3

EVERYONE WHO COULD be stirring was out taking advantage of the hour or two of winter’s lemon-colored daylight. The Gold Street office workers, the Federal Building employees, the shop clerks, skittered across the icy sidewalks for the morning coffee break at Nick’s Caribou or the Bering Coffee Shop or Gabe’s Sunny Nook Café. Merchants rearranged their windows and risked a brief bareheaded moment outdoors to survey their handiwork. Housewives, marketing at a brisk trot, stared resignedly at printed signs in the supermarket bins that read Steak, $2.29 a lb.; Milk, 65 cts. qt; Eggs, $1.23 doz.; Cauliflr, 81 cts.; Bread, 64 cts. loaf. They looked again at the money in their purses and thought longingly of summer when the milk and home-grown vegetables would be coming in by truck from Matanuska, or by short-trip bush plane instead of by the long costly air freight from Outside. Bundle-laden they trotted home and telephoned a neighbor. Eleven A.M. “Come on over for coffee. I made a coffeecake early this morning out of that recipe in the Lode. No eggs no butter no—well, sawdust mostly, I guess, but it turned out real good.”

School children at their desks stared longingly out at the ice-sheathed schoolyard. It would be too dark, too dangerously cold for sliding or skating by the time school was out.

Air pilots counted on those two hours, hurtling in from Seattle with the big four-engine jobs, or from up north in the twin-engine DC-3’s, or the little single-engine Cessnas or Pipers. Big or small, they usually tried to make the run before the darkness came down again; though somehow the long long nights never were quite black here with that limitless chandelier up there sparkling with a million incandescent celestial watts. In the early autumn, the late winter, and early spring nights the northern lights made a wild aerial fantasy of the skies, the fliers said it made them feel kind of crazy. Still, pilots from Kinkaid and Morgenstern Air Force Bases said they would almost rather fly by Arctic night than by snow-dazzled day. But then, they were a race apart, everyone knew they were transformed from pink-cheeked lads to supermen, once they buckled into their gear and crawled into the cockpit. They screeched through the air in jets, day or night, flinging their lives into the constellations like gods, wing-tipped.

Bridie Ballantyne, walking up Gold Street from her apartment at the Ice Palace at eleven this winter morning was dressed as you might see women garbed on Michigan Boulevard in Chicago, or Madison Avenue, New York, or Sutter in San Francisco. No great clumsy mukluks or parkas for Bridie. No one knew how she did it but there she was mincing along, a small garnet velvet hat atop the carefully coiffed steel-gray hair, her ears unprotected. A good Pribilof seal coat. White gloves. A handsome black suède bag. Coquettish black suède pumps. Her step, what with the icy streets and her own high spirits, was a sort of prance with a slight swing. Old-timers who loved her said this was a relic of the day when, a girl of eighteen, she had whisked as a student nurse through the corridors of the old Seattle hospital. The evil and envious said, nurse, my foot, she was a waitress in a lunchroom on Skid Row down by the Seattle docks. Political enemies said that the swing and the prance were left over from the period of her first Baranof days when the town was a crazy new mining camp and Bridie a picture bride without a bridegroom.

Friends and opponents were stunned when, at sixty, Bridie had settled all this.

“Let ’em have it, fair and clear. I’ve been up to my scalp in Alaska doings for forty fifty years, politics and everything else, they’ve called me words you wouldn’t come on even in the Bible. I wouldn’t change a minute of it, not if three fairies were standing over me the way they do in the storybooks, with those sticks in their hands waving and sparks coming out.”

She herself had written her life story, breezily, with perhaps an occasional assist in the grammar department from Chris Storm or from Addie and Paul Barnett, editors and reporters on Thor Storm’s weekly.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had bought it, published it, and syndicated it. The digest magazine called Look Alive had used it in its Stranger Than Fiction department. All Alaska, Washington State, Oregon, British Columbia and the whole Northwest for that matter had read and fumed or chuckled, depending on the political and social standing of the reader.

“I guess maybe that will shut their mouths clap-clapping these fifty years past,” Bridie said, quite without rancor. “It’s been kind of exciting and all, being talked about and whispered about. But being they’re so nosy all these years, why, I figured they should have the straight of it. So they’d know what to put on my tombstone when the time came.”

With the money received from this lone literary effort she had achieved three almost lifelong wishes. She bought for herself a pair of smallish clear blue-white diamond earrings and it was said she wore them even to bed; she took a trip to Honolulu in midwinter and was, on her return, more chauvinistically Alaskan than ever, if possible.

