“Thor!” Bridie repeated, stiff-lipped. She looked up at a giant of a man who now stepped forward from the crowd—a man well over six feet tall with a short golden beard and eyes that were different from the other men’s eyes, serious but friendly, too, and smiling.

“Where is your luggage, miss?” he said. His words and voice were different, too, something like that London doctor who had been head of the Lancashire hospital.

Gazing at him Bridie gasped, “Are you English! You didn’t say you were English.”

“Heh, Swensky! Heh, Thor!” a voice called. “You an English swell?”

Heedless of this, still gently smiling, the big man looked down at her. “I’ll fetch your luggage if you’ll point it out to me. Possibly there may be a room for you at Mrs. Belcher’s boardinghouse, a respectable place, I can assure you of that. But I’m not sure she’d want you there after you’ve seen your patients. After all, Mrs. Belcher has two small children, it might be a risky thing—–”

“Oh, no, no!” she cried. “It’s a mistake!”

Soothingly, he went on, “If Mrs. Belcher objects, you can stay in my cabin and I’ll move in with someone else until it’s over. Czar’s moved out, anyway, it will be quite all right.”

Desperately, she cried, “But you’re not him! His name is Czar—wait a minute”—she groped in her reticule for the photograph and fished it out, her hands shaking—“Czar Thor, his name is. Mr. Czar Thor, Box 19, Baranof, Alaska. I came to see him. They called you Thor, but you’re not him!”

The big man took the photograph from her and gazed at it in silence. He looked down at the girl’s face upturned to his—the plain, fresh decent face upturned to him. One of the other men had peered over his shoulder.

“Kennedy!” the man yelled. “It’s Czar Kennedy!” Then he, too, stared at her. “Why, say, miss, Czar’s left for Seattle and Tacoma to be married. He left on the boat last week. He’s married by now.”

Years later, when Christine was a woman and the mother of children, Bridie still found herself answering the questions questions questions put to her by this insatiable lover of the always mysterious Alaska. Bridie could answer the questions freely and frankly now and she had miraculously retained, old as she was, the astringency, the piquancy of her verbiage. She loved to hear the ripple of Christine’s sudden laughter when the answer to a question was more than ordinarily pungent.

“I’ll never forget that first day. Come, like a ninny, to marry a man who’d never heard of me, and finding myself nursing a bunch of girls down with smallpox in a House. Not one of them died, I’ll say that for myself, but then they were a husky bunch, they had to be to stand this climate then, no conveniences. Conveniences! Well, we won’t go into that. A gold-rush camp, rough as a bear’s den. They were kind of like children, those girls. Their minds, I mean. Dull-thinking, most of them. They’d sit in their wrappers, afternoons, in the back yard, fenced in, it was, wearing Mother Hubbard wrappers, there was a hammock I remember, slung between two posts. They’d wash their hair and fluff it out in the sun, summers. And the waiter—he was a Negro fella—he brought them beer and sandwiches on a tray, and they talked and laughed and read those yellow-back paper novels or the little newspaper, maybe, it was about the size of a handbill. Sometimes they played games, like little girls. I’ve seen ’em play jacks, even, on the back steps, and fight over the little rubber ball.”