He rose leisurely and walked the length of the great room to where the child sat. He placed a hand tenderly on her shoulder. “Christine. Christine child.”

She opened her eyes, she looked up at him. “Grampa Czar, I’m hungry.”

“Well, sure. So am I. We’ll go back to the hotel and we’ll have a fine lunch. Rock crab and ice cream.”

She jumped from the chair, shook herself like a puppy. “I don’t want to have lunch at the hotel, I’m tired of the old hotel, I want to have lunch down by the water at that place where the vegetables are all spread out, like a garden. And the Japanese sprinkle them with watering cans. And we can eat those little tiny shrimps out of a paper bag.”

She was startled by the whoop of laughter from the men. “Czar, you sure picked yourself a girl won’t break you,” Dave Husack shouted.

Her hand in Czar’s they walked down to the waterfront, and to the color and sound and delicious smells of mingled fruits and vegetables and berries and coffee and crullers and cheese and fish and apple pie and flowers of the Farmers’ Market.

“I didn’t like those men,” she said. “Where we were.”

“Why not?”

Something warned her not to reveal what she had heard. “They aren’t like the people in Baranof.”

Triumphantly he said, “That’s just it. That’s why I brought you along with me to Seattle. I want you to get used to the way people act Outside. When you get older you’re going to school Outside. Here, maybe. And you’ll meet people who are somebody, the way your Grandma Kennedy was, and your mother, too, before she married that—that mongrel.”

She sprang to the defense of the father she never had known. “My father was Grampa Thor’s son and my mother was married to him and I am their daughter and I was born in a caribou—–”

“Stop that! Never mind about that!” Czar shouted in a rare display of emotion. “I don’t want you to talk about that, understand me!”

“Why?”

“Because I say so.”

“I told that Mrs. Husack about it that day you left me at her house and I had tea with her and her friends and one of them said it was—wait a minute—that lady said ma-cabber. Oh, what a ma-cabber story! What’s that? And they all stared at me.”

“Then don’t talk so much. Now you listen to toe, Christine. By the time you’re eighteen I’ll about own Baranof and a good chunk of the rest of the Territory besides, and these people here will be eating out of my hand. You’re going to come into money someday. Big money. People are going to try to take it away from you, but you’ll be too smart for them. I want you to know what it’s good for and how to handle it.”

“I know what it’s good for and how to handle it, too,” the child announced, with pride. “When I go to the Nugget Drugstore for a chocolate nut bar I give the man ten cents and then he gives me a chocolate bar.”