OF ALL THE PASSENGERS on the scabrous vessel that had shoved off from Seattle, Alaska-bound, probably the only two who had themselves in hand, who knew the plan they definitely would follow, once ashore, were the Norwegian Thor Storm and the New Englander Zebedee Kennedy, whose far background was Scotch-Irish. These two had not been dazzled by mad stories of gold lying like pebbles strewing the Bering Sea shores at Nome, or the creeks of Baranof; or forming chunks in the Fairbanks or Juneau lodes.
They had come together on deck one evening after the greasy supper. The other passengers were swarming inside the snip’s shabby saloon, drinking, shouting, stamping to the whine of harmonicas or intent on the shuffle and slapslap of grimy playing cards. There the air was malodorous with smoke, food fumes, unwashed bodies and the acrid smell of unspoken fear and apprehension, the effluvia one encounters in courtrooms, in stockades.
Separately the two men had sought clean air and quiet on deck. Each had marked the other before meeting. They were set apart from the rest in bearing, in the light of intelligent purpose that was reflected in their faces. They wore a confident and resolved expression, quite different from the nervously grimacing features and the feverishly glittering eyes of the other men. Each had recognized in the other the usual, the purposeful. The man who was to be known as Czar Kennedy saw with the shrewd eyes of the born trader, the canny commercial opportunist. Thor Storm looked out at the world through the eyes of the natural student of the humanities, his gaze colored—and perhaps handicapped—by love, compassion and curiosity toward the human race.
Both were tall men, but Thor Storm towered above Kennedy, his was the physique of a giant, but without the giant’s usual pinhead. Kennedy, slighter in build, seemed almost fragile beside him. The casual observer would have mistaken Kennedy for the scholar, the thinker, with those curiously dreamy long-lashed eyes, the leonine upper head that contradicted the square punishing jaw. The thick crown of black hair was worn longer than ordinarily, and it had a natural wave. In later years, as he turned into his fifties, and the wavy black locks were powdered with white at the temples and the fore-lock, he took on an almost poetic look, with a touch of the ham actor.
Thor Storm, with those great shoulders, the merry eyes, the pink cheeks, the yellow hair that seemed almost to sparkle, appeared the man of physical action and material mind. Nature had played a trick on both these men, and on the world in which they functioned.
Now the two young strangers stood at the boat rail, mysteriously drawn together by a magnetic force that was to bind them for life. They seemed to be gazing at the almost shockingly magnificent view of water and snow-capped mountains and sunlit north night sky. Each saw the other out of the corner of the eye. Kennedy’s coat collar was turned up against the fresh wind that even in midsummer tasted of the snowcaps.
He, the charmer, spoke first, he flung an arm in exposition of the splendors before them. “I bet you never saw anything like that before in broad daylight at ten o’clock at night.”
“Great mountains like these, no. But daylight at night, yes.”
“How’s that?”
“I was born in the North Country.”
“You mean here!”
“No. Not here.”
Piqued, Kennedy pressed on. “I suppose you’re hell-bent for gold, like the rest of those fools in there?” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the lights, the shouts, the music. As the man did not reply at once to this blunt question Kennedy added, hastily, “No offense meant. They seem a poor lot, those in there.”
“Perhaps not as lacking as they seem. They must have courage of a sort, or they wouldn’t be here. I suppose you could say that of any pioneer.”
“Call these fellers pioneers!”
“Why not! They’re dissatisfied and want something better—freedom or land or peace or money. The early ones crossed the sea to Massachusetts or Virginia, the later ones crossed the continent to California or Oregon. They started because they were dissatisfied or curious or ambitious or adventurous. The frightened and the cautious stayed behind, even if they were dissatisfied. And they let the world roll over them. We’re all different in the same way—you and I and those men—and even those women, too—or we wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t lump me in with that parcel. They’re after gold. You get bit by that craze it isn’t courage drives you. It’s a kind of”—he searched for the word—“a kind of frenzy takes hold of you. Now, you don’t look like that, wild-eyed.”
“No, I’m not after gold.” Again the silence.
“What then?” Persistence was a trait that later contributed much to Czar’s success.
Thor Storm looked down at the water churning below, and then up at the Northern sky so strangely bright above them at this night hour. “New strange people. New adventure. New discovery. Like my ancestors who discovered America.”
“You don’t look like an Italian, or talk like one.”
“I was born in Norway. My people for cen—all my people have been Norwegian.”
“Well, say, Columbus discovered America, any kid knows that. He was Italian.”
“The Norsemen touched here long before Columbus. And the Eskimos were here before that. But it doesn’t matter. If you think those men in the saloon are fools I suppose you’re not looking for gold, either.” His accent was almost pure Oxford English.