“Hot,” she said, in a kind of running travel talk. “And a little pee of rain most days just when you’re out at a garden party. Liquid sunshine they call it. Summer all the time. My, I should think they’d get sick of it! Here in Baranof summer’s summer and winter’s winter, no mistake about it and keeps you on your toes. Hawaii they’ve got what they call a fruit, it’s papaya, my opinion no more flavor than a rubber boot. Alaska’s good enough for me, strawberries so big you have to cut them in quarters and watch not to dribble the juice.”

For the third part she virtuously donated a neat sum toward the Baranof College Scholarship Fund. “For an Eskimo student,” she stipulated. “One of those smart kids can take an engine or a watch or any mechanical thing apart and fix it and put it together again. Natural-born mechanics, I’ve seen ’em at it. Engine instinct. God knows where they came by the knack of it.”

Her costume this frigid morning had been planned for the airport arrival of a group of Distinguished Visitors, to be followed by the Baranof Chamber of Commerce luncheon at Nick’s Caribou Café. Now as she pranced along Gold Street she audibly sniffed the icy air as though she were drifting languorously through a balmy vale heavy with the scent of exotic bloom.

“My!” she said aloud to no one. “Smells elegant.” She often talked to herself thus as people do who live alone. Everyone she passed greeted her. Hi, Bridie!… Miz Ballantyne!… See you at the luncheon?

They wore fur parkas, the hoods pulled forward so that their faces were all but obscured, but Baranof spoke to Baranof, no matter how deeply hooded in wolf. They were accustomed to seeing Bridie dressed like a Vogue cover, miraculously unfrosted. Younger and hardier citizens would not have dreamed of venturing out in such garb. Her keen eye recognized everyone, marked everything. Hello, Nap! Well, good morning, Zella, I hear it’s a girl this time, like you hoped for. She passed Bowker’s Jewelry Store window. Gus Bowker had just finished his new display and was cautiously surveying the effect from inside, his head screwed round so that he seemed to be ogling the passer-by. Bridie, not pausing in her progress, glanced swiftly at the shining show window, threw up her hands and wagged her head in a gesture conveying dazzlement. A gratified and reassured Gus removed his head from public display.

A young man in Air Force uniform, winter issue, came toward her, in town from the Base. Rashly, his head was without covering. Bridie glanced at him sharply. She saw the white blob in the center of his face. A newcomer, a rookie. “Heh, young man!” she called as he passed. “Young man! Your nose is frozen!”

He went on, heedless or perhaps unhearing. She turned to scuttle after him but he vanished into the Juke Box Stationery and Lunch, you heard the blare and squawk of the canned music as he opened the door and disappeared. Oh, well, Bridie thought, he’ll find out all right when it begins to hurt in a minute. Teach him.

Always, winter and summer, when she reached the busy corner of Gold and Polaris, where the Miners’ National Bank stood so solidly, she too stood solidly a moment to gaze up and down the street to the jagged sky line of the mountains at one end, to the gray water at the other, with the shining slab of the Ice Palace challenging both. She liked Baranof best in the winter. This was no unique perversity. The town had recently taken a poll. It turned out that ninety per cent of the adult population and ninety-five per cent of the school boys and girls preferred the winter months to the brief summer season.

“Just goes to prove,” Bridie said. “Pioneer spirit. Pioneers like it tough or they wouldn’t be pioneers.”

She liked to stand there at the corner and watch the gay new traffic lights go green go red like the Christmas-tree globes in the window of Hager’s Hardware Store at holiday time. Lights, snow, mountains, people, stood out sharply as though cut for a gigantic game of jigsaw.

Passing in cars or on foot her fellow townsmen were concerned a bit as they saw her waiting to be picked up by the others of the reception committee. You aim to freeze yourself into a totem, standing there?… Give you a lift, Bridie?

A young woman stepped briskly along the snow-ridged sidewalk, a three-year-old by the hand, a one-year-old in the gocart. The faces of all three blossomed out from the fur-bordered parka hoods, fresh and glowing and unexpected as tundra flowers.

Bridie peered down at the new-minted face almost hidden in the cart. “The new one? Look at the cut of him, would you, in that parky! The spit of his dad. And how is Augie?”

“It’s a girl. And my husband isn’t Augie. Lowell. I’m Mrs. Lowell Kramer.”

Bridie caught this challenge deftly, she fished a name up from the swarming depths of her memory. “Who else, of course? Who else but little Lorine, as if I didn’t mind the day you stepped off that plane—black winter—how long ago was it now?—four—all right, call it five years ago—and you scared he wouldn’t be there to meet you from the Air Base and in another way scared he would, and there he was at the airport waiting in his uniform, and off we went to the church. And a prettier wedding I never did see, though I recall the gardenia corsage he’d ordered for you from Seattle by air was just a leeee-tle bit brown around the edges. Nipped, they were.”

