They had come together on deck one evening after the greasy supper. The other passengers were swarming inside the snip’s shabby saloon, drinking, shouting, stamping to the whine of harmonicas or intent on the shuffle and slapslap of grimy playing cards. There the air was malodorous with smoke, food fumes, unwashed bodies and the acrid smell of unspoken fear and apprehension, the effluvia one encounters in courtrooms, in stockades.

Separately the two men had sought clean air and quiet on deck. Each had marked the other before meeting. They were set apart from the rest in bearing, in the light of intelligent purpose that was reflected in their faces. They wore a confident and resolved expression, quite different from the nervously grimacing features and the feverishly glittering eyes of the other men. Each had recognized in the other the usual, the purposeful. The man who was to be known as Czar Kennedy saw with the shrewd eyes of the born trader, the canny commercial opportunist. Thor Storm looked out at the world through the eyes of the natural student of the humanities, his gaze colored—and perhaps handicapped—by love, compassion and curiosity toward the human race.

Both were tall men, but Thor Storm towered above Kennedy, his was the physique of a giant, but without the giant’s usual pinhead. Kennedy, slighter in build, seemed almost fragile beside him. The casual observer would have mistaken Kennedy for the scholar, the thinker, with those curiously dreamy long-lashed eyes, the leonine upper head that contradicted the square punishing jaw. The thick crown of black hair was worn longer than ordinarily, and it had a natural wave. In later years, as he turned into his fifties, and the wavy black locks were powdered with white at the temples and the fore-lock, he took on an almost poetic look, with a touch of the ham actor.

Thor Storm, with those great shoulders, the merry eyes, the pink cheeks, the yellow hair that seemed almost to sparkle, appeared the man of physical action and material mind. Nature had played a trick on both these men, and on the world in which they functioned.

Now the two young strangers stood at the boat rail, mysteriously drawn together by a magnetic force that was to bind them for life. They seemed to be gazing at the almost shockingly magnificent view of water and snow-capped mountains and sunlit north night sky. Each saw the other out of the corner of the eye. Kennedy’s coat collar was turned up against the fresh wind that even in midsummer tasted of the snowcaps.

He, the charmer, spoke first, he flung an arm in exposition of the splendors before them. “I bet you never saw anything like that before in broad daylight at ten o’clock at night.”

“Great mountains like these, no. But daylight at night, yes.”

“How’s that?”

“I was born in the North Country.”

“You mean here!”

“No. Not here.”

Piqued, Kennedy pressed on. “I suppose you’re hell-bent for gold, like the rest of those fools in there?” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the lights, the shouts, the music. As the man did not reply at once to this blunt question Kennedy added, hastily, “No offense meant. They seem a poor lot, those in there.”