This unconscious elegance of speech irritated Kennedy into a boasting loquacity unusual in his canny pattern of behavior. “Not me! I’m too smart for that. Let them freeze in the wilderness and starve and scratch for a few crumbs of gold. What’s gold, anyway!”
Thor Storm turned to look at this man, then, deliberately. He smiled a little. “Gold is a soft metal chemically formed in the earth. It isn’t as beautiful as quartz or common mica or even copper. But there’s less of it and it’s more difficult to find, and nations have made it the medium of exchange. If they decided on coal, for example, or oyster shells, or coral, then those would have been precious. Like wampum used by the North American Indians.”
“You sound like a smart fella,” Kennedy said, grudgingly.
“No, I’m not what you would call smart. I’m only intelligent.”
“Well, I am. I’m smart.” Curiously, there now was no note of boasting in his voice. It was said as a simple statement of fact. “I’m headed for the camp they call Baranof. They say that’s the place with a future. Not like Nome, they’d skin you alive and throw your bones into the Bering Sea. Baranof I hear they’ve put up wooden houses and a land office and a bank and there’s talk of running a railroad from there to the coast. I know where I’m headed in, but I don’t make any sense out of what you said—new people—new discovery. Where’s the money in that?”
“No money.”
“Then I can’t figure it. You one of those scientific fellas looking for the North Pole?”
“No.”
Zebedee Kennedy was angry now, his hands gripped the rail, he spoke very quietly as always when he was at high emotional pitch. “You murdered somebody?”
Thor Storm laughed then, a great rich rollicking laugh that boomed on the clear air and echoed from the menacing white-capped mountains. He put a hand on Kennedy’s shoulder—an incongruous hand for a man of his build—long-fingered, sensitive, the hand of generations of aristocrats.
“No, I am not a murderer running from justice. I’m here because there’s never been anything like this since the world was made. Men have roamed the world through the centuries for plunder and for land and for adventure. Europe and Asia and Africa and America North and South. Just a few years ago Oregon and Washington and California. But those were warm and lovely lands. Sun and rich valleys. But this! This is as it was when the world began, when it was just made. It is like being at the beginning of the world. You wait. You’ll see.”
“Say, you wait a minute, will you! Just a minute. I’m not figuring on any place that’s like the beginning of the world. I’m going to fetch up in a town. A town with a future.”
“The future there can be anything you want to make it. It can be a model for civilization. There is Alaska, raw as the day the world was born. The Russians have been there maybe a hundred years or so, but they haven’t made a mark. It’s as if the world had just been finished, and we’re in on it the day after Creation. Like gods. It’s all there, waiting for the work of our hands”—he hesitated a moment then finished, almost shyly—“and our spirits.”
Now there was something of distrust and disappointment in the narrow look with which Kennedy regarded his deck companion. “Your collar’s turned the right way, but you sure talk like a preacher.”
A quarter of a century later they could laugh about it, ruefully. A hundred times Kennedy had said, almost nostalgically, “Do you recall that night out on deck? A pair of babes, for all we knew what we were up against. Even you, with all your books.”
“We were better off than the others,” Thor reflected. “We didn’t just stay in Alaska because we had nothing we wanted to go back to. We were both crazy about it in a queer way. And we were both doing what we had come to do.”
Prophetically, even on the battered old boat, Thor Storm had known that everything in those next decades in Alaska would be larger than life, out of drawing, fantastic, so that the reasoning mind rejected it while actually living it.
He had tried to convey something of this to his fellow passenger. But Kennedy, a realist, was not possessed of imagination. He was merely, as he said, smart, with an almost prescient sense of material values.
“This whole thing,” Thor now persisted, and swept the air with one great arm that included the ship, its passengers, the overpowering mountains, the sea, the endless sky and the singularly vital air, “this whole thing is ridiculous.”
Kennedy stared at him, suspecting a joke he did not understand. “How d’you mean?”
“It’s ridiculous to happen in a civilized country like the United States in the twentieth century. People rushing in and grabbing whatever they want. For two hundred—three hundred—five hundred years or nearly—this continent has been ravaged, it’s a wonder it has survived. But it has. Now they’re swarming into this wilderness like the Spaniards into Mexico, like the forty-niners into California, like the Sooners into Oklahoma. It’s the last of it, I think. There can be no more unless someone discovers a new continent, or the day comes when we can somehow reach the other planets.”
“Looks like you know an awful lot about this country, and all—about the United States, I mean—that is, for a foreigner.”
“Everyone in the United States is a foreigner, or the son or grandson or great-grandson or great-great-grandson of a foreigner. Everyone except the red Indians, and, in Alaska, the Eskimos. All the others are foreigners.”
“Say,” Kennedy drawled, amused, “you go to calling those men in there foreigners to their faces, why, you’re liable to get yourself into a hell of a brannigan, puny-looking as they are.”