The girl laughed then, helplessly, half amused, half vexed. “Lowell isn’t Air Force, he’s a construction worker, we were married back home in Dakota and this one”—she pointed to the older child—“was born before I ever got here. I stepped off the plane, my husband had never seen him, he was so excited—–”

“Oh, well, make nothing of it,” Bridie said, airily, as though it had been the girl who was in error. “You’re here and happy, and that’s what counts.” She looked sharply at the young woman. “Two, and another one coming. Three’s a nice number, four is better, and Alaska wants population, those ninnies in Washington keep saying there aren’t enough of us. Why, look at Oregon when it came in, and Nebraska and New Mexico and California even, not to speak of that Texas—why, twenty-eight territories with a lot less population than us got statehood but here we are—–”

Bridie was off, riding her favorite subject full-tilt. The young wife thought of her marketing and her household tasks as she nodded politely, her glance distrait. The boy shook his mother’s hand impatiently, the child in the cart began to whimper. Bridie broke off abruptly. “And who’s a bigger ninny than me, keeping these angels here in the cold?”

A car came to a stop at the curb. Another, just behind it, halted with a screech. Windows were lowered, there was hallooing and beckoning, a girl at the wheel of the first car stuck her head out of the window. A black-eyed blonde in a white fur parka, its white wolf hood dramatically framing her face.

“Bridie! We called for you at the Ice Palace. Waited and waited and Ott went up to your room. You said you’d be in the lobby at eleven.”

“Did I now, Chris! Oh, the pity of it!” The feet, in the smart black suède pumps, made nothing of the snowy distance between sidewalk and car. “I had an errand, very particular it was, and I made sure you’d pick me up here at the corner.” She waved farewell to the young wife and the two children. “My love to Augie, now, and don’t forget,” she called, blithely.

Ott Decker emerged from the first car, he scurried round to hand Bridie in. “Oh, now, Bridie, everybody knows you can’t sit still long enough to be called for. Ants in your pants.”

“Mind your tongue!” Bridie commanded, teetering toward the door.

The front window of the second car was lowered. Czar Kennedy’s silver head was poked out. Peering just behind it was Oscar Bogard, Mayor of Baranof.

“Someday you’ll be standing here on the corner frozen stiff,” the Mayor shouted, “and somebody’ll put a dime in your mouth thinking you’re a parking meter.”

“It won’t be you,” retorted Bridie. “You’re too stingy to meter-park, you got diplomatic immunity.” Her laughter whooped out on the icy morning air.

Czar Kennedy’s benevolent face, his gentle voice, chided her.

“Come on right in here where you belong, Bridie, with the old sourdoughs. You can have the whole back seat to yourself, like the queen you are.”

With one gesture, Bridie’s white-gloved hand rejected this courtly offer. “I’m riding with the young fry.” She scrambled into the broad seat beside Chris before Decker could assist her. “That is, if I ain’t crowding.” Seated, she now raised her voice to an astonishing shriek that carried to the rejected pair in the second car. “No offense, Czar, and you too, Mr. Mayor. But Bridie Ballantyne never sits at the second table.” Again her whoop of laughter.

The second car now moved off into first place. As it passed smartly the two men could be seen shaking their heads in amusement or disapproval or both. “You kill me,” Ott Decker remarked, inadequately, as he slid into the front seat beside the two women.

Bridie patted the head of the girl in the white parka, gave a straightening jerk to her own hat that had gone askew as she clambered in, adjusted her scarf, wrapped her seal coat about her silk-clad legs, licked her lips with a quick nervous flick of triumph, gave a little settling hunch to her shoulders, sighed with satisfaction, and took her handkerchief from her bag with a flourish that assailed the atmosphere with Parma violet—all this in a series of gestures so swift as to melt into one rhythmic sequence.

“Up front is where I like to sit,” she went on, as though continuing a conversation, “so’s I can see what Chris is hitting before she hits it.” Suddenly she leaned forward to stare at the vehicle’s pale orchid hood. “Say, whose car is this, anyway, you’re driving, Chris? It sure ain’t yours, unless you’ve bought a new one or Czar’s gone wild and given you one, not likely.”

“Mine,” Ott Decker said plaintively. “My brand-new Thunderbird. And don’t ask me why I let her drive it to the airport. Except she busted up her own. And I’m nuts about her.”

Chris’s voice was soft and low. Some said this was a trick she had learned from old Czar. The resentful ones said it was an affectation. She soft-pedals it, they complained, so you have to listen close, that way she makes everything she says sound important.

