“Seal—–?”

“Someday I’ll teach you how to make a seal poke. It’s quite a trick. Now, let’s go out and see what we can find. Greens or berries that are good to eat.”

No such fancies spangled her months with Czar Kennedy. She lived in the finest house in Baranof, she wore dresses bought in Seattle, she ate the best the town afforded. On one of his rare trips to Seattle Czar even took Christine with him. In her early girlhood this journey was by no means the casual fling through the firmament that—thanks to the airplane—was to bring the mainland a mere handful of hours away from distant Arctic shores.

Most Alaskans did not dream of staying at the Olympic Hotel when they visited Seattle, that first Outside stop. It was too grand, too costly. They chose one of the small side-street hotels where they knew they would encounter fellow territorials whose tastes and pocketbooks matched their own. With or without Christine, Czar stayed at the Olympic. The hotel staff knew him, there always was a room for him, no matter how many national business conventions might be crowding the lobby, the halls, the restaurants. Long ago the room clerks, bellhops, waiters had learned not to be deceived by the baggy clothes, the battered old hat above the ascetic face, the veiled eyes. Bridie Ballantyne, provoked perhaps by some fresh evidence of ruthlessness, had said with characteristic acumen, “That face of Czar’s, and the look of it, it’s like you were looking at one of those paintings of the prophets, mild and understanding everything, and forgiving. Then all of a sudden he looks at you, you notice his eyes, and they’re like that FBI man was here once during the War. Cold steel.”

This glimpse of the Northwest metropolis had dazzled the child, and puzzled her. Like an Alice in Wonderland she stared, confused and sometimes unbelieving, at the hotel’s luxurious appointments, at the wide streets, the amazing hills, the shopwindows, the handsome houses, the cloud-crowned office buildings.

“Baranof doesn’t look like this,” the child said. “Why doesn’t it?”

“No money.”

“Then why doesn’t Seattle give them some money?”

He stared at her, startled. He had been hearing this question lately, from other sources. Then he laughed. “No, that wouldn’t do. That’s the wrong way round.”

Not wishing to leave her alone in the hotel, or on the street, he took her with him when he had a businesss conference in this office or that, with Dave Husack or Sid Kleet or any one of a half dozen other Northwest nabobs.

“Now you sit here,” Czar would say as they entered the outer reception room of one of these luxury office suites, “and read a book or look at these folders with all these pictures in them, I won’t be long.”

“I want to come in with you.”

“You can’t. We’ve got business to talk about.”

“I won’t stay here. I want to come in there with you. I’ll be quiet.”