“No money.”

“Then I can’t figure it. You one of those scientific fellas looking for the North Pole?”

“No.”

Zebedee Kennedy was angry now, his hands gripped the rail, he spoke very quietly as always when he was at high emotional pitch. “You murdered somebody?”

Thor Storm laughed then, a great rich rollicking laugh that boomed on the clear air and echoed from the menacing white-capped mountains. He put a hand on Kennedy’s shoulder—an incongruous hand for a man of his build—long-fingered, sensitive, the hand of generations of aristocrats.

“No, I am not a murderer running from justice. I’m here because there’s never been anything like this since the world was made. Men have roamed the world through the centuries for plunder and for land and for adventure. Europe and Asia and Africa and America North and South. Just a few years ago Oregon and Washington and California. But those were warm and lovely lands. Sun and rich valleys. But this! This is as it was when the world began, when it was just made. It is like being at the beginning of the world. You wait. You’ll see.”

“Say, you wait a minute, will you! Just a minute. I’m not figuring on any place that’s like the beginning of the world. I’m going to fetch up in a town. A town with a future.”

“The future there can be anything you want to make it. It can be a model for civilization. There is Alaska, raw as the day the world was born. The Russians have been there maybe a hundred years or so, but they haven’t made a mark. It’s as if the world had just been finished, and we’re in on it the day after Creation. Like gods. It’s all there, waiting for the work of our hands”—he hesitated a moment then finished, almost shyly—“and our spirits.”

Now there was something of distrust and disappointment in the narrow look with which Kennedy regarded his deck companion. “Your collar’s turned the right way, but you sure talk like a preacher.”

A quarter of a century later they could laugh about it, ruefully. A hundred times Kennedy had said, almost nostalgically, “Do you recall that night out on deck? A pair of babes, for all we knew what we were up against. Even you, with all your books.”

“We were better off than the others,” Thor reflected. “We didn’t just stay in Alaska because we had nothing we wanted to go back to. We were both crazy about it in a queer way. And we were both doing what we had come to do.”

Prophetically, even on the battered old boat, Thor Storm had known that everything in those next decades in Alaska would be larger than life, out of drawing, fantastic, so that the reasoning mind rejected it while actually living it.

He had tried to convey something of this to his fellow passenger. But Kennedy, a realist, was not possessed of imagination. He was merely, as he said, smart, with an almost prescient sense of material values.