“Bridie Ballantyne, you know perfectly well I’ve never hit anything, and I’ve been driving since I was fifteen, haven’t I!”

“Then what does Ott mean—you busted up your car!”

“Something hit me. Yesterday I was driving down past Mile Forty and a moose charged right out at me from the woods, I never saw anything so silly, I thought for a minute that I’d be out in the snow and the moose would be in the front seat, driving. It was a close thing, he damaged the radiator and broke a headlight. And my spirit, of course. I never thought a moose would hunt me.”

Bridie pointed in the direction of the fast-vanishing car ahead of them. “I wish I had those two men here this minute. I got up and told them, last week’s City Council meeting, I said, more moose around this winter than I’ve seen in fifty years, they’ll be promenading down Gold Street next. Oh, no, they said, and anyway that’s the wrong kind of publicity to give out about Alaska. Ott, why’n’t you Chamber of Commerce people do something?”

“Do! You’ll have to speak to God. It’s the record cold. There’s nothing in the woods for them to eat so they come out looking for handouts. You can’t shoot every moose that shows its head the other side of a tree.”

“That’s right, protect the poor moose and the hell with the people of Baranof. You sound like one of those Absentee Big Boys in Seattle. Sometimes I think Alaska deserves what it gets—which sure is nothing.”

Chris’s laughter rang in the clear cold air. “Children, children! Stop fighting among yourselves. You won’t have any ammunition left for the enemy.”

Ott Decker reached past Bridie to place a doubled fist gently against Chris’s jaw—a wooing, futile, tender gesture of his kind.

“As Secretary of the Baranof Chamber of Commerce I don’t want to hear any of that enemy talk. We’re all buddies from the time their plane touches down until they take off again for Outside.”

“Who all’s coming?” Bridie interrupted, briskly. “The General, of course, but the Base will take care of him. Besides, he isn’t rightly a general any more, is he, now that he’s Vice-President and Chairman of the Board, no less, of National Fish Pack Company? Seventy-five thousand a year, I hear he’s pulling down. Place on Long Island, apartment at the Waldorf in New York. He a general now, anyway?”

“A general once is a general always,” Ott assured her. “Flesh, fowl or fish.”

Bridie jerked at her skirts and scuffled her feet impatiently in the way she had when she scented news. “Yes, but who Who else? The General well and good, he’s window dressing for the Seattle crowd. And Dave Husack must be coming or Czar Kennedy wouldn’t be down meeting the plane. I hear Dave’s gone soft in his sixties and he eats a blonde for breakfast every morning—that is, when he’s away from home and that starched wife of his.” Then, as a curious weight of silence fell upon the air, “Oh, Chris, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—I guess I must be going soft myself.”

Ott Decker’s arm slid along the back of the seat until his hand just touched Chris’s shoulder. “Chris is a blonde, all right, but she sure would stick in Dave Husack’s throat if he tried to swallow her.”

“How did I get into this?” Chris demanded, rather waspishly for her. “I live here, don’t I? And you know perfectly well who’s coming, Bridie.”

“Do I, now? I know Dave Husack’s coming, and of course Sid Kleet. Where Dave is, there’s Sid just behind, nudging him like a tugboat edging an oversized ship into harbor. Then there’s General Cass Baldwin—did you say I call him General anyway, even if he’s in the Fish Business now instead of the Fight Business?”

“Now, Bridie, we covered that once,” Chris reminded her. “What’s wrong with you this morning? I don’t mind meeting Dave Husack. All that’s over and done with.”

“Just the same, something’s afoot,” Bridie persisted, musingly. “Let’s see now. There’s Wilbur K. Distelhorst coming too—the nerve of them in Washington! Sending just an assistant instead of the top boy. There’s a fine sample of the Department of the Interior for you! I bet he’s never seen a salmon, only on a platter, or a bear except in a zoo, or a stand of timber outside a movie.”

“Wilbur K. Distelhorst,” Chris interrupted, dreamily. “I love to say it. It’s like something out of Dickens. Or Sinclair Lewis.”

“Look, Chris, let me drive, will you?” Ott Decker said. “We’re a little late. Can’t even see Czar’s car. I think I hear the plane.”

“That’s an old bush crate and you know it perfectly well, Ott,” Bridie persisted. “Come on now. Something’s afoot.”

Now, for the first time, Chris tensed a little at the wheel, she risked a quick searching glance at Ott Decker’s guileless face. A boyish flush suffused it as she eyed him.

“I’m a big girl now, Ott. You’re nervous as a bridegroom. Are you importing some choice morsel from Outside? Object matrimony?”

