To compensate, the three saw to it that her parka was of the finest pelts, its hood faced with wolf; her dresses, often as not, ordered from Seattle. Bridie, through the years, had achieved a great reputation for style. Fond Baranof said that Bridie Ballantyne was the Ten Best-Dressed Women in Alaska. Best-Dressed Member of the City Council. Best-Dressed Alaska Public Relations. Best-Dressed—uh—Mature Type. Best-Dressed Candidate for the Legislature. Best-Dressed Alaska Pioneer and Sourdough. And so on.

Even in her later years Bridie’s neatness never was besmirched like the food-stained bosoms of the elderly whose spots were decked with an unavailing façade of chains, beads and brooches. “There never was a diamond big enough to cover a grease spot,” she said in one of her sententious moments. “Even if you can’t see the spot you kind of know it’s there.”

“Neat,” Bridie counseled the girl. “That’s all there is to it. I learned that when I was student nurse in the Old Country, and in Seattle. You know the way young nurses always look pretty. Specially to men’s way of thinking. Half the time they’re plain as posts, but you get white or blue-and-white up under the face, and put plenty of starch in it so it rustles and smells fresh, and a broad stiff apron band that makes the waist look tiny, why, you’d give off the effect of spring flowers in a paper frill. Neat does it, before style or richness, to my way of thinking.”

So now, when Bridie said, “That dress is tacky,” Chris discarded it. When Czar said, “That boy acts all right, but hell never amount to anything,” she was likely to defend him, though doubting her own sense of values. Thor said, “Read that, and you’ll know Thomas Jefferson was a greater man than Alexander Hamilton, and always will be. He thought of the United States in terms of people, not as an example of the capitalistic system. They were both right, but people are more important than any system.” She won the negative side of the Baranof College Forum debate on “Would Hamilton Have Been a Better President Than Jefferson?”

It spoke well for the three, and for Christine’s disposition and strength of character, that she did not emerge as an insufferable example of overconfidence. She had been president of her class at Baranof; voted the most popular girl on the campus; best-dressed co-ed (she wore clothes identical in style with those of the other girls, but the effect was, somehow, distinctive); the recipient of a half-dozen invitations to every social or athletic affair from ice hockey to the annual prom.

Frequently, in the course of growing up, she deliberately or involuntarily acted against the judgment or the wishes of one or two or even all three of her mentors. “Trial and error method,” Thor said, when such behavior came up for discussion. “Leave her alone. She’ll learn that way.”

9

OF ALL THE PASSENGERS on the scabrous vessel that had shoved off from Seattle, Alaska-bound, probably the only two who had themselves in hand, who knew the plan they definitely would follow, once ashore, were the Norwegian Thor Storm and the New Englander Zebedee Kennedy, whose far background was Scotch-Irish. These two had not been dazzled by mad stories of gold lying like pebbles strewing the Bering Sea shores at Nome, or the creeks of Baranof; or forming chunks in the Fairbanks or Juneau lodes.