“This whole thing,” Thor now persisted, and swept the air with one great arm that included the ship, its passengers, the overpowering mountains, the sea, the endless sky and the singularly vital air, “this whole thing is ridiculous.”

Kennedy stared at him, suspecting a joke he did not understand. “How d’you mean?”

“It’s ridiculous to happen in a civilized country like the United States in the twentieth century. People rushing in and grabbing whatever they want. For two hundred—three hundred—five hundred years or nearly—this continent has been ravaged, it’s a wonder it has survived. But it has. Now they’re swarming into this wilderness like the Spaniards into Mexico, like the forty-niners into California, like the Sooners into Oklahoma. It’s the last of it, I think. There can be no more unless someone discovers a new continent, or the day comes when we can somehow reach the other planets.”

“Looks like you know an awful lot about this country, and all—about the United States, I mean—that is, for a foreigner.”

“Everyone in the United States is a foreigner, or the son or grandson or great-grandson or great-great-grandson of a foreigner. Everyone except the red Indians, and, in Alaska, the Eskimos. All the others are foreigners.”

“Say,” Kennedy drawled, amused, “you go to calling those men in there foreigners to their faces, why, you’re liable to get yourself into a hell of a brannigan, puny-looking as they are.”

“I’m glad you don’t underestimate them entirely.”

Scoffing though he appeared, Kennedy had been listening. The veiled eyes were lifted now to Thor’s earnest face. “Well, anyway, I know that each of us alone is bigger than any two of them in there; together. And not only size. I’ve been thinking that, smart as I am, and you with your special education, why, we might think of working together, like. Maybe not pardners, exactly. But working together.”

“What makes you think I’ve had a special education?”

“The way you talk. I’ve heard Boston talk, and New York, too, but you don’t talk like an American, or a Swensky either, even if you are. It’s more what they call an English accent, isn’t it? Special.”

“My t—that is, I had an English teacher, perhaps I imitated him.” He had almost said, My tutor was an Oxford man. He led the subject away from himself. “So here we are on our way to Alaska, you and I, with these other men. What makes you feel you are smarter than they? Probably you are. But why do you think so?”

“Because they’re going to work themselves to the bone scratching crumbs of gold out of the ground, and I’m going to get it away from them, in comfort, by selling them the thing they’ll need and want. Not little piddling things. Big. They’ll need boats to get up the rivers—sizable boats, I mean—and I’m going to get hold of a boat and maybe run it. My folks back east were seafaring men. These ninnies yelling their lungs out in there”—he jerked his head toward the crowded saloon—“they’ll have to have places to live in, wagons for hauling, I bet there isn’t a horse in all Alaska. I’ve already got connections in Seattle. Let those poor suckers in there dig the gold. I’ll get it without digging. I know ways. Lots of ways I’m not talking about.”