Bridie yelped, “Ott!”

“No. And you damn well know why, so don’t needle me, Chris.”

Bridie now began to breathe heavily with the intake and exhaust of a steam pipe about to burst. “Ott Decker, if you don’t tell us this minute what you’re being so sneaky about—–”

“All right.” He threw his arms wide in a gesture of revelation. “Czar kept it under wraps. And nobody actually told me. But down at the Chamber office we put two and two together, sometimes, and it comes out five—–”

“Ott Decker!” Bridie screeched.

“Young Husack’s coming,” he blurted. “Bayard, no less. And that girl he’s going to marry—or supposed to. And he’s supposed to stay six months in Alaska. The heir apparent kind of getting acquainted with his future subjects, I suppose. The old king is kind of pooped. Long live the king.”

There was silence in the car. Even Bridie was momentarily speechless. Then she drew the long whistling bronchial breath of one who is about to blast. Ott Decker raised a restraining hand.

“Wait a minute. I haven’t finished. Nobody knows this, Chris. Nobody but your Grandpa Thor, and Paul and Addie Barnett. And, of course, Czar’s whole crowd, and they don’t know Thor knows.”

Chris began to laugh, not very merrily, for her. “Nobody? Well, we’ll have a field day with that.” She stopped, stiffened at the wheel. “But we went to press yesterday. Did they know it then? You can’t unscramble a weekly. And why didn’t somebody tell me?”

“They didn’t know until last night. It must have been too late, they distribute this noon.”

“Ott Decker! If you’ve known about this all along—–”

“I tell you I haven’t. Wouldn’t I tell you, Chris! That isn’t all. Young Husack’s only staying a month or so now, to get the feel of Alaska in the winter. That’s what they said. The feel. Then Outside till June or July, and back here and we’re supposed to do the real guided tour, Barrow to Juneau, with you chaperoning, Bridie. You window dressing, Chris. Unless he marries in the meantime. But that isn’t the idea. Just wait, you two.”

Bridie jerked her hat forward, a characteristic gesture of utter irritation. “Wait for what? What is the idea! I’ve a mind to slap you, Ott Decker, big as you are.”

“I’m the idea, I suppose,” Chris said, quietly.

“Partly. But this is real old melodrama, it’s like the stuff in those books I used to read out of my grandmother’s bookcase when I went to visit her in Sausalito. The rich old bastard and the young district attorney and the beauteous maiden. Old-timy books left over from Theodore Roosevelt’s Big Stick days. Robber Barons.”

Bridie’s protest now hurtled through the winter air like the warning screech of a locomotive when a cow is on the track. Ott laid a placating hand on her knee. “They’re grooming young Bay for the big-time race. He is supposed to spend some time in the Territory because they aim to have him appointed Governor of Alaska. Youth, see, in the saddle.” Then, as Bridie again opened her mouth, “Now wait a minute. You haven’t heard the half. A couple of years is all, he resigns on some excuse, then he’s back in Seattle and they run him for Congress. Then Senator. Then, by the time he’s maybe forty or forty-five, he’s candidate for the first President of the United States to come out of the Great Neglected Northwest Empire.” He leaned forward to clear Bridie’s furred expanse and stared hard at the silent girl at the wheel. “You think she’ll run the White House O.K., Chris? All those lovely state dinners? And the Easter egg rolling? Couple of years now I noticed they’ve dropped that egg rolling, it’s a damn shame—–”

Bridie found voice again. “Fine time to be telling us, Ott Decker. I won’t forget this in a hurry. And for Chris—–”

“I tell you I didn’t get wind of it until half an hour ago when I was calling the Ice Palace. I found out Dave Husack wasn’t staying at Czar’s house this time, the way he usually does. So I got the manager’s office and Goomer says they’ve reserved the four rooms they call the Governor’s suite on the top floor, no less …”

“Four,” Chris said, quietly. “That’s a bedroom for old Dave, one for Bay, and a sitting room. And a bedroom, leave us piously hope, for her.”

“I knew it!” Bridie crowed. “I had a hunch this morning early something stinking was on the fire. I just thought I’d go up and check the Ice Palace V.I.P. suite. I knew Sid Kleet alone didn’t rate it, even with that Distelhorst along, and Husack generally always stays at Czar’s place. The minute I laid eyes on it I smelled something funny. Sitting room, three bedrooms, dressing room in the big one, two baths, flowers in vases and the refrigerator chugging as if they had a whale in there. Whose coming rates that, I said to myself. Who gives Dave Husack flowers? I’d as soon give flowers to a Kodiak bear. The bridal suite if I ever saw it. But who’s the bride, I said.”

