

Later, as Chris approached young womanhood, Bridie brought her taste in dress to bear on the girl’s problems. “Your coloring, yellow hair and black eyes, you can wear anything, I suppose; only can you? Because what goes with your hair would fight your eyes. The thing that saves you is your complexion. By rights you ought to be sallow, but you’ve got Thor’s pink, isn’t it lovely now! You’re a blonde and a brunette and whatever they name in between. Blue is a good color for you, you can wear pink, too, and green and even yellow though I wouldn’t advise it, hair or no hair. If you’re sunburned your black eyes will make you look native. And if you’re too pink and white your yellow hair will kind of wash out. You’ve got your work cut out for you the rest of your life, Chris, dressing.”

Perhaps if all historical data of the past half century in the Alaska Territory had been lost, swept from memory and from record, leaving Thor Storm, Czar Kennedy, Christine Storm, and this Bridie Ballantyne only, there might still have emerged from these informal records a fairly comprehensive history of the manners and mores and events of the time and place.

Occasionally, in her childhood, Chris had burst into rebellion against the three middle-aged guardians of her life. But when she rejected them she had only herself to fall back on—or one of the three against the other two.

She had been a small girl when first a playmate in the course of a squabble had confronted her with the ultimate threat. “I’ll tell my mother on you.”

“I’ll tell my Grampa Thor on you, then.”

“Pooh, who’s afraid of him!”

“I’ll tell Grampa Czar.”

“Nobody’s afraid of grampas.”

“I’ll,” summoning her last defense, “I’ll tell Bridie.”

“She ain’t your mother. She ain’t anybody’s mother. You haven’t got a father or a mother or anything.”