“I do. I can tell you. I can tell anybody.”

“No!” Kennedy yelled. “Me! Tell me!”

Thoughtfully, and—to Kennedy, maddeningly—he presented his terms. “All these things—all the riches of this great rich Alaska region—must be put to the good of the region itself. Not like the history of other parts of the United States in the old days. They grabbed and they schemed and they kept it for themselves—the land and the metals and the forests and the streams. This time, the last of the free land, it must be for the good of the people. All of them.”

Kennedy stared at the man Thor Storm, at the guileless face, the quiet eyes. Something in their gaze caused him to shift his own eyes. He laughed, then, a little short bark of discomfiture which he hastily tried to change into a cough. “Well, sure. That’s the way to look at it.” Desperately now he persisted. “We could make a go of it together. After all, you have to use money, same as everybody. Like you said, it’s the medium of exchange. I don’t want to lose track of you. Where you heading in, exactly?”

“Baranof, like you. As a base, at least. Then out from there, up and back and around, as far as I can go.”

“Baranof.” Zeb Kennedy let out a great breath, smiling. His shoulders that had been hunched and tensed, relaxed. “Now, about that fish and coal and timber and metals and so on? Fish and coal alone, they add up to food and fuel. Everybody needs food and fuel, everywhere.”

“And friends,” Thor added. His smile, for the first time, was quizzically amused. He put forward his great hand. “Luck to you,” he said. “And hoping you will make that pile—as you say—whether boats or houses or gold or fish. But for the common good. That is the only share I want in it.”

It was the beginning of their half century of friendship and enmity.

10

BRIDIE BALLANTYNE had been the first picture bride to come to Baranof. Perhaps this was because Baranof, from the beginning, had taken on a definitely solid aspect. Other settlements—Nome, Ketchikan, even Juneau—had had a wilder history. It was as though Baranof, and Baranof’s early sourdoughs, sensed that this was to develop into a substantial town.

Her coming had been the result of a joke fundamentally more stupid and rough than actually cruel. The men who had perpetrated it belonged to a lesser layer of the town’s citizenry in those early days. Drunk when the joke was devised, they were mildly resentful of the already successful Czar Kennedy. Probably they never would have conceived this jest if both Czar and Thor had not, each in his own way, been unique.

“Who does he think he is!” a prospector might say, after his fourth drink. “Keeping to himself, so high and mighty. We’re not good enough for him. Even the girls ain’t good enough for him. Him and that big Swede, too. Who do they think they are, anyway!”