They were in sight of the airport now, a gay toy in a sparkling white setting, dotted with other tiny silver-bright toys.

“Here we are,” Ott announced, foolishly. Chris’s gaze was straight ahead as she guided the car toward the parking space.

“Does Grampa Kennedy know about the Ice Palace?”

“He made the arrangements.”

“You knew.”

“I tell you I didn’t know until this morning. I had a feeling something was stewing, that’s all. Old instinct left over from my newspaper days.”

The warning intake of breath from Bridie. Chris laid a gently restraining hand on her arm. “Let’s not get emotional.”

“Look, Chris,” Ott said, miserably, “I’m Chamber of Commerce Secretary. Right? My job is to go along with the people who run this town. I think the Territory’s being had, but if I’m going to buck the Big Boys, why, I can resign. Czar didn’t want this news around for a lot of reasons and one is that Thor’s weekly went to press last night and Czar counted on a beat for this afternoon’s Lode. He’s got it.”

“Thanks, chum.”

Desperately, “Look, Chris, marry me and we’ll get out of here. I can get the C.C. Secretary job in Topeka any day I want it.”

“Indelicate!” Bridie shouted. “Asking a girl to marry you in front of a third party.”

Ott hugged her as he handed her out of the car. “I’d marry you, too, if I was young enough, Bridie. But I just couldn’t go your pace.”

He rushed around to the other side of the car but Chris was already making for the building. Over her shoulder she said, “I wouldn’t be too sure if I were Grandpa Czar. Paul and Addie have a mukluk grapevine.” A roar rent the blue. “There they are.” A loud-speaker blared. The mountains hurled the sound back into the crystal air. Pan American Number Six Two Nine arriving from Seattle Gate Two … Arctic Clipper Number Three Seven Five for Nome Kotzebue Oogruk …

Ott opened the heavy door that led to the crowded waiting room. He looked at the girl and she at him, her hand touched his arm and rested there a moment. “Thanks, Ott dear.”

“I could be mistaken.”

“No. Grampa’s never forgiven me for not marrying Bay. This is his way of punishing me. Or something. You never know what he’s up to.”

“How scheming can an old man get, anyway?”

“Well, Machiavelli was nearly sixty when he died. That would be, roughly, today’s ninety. He did pretty well, considering that they didn’t have all those steaks and spinach and B₁₂ shots those days.”

“Thor going to be here?”

“You know he doesn’t go in for reception committees.”

“Well, lean on me, will you, Chris?”

“Grandpa Storm taught me to walk alone.”

“You can overdo it.”

Inside the waiting room were warmth, movement, a shimmer of excitement. Modern and adequate when it was built barely six years ago, the airport now was almost obsolete. Baranof was a crossroads between Russia and the United States, between Japan and the United States, between Scandinavia and the United States, between the North Pole and the United States. The main concourse (as the publicity departments grandly phrased it) today and every day and night, V.I.P.s or no V.I.P.s, always was bursting with men and women and children and infants in arms waiting to hurl themselves into the clouds. Slim lads in Air Force uniforms. Stout colonels in mukluks and parkas. Girls with the narrow band on the third left finger, their husbands looming mammoth in wool and fur, both concentrating on a wailing goggling object in her arms. Young fry slid and yelped across the polished floor. In the lunchroom ham and eggs and waffles and steaks and coffee appeared and disappeared like props in a conjurer’s trick. The loud-speaker trumpeted again.

Passengers for Point Barrow … Number Six Eight Nine arriving Gate Three … Fairbanks Anchorage Seattle leaving … Passengers Cordova … Sitka … Ketchikan … Juneau … Passengers for the North Pole …

Science had married the Wilderness and was taming the savage shrew.

Even in that crowded room it was easy to distinguish the arresting figure of Czar Kennedy. He stood tall and erect in a world of six-foot men. But it was the head that gave him distinction. Above the benevolent face your eye was caught by the spectacularly beautiful hair, wavy, abundant, vigorous. Its natural mixture of white and steel-gray imparted a silver-blue tone. Elderly Baranof matrons strove to achieve this effect at the Modish Mayde Beauty Salon. It was a standing joke. “Louella,” they said, after their shampoo, “give me a nice Czar Kennedy gray-blue rinse, now.”

The three late-comers made their way through the crowd toward the beacon of that distinguished head. Bridie and Ott, incorrigible greeters, halted their progress a dozen times to pat a baby’s behind, to shake a parent’s hand, to speak to the newsstand girl, to wave at a harried waitress rushing toward the lunchroom. Unerringly they spotted businessmen from Outside on the way to a waiting bus or taxi, and of these they cordially demanded to know how they liked Alaska. Ott darted out to the runway gate where the Big Brass stood stoically in Arctic full-dress splendor; the very best cloth, the very best leather, the very best fur, the goldenest gilt in the uniformed world.

