Barely seventeen, Corto finds himself at the side of two incredible characters, the writer Jack London and Rasputin, his future companion of adventures. At the time he is too young to comprehend the importance the two will have in his life, but as he himself admits at the outset, “Today I am able to tell you two or three things about them that I did not understand then.”

As regards the figure of Jack London who is given considerable importance here, Pratt exploits his profound knowledge of the subject to dispel certain widely held beliefs that the future writer held socialist ideas. In this story, London is shown to be much more interested in issues of race than in social issues. In fact, in this war London was very much on the side of the Russians, not because of his socialist ideals but solely for reasons of race.