“You’re just sore because your claim dribbled out on you,” a more reasoning one would say. “Why don’t you do like Czar does? Use your head.”

“Czar Kennedy, he uses everybody’s head,” the disgruntled one announced with a flash of drunken clarity. “Everybody he meets, he picks their brains, quiet and smooth as a cobra.”

“Cobras don’t pick brains. Leastways, if they did they’d have a sorry meal off yours.”

“Oh, so that’s the way it is! You’re in Czar’s pay, the way a lot of them are.”

“I’m in nobody’s pay. I work my own claim.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe I’m smarter than he is, some ways. Or you, either.”

If Thor Storm and Czar Kennedy had been philanderers, or even fairly steady patrons of those early-day saloons and Line houses, lonely when alone, driven to the false comfort of drink or the fleeting solace of the town women when oppressed, Bridie Ballantyne never would have known Alaska, much less become one of its most respected citizens.

Czar and Thor took a drink now and then at the bar of the Rocker Saloon or the Poke of Gold. But it was known that they were not drinkers. They were polite and friendly toward the girls, they knew the women in the little close-huddled log cabins on the Old Creek Road. But no woman claimed them, the two stood apart. Both, to the other citizens of the haphazard town, came and went mysteriously.

Baranof admired the two men, sometimes grudgingly. They sensed that in each there was something distinctive. “Not stuck up, though. I mean they don’t exactly act like they think they’re smarter than other people.” Then, wryly, “Say! But they are, at that!”

Confined as the Baranovians were by barriers of mountains, water, trackless tundra and killing cold, everybody’s business was everybody’s business. News traveled by what was called the mukluk grapevine. Mukluks are Eskimo boots of soft strong mooseskins, or caribou. News, then, that travels on foot, silently.

They say they say they say. They tried to extract news of Czar from Thor, and to verify Thor’s puzzling pattern of life through Czar. Each was loyal to the other, though by now their differences were many and acute. Each pursued his own way of life and process of thinking. The men were in direct antithesis.

That crazy Swensky he goes off alone with his dog team up to the Eskimo villages, they say he learned to talk Eskimo, he writes pieces about them, they say when he’s up there he lives right in with them, dirt and all and eats the stinking stuff they eat, raw. Summers back here he goes out in the salmon season with the boat crews that bring in the big catch for the canneries, July and August. They say he works like that, summers, so he can do his writing, winters, real scientific writing. He’ll talk to you about it, if you come right out and ask him, but for all he’s so good-natured and all, why, you feel he’s kind of studying you, he kind of studies everybody, friendly, mind you, but there’s a look in his eyes like he isn’t only listening to you, he’s storing away what he hears. Somebody said he married one of those half-breed Eskimo girls but he isn’t as big a fool as that, I mean he’s kind of crazy but he’s no fool. Leastways, he ain’t as crazy as all that. Any Eskimo will lend you his wife, anybody knows that, if that’s what you want.