“I’m glad you don’t underestimate them entirely.”
Scoffing though he appeared, Kennedy had been listening. The veiled eyes were lifted now to Thor’s earnest face. “Well, anyway, I know that each of us alone is bigger than any two of them in there; together. And not only size. I’ve been thinking that, smart as I am, and you with your special education, why, we might think of working together, like. Maybe not pardners, exactly. But working together.”
“What makes you think I’ve had a special education?”
“The way you talk. I’ve heard Boston talk, and New York, too, but you don’t talk like an American, or a Swensky either, even if you are. It’s more what they call an English accent, isn’t it? Special.”
“My t—that is, I had an English teacher, perhaps I imitated him.” He had almost said, My tutor was an Oxford man. He led the subject away from himself. “So here we are on our way to Alaska, you and I, with these other men. What makes you feel you are smarter than they? Probably you are. But why do you think so?”
“Because they’re going to work themselves to the bone scratching crumbs of gold out of the ground, and I’m going to get it away from them, in comfort, by selling them the thing they’ll need and want. Not little piddling things. Big. They’ll need boats to get up the rivers—sizable boats, I mean—and I’m going to get hold of a boat and maybe run it. My folks back east were seafaring men. These ninnies yelling their lungs out in there”—he jerked his head toward the crowded saloon—“they’ll have to have places to live in, wagons for hauling, I bet there isn’t a horse in all Alaska. I’ve already got connections in Seattle. Let those poor suckers in there dig the gold. I’ll get it without digging. I know ways. Lots of ways I’m not talking about.”
The fair-haired giant looked at him then long and steadily. “Women? I hear they’re scarce, too, up there. Scarcer than almost anything else needed. These girls on board were congratulating themselves.”
“I’m no pimp. I’ll make my pile and get out, but I’ll make it fair and square enough. Everything legal.”
Everything legal. Years later Thor Storm sometimes recalled this phrase with wry amusement. And, he told himself, it was. Even if Czar and the Big Boys had to make the law themselves and lobby it through Congress under their own steam.
Now, standing there at the ship’s rail, he said, “I see. It sounds a practical scheme.”
“Damn right it’s practical. I’m not just going it blind.”
“You say you’ll make your pile and get out. If it’s money you’re after—and nothing else—I wouldn’t get out too soon. Nobody knows yet what there is in this Alaska. It may be as big as all Europe. It’s like a seventh continent. I’d say that gold is the least important product they’ll take out of it. There are precious and valuable things in Alaska—furs and metals and coal and timber. And fish.”
“Fish.” Kennedy’s tone was contemptuous.
But Storm was paying little attention to the man beside him, he seemed to be ruminating aloud. “Of course Bering was a Dane, though the Russians financed his voyage. What a voyage, poor man. But Steller, the botanist, the ornithologist—he was the first white man actually to set foot in Alaska. Did you know that? Most people don’t.”
“No, can’t say I did,” Kennedy replied because it seemed expected of him. The fella was kind of cracked, after all.
“It’s true. He was nine months on Bering Island, for example, and of course he was on Kayak, too, and Kagal.”
“Course,” Kennedy conceded, politely.
“Do you know,” Storm continued, absorbed in his topic, “how Steller proved that Alaska was part of America, part of the North American continent!”
“Can’t say I do, exactly.” He wished himself out of it by now, casting an almost wistful eye toward the noisy saloon. “How was that?”
“The bluejay.”
“How’s that again?”
“The bluejay. Steller knew that the eastern bluejay and the western bluejay were to be found nowhere but in the Western Hemisphere. And he actually saw one and shot it and examined it. It’s in his diary and there is his magnificent book De Bestis Marinis published in 1751. What wonders that book revealed! Would you believe that until that time the world actually never had heard of the sea otter, the sea lion, and the fur seal!”
“That a fact!”
“That news alone brought the Russian fur hunters in droves to Alaska. Sealskin. Otter. Money. Money. But then, the sea cow! That was the real Steller triumph. What about the sea cow!”
“Yeh. Sure. The sea cow.” Kennedy shook his head placatingly. The feller was crazy as a coot. He began to edge toward the saloon and safety.
“But that’s all in the past,” Storm went on, his tone regretful. “They’re almost mythical animals now, except the fur seal. Man’s greed destroyed these magnificent and valuable creatures years ago.”
“Damn shame. Well, kind of chilly out here, guess I’ll—–”
“And now the real gold in Alaska—do you know where that is?”
Kennedy had turned away. But something in the man’s earnest face and manner cautioned him to wait and hear. “Where’s that at?”
“The rivers. The inlets. The bays. There are millions and millions there, waiting to be discovered.” His words were exciting but his tone was quiet, thoughtful.