Czar Kennedy and Oscar Bogard stood near the exit as Chris and Bridie came toward them. Ott, rushing in now, reported the plane’s imminent landing.

“Well, Bridie,” Czar Kennedy said gently, in indirect reproof to his granddaughter. “You would have done better to ride along with Oscar and me after all. We had time for a cup of coffee.”

“I never touch the acidy stuff. Tea is my tipple, as you well know.” Her high metallic voice cut through the roar of the incoming monsters outside and the outgoing humans inside. “You know what! I’d like to come down here and spend the whole day sometime. I’ve wanted to ever since they built the airport. Breakfast lunch and dinner at the counter, maybe a little bourbon highball toward evening, just visit around and watch the people and the planes in and out, it’s better than a movie.”

“Oh, now, Bridie,” Ott jeered. “You trying to make out you’re just a little girl from the farm? You fly all the time, you’re whizzing in and out of Baranof like a bluebottle.”

“Back east, when I was a little tyke,” Czar mused, aloud, “we used to go down to the depot to see Number Eleven come in. It was the big city train with the Pullman cars. People who got off, or even those who looked out through the windows, were from another world. Outside. It’s the same thing, planes or trains, today or yesterday.”

Oscar Bogard cut short this little reminiscence. “Here’s the Barnetts,” he announced. His tone was less than cordial.

Chris Storm’s hands were outstretched toward the approaching couple while they still were ten feet away. “Paul!” she called. “Addie!” As one would hail rescuers. The intelligent civilized faces beamed affection upon her as they made their way toward the group.

Oscar Bogard greeted this couple with an unconvincing joviality. “What’re you folks doing down here! Meeting friends?”

Addie Barnett of the crisp red hair and the lively retort met this in character. “On the contrary.”

Paul Barnett, tall, stooped, gangling of frame, spectacled, might have passed for a post-graduate summer college student if it were not for the slight graying at the temples. Now the myopic eyes behind the thick lenses peered down at Oscar Bogard as a microscope centers on a bug. Slow of speech, almost drawling, his utterances often took on a misleading mildness. “You haven’t forgotten that Addie and I get out a weekly paper, have you, Oscar?”

“Not likely. I get more mention in one issue of your weekly than in a whole month of Czar’s daily. Not better—but more.”

Blandly, “It’s nice to know you read us, Oscar. By the time Addie and I get through the week of being editors, reporters, linotype operators, proofreaders, compositors—and then run the paper off the press—we don’t get a chance to poll the readers. How did you like Thor’s editorial this week?”

Oscar’s little eyes narrowed to slits. “You keep on with stuff like that against Czar, you’ll lose what little advertising you got.”

“That wasn’t against Czar. It was about him. Facts.”

“Facts! It’s funny how a man who’s a failure can always root up something to say against a man who’s a success.”

Paul Barnett seemed to consider this briefly. “Well, now, I don’t know. Czar’d have a hard time rooting up anything against Thor.”

“Czar!” Oscar yelled. “You talk the way you go twisting things in that column of yours.”

In each weekly issue of the Northern Light there appeared a Thor Storm editorial and a column of astonishingly unstilted, often witty and always courageous comment called—somewhat lamely—Deep Freeze. Served up from this receptacle were odds and ends political, casual, personal, pungent. Their origin was attributed to no one in particular, but it was known that Paul and Addie Barnett, Thor Storm, and even Chris Storm contributed to the savory dish. Now you occasionally saw bits and paragraphs quoted in Stateside papers. Sometimes a Thor Storm local editorial found its way, astonishingly enough, into the editorial pages of such big city dailies as the New York Times, the San Francisco Call, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as two decades earlier the wise and witty observations of another newspaper editor, William Allen White of the little Emporia Gazette, had so often been nationally reprinted.

Ott Decker was herding them to the runway gates. “Come on now, folks, they’ll be touching down in a second.” The little group stood in the brief pale winter light, their faces turned toward the moving shining thing in the sky, brighter than the Arctic sun itself. Old and new Alaska. Czar Kennedy, Oscar Bogard, Bridie Ballantyne. Chris Storm, the Barnetts, Ott Decker.

Addie Barnett leaned close to Chris. “Have you heard about Bay Husack and the girl? I tried to get you on the telephone.”

“Yes.”

“Did Czar tell you!”

“No, of course not. Ott.”