Zebedee Kennedy was thoughtful now, too. He had turned back to the giant. “Gold in the rivers, huh? Anybody knows that. Rivers and creeks. This feller Steller write something special about that, did he? In his book—De Something?”
“Not gold. Fish.”
“Fish!” Kennedy yelled, in disappointment and anger. “That’s the dumbest joke I ever did hear. I don’t need any dumb Swede to tell me there’s fish in Alaska.”
Storm seemed not to have heard. “Millions of fish,” he repeated, musingly. “Salmon. Millions and millions of salmon, enough to supply the world. For years and years and years. And timber. And coal. And metals. Those are the things to make Alaska a place of permanent value. Long after this little gold rush, as they call it, is over, those still will be there. Basic industries to make an empire out of a wilderness.”
Kennedy thought (with one small part of his quick mind only) that this fellow sounded like one of those Fourth of July orators back home. But he no longer felt chilly. He stared hard into the man’s face, his own face tense. He tried to be casual. “Yeah? What else besides?”
“Land, I suppose. Town land in a new world like this.”
“Take a lot of money—fish canneries, timbering, real estate.”
“I don’t know about that part of it. I only know what I know. You said you had—what was that word?—connections—you said you had important connections in Seattle. Perhaps they would furnish the money.”
Kennedy coughed a little preliminary cough. “We been standing here, gabbing, I didn’t even tell you my name. Kennedy is my name—Z. Kennedy. Stands for Zebedee, out of the Bible. Zeb, everybody calls me. Pardon me being blunt, but I don’t make you out, exactly. You talk like you know what you’re talking about, you can see you’re a man of education and so on. Next minute you’re an explorer like Columbus or the Vikings. I only went through sixth grade but I know about the Vikings, a little anyway. You got the yellow hair, but you’re lacking the helmet and spear and so on. I don’t believe I got your name, sir.”
“My name is Storm. Thor Storm. Thor after one of the Vikings, you know. Remember?”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” His right arm extended, the two men clasped hands. “You sure appear to know a lot about Alaska.”
“It isn’t what I know. That isn’t much. It’s what I feel. This can be Valhalla. We can be gods.”
Kennedy began to look uncomfortable again. “Well, I don’t know’s I want to be any god, exactly. I just figure to make my pile and get out.”
“No. No, you mustn’t do that. You must stay and make this a proud place. It’s a proud place already—the native Indians and the Eskimos.”
“Now wait a minute. They’re nothing but savages. Dirty savages.”
“The Eskimos are a civilized and resourceful people. They do not fight wars, they don’t kill one another. They share.”
“Civilized!”
“Well, perhaps not in our way. In their own way. And how civilized are we, after all?”
Kennedy now laughed, disarmingly, his manner was open and friendly, his eyes were cautious, speculative. “That’s what I always say. Uh, by the way, for all our talking here, and it’s been darn interesting to hear you go on, I don’t know yet what you do. For a living, I mean. What’s your line of work? Back home, I mean.”
“I fish.” Then, at the look of blank disappointment amounting almost to shock in the other man’s face, he added, “I come of sea people. Like yourself. And chiefly I study about people and places, their background and their life today because of that background. And then I write about them.”
“Write! Books, you mean!”
“I’ve written one. Nobody much read it, the first one. I hope to write another someday.”
“Write about this, you mean? Alaska and so on? The gold rush?”
“That’s only a small part of it. An incident, really. Now, the Eskimos—–”
But this was too much. Huffily, and with haste, Kennedy began to backtrack. “Books and Eskimos, they’re not in my line. What you said about millions of salmon in the rivers—and coal—and metals—and so on—that’s different. That’s likely to be important. If you know, that is.” Craftily he tried to gauge this man whose inner quality eluded him. And was this man a babbling fool, with his books and his Vikings and his fish, or did he know? If he actually could prove this knowledge, then what was the basis of the future relation between the two?
Quite simply Storm said, “I know this region, though I never have seen it.”
Suspiciously, “How’s that?”
“There are records and early histories, there are scientific books in the libraries and archives of many cities—Copenhagen and St. Petersburg and New York and others.”
“You’ve seen those!”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When I was sixteen—eighteen—twenty—all my life.”
“You must have had money to travel and jaunt around like that. Archives.” To this the man said nothing. Kennedy’s face hardened. “I want to know just where I stand,” he said. It was to become a business slogan with him, a safety catch used through future decades in all the preliminaries to his plans and schemings. “I want to know just where I stand. I take it you’ll want your share of anything comes out of this. If we go in business together, that is.” Hastily added.
“Business?” Thor Storm shook his head, a look of amusement lighting his face. “Business is not for me. I know nothing of business.”
“But you just said. Damn it, you said you knew where things could be found.”
“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.