“Do you mind if I let Czar know that Paul and I know? Before they land? It’s mean, but I can’t resist it.”

“Go ahead.”

A little apart stood Kinkaid Air Base Big Brass. It unbent just a little in the direction of Alaska’s First Citizen. “Mr. Kennedy,” they said. “How are you, sir.” Czar’s hand went to his head in a semimilitary salute. “General,” he said, with a kind of sweet solemnity. “Colonel … Major …”

Now the sky monster roared toward them, it touched on tiptoe. The aluminum steps were rushed up to its shining side.

Addie Barnett raised her clear incisive voice above the tumult. “Czar, isn’t it interesting that young Husack is taking over in Alaska, at last?”

A jaw muscle tightened in the old man’s face. He did not turn his head. “Well, now, I wouldn’t say taking over. Just getting the feel. Too bad you and Paul went to press yesterday. That’s the worst of a weekly, Addie. Time. Time.”

The plane door opened. Paul Barnett’s quiet voice could just be heard. “As a matter of fact, we just barely made it. Addie and I worked till three this morning, setting up the story. But the paper’s out and distributed by now.”

“Say!” Ott Decker exclaimed, beaming. “Say! When a weekly beats a daily—that’s news!”

A little cold white flame of dislike shot from beneath Czar Kennedy’s eyelids.

Two plane hostesses stood in the doorway, one blonde, one brunette, coolly pretty, very smart in their blue tailored uniforms and their slim high-heeled pumps. Good-bye now! they chirped, smiling. Good-bye now good-bye now good-bye now.

The General was the first to emerge. Paul Barnett swung his camera into action. The Lode photographer suddenly appeared from nowhere and crouched at the foot of the stairs. General Cass Baldwin appeared the man of business now, in mufti. Somehow, minus the cap with the gold snakework, and the battle blouse and all, the profile lacked that firmness, that austerity which had been so reassuring in the wartime photographs. Rather haggard and crumpled now, the face was that of any elderly passenger who had flown across a maximum of continent with a minimum of sleep. Just behind him loomed Dave Husack, vast, opulent, cuddled in cashmere. For a moment he blotted out his shadow, but it followed him as always, for where Dave Husack stood or walked, there was Sid Kleet at his side or in his footsteps. Slight, pale, impassive, Kleet seemed negligible in contrast to the monolithic males of the Northwest—unless you looked well into his eyes. Sid Kleet, in or out of the bare shabby offices of his law firm down near the waterfront in Seattle, was a general too. But Industry, not War, was his science. He marshaled millions of dollars, not millions of men. His campaigns were mapped in law offices; over a bourbon-and-water in the libraries of private homes after dinner in Seattle and Tacoma and San Francisco; at lunch in the Senate restaurant in Washington D.C. No blueprints, no mathematics, no money figured in these meetings. Everything casual, bland, friendly. To a listener the talk might have sounded like a particularly dull collection of cliches.

“If you can see your way clear to bringing it to the attention of the House, I certainly would appreciate it, Ed.”

“I’ll be glad to do whatever I can, Sid. Of course, I can’t guarantee anything. Naturally.”

“Naturally. None of us can do more than our best, and if you can see your way clear, why … by the way, I see where that Tidelands bill is coming up in your bailiwick. It just might be that I could ease that a little bit by talking it over with old Woody …”

Down the steps, their heels clattering on the bright metal; pausing a moment for the photographers. Now the doorway framed the businesslike figure of Wilbur K. Distelhorst. Wilbur Distelhorst could look brisk even while standing still. He glanced comprehensively at the assembled welcoming committee, at the impressive Brass, at the photographers crouched at the foot of the stairs, at the fishbowl faces swimming behind the big plate-glass windows of the swarming airport waiting room. He then shook hands with the two pretty airplane hostesses and his own good-bye now good-bye now good-bye now became a bass obbligato to their soprano chirpings. He began a leisurely descent of the stairs. The effect was that of a one-man parade. You just heard his first reply to the question put to him by the Daily Lode reporter, “I’m here for just one reason. To learn. To learn all about your wonderful …” when two handsome young people appeared in the doorway; a man and a woman.

“My God, she’s got on a mink coat!” Bridie Ballantyne exclaimed.

“Why not?” Chris retorted. “Wouldn’t you wear one if you had it?”

“Not if I was her, I wouldn’t. I’d dress plain as a post.”

“It just means she’s tough-fibered and honest, in her own terms,” Chris said. “Out for blood and doesn’t hide the switch-blade.”

“I guess they’re really wearing those hats this winter,” Bridie concluded, mournfully, “if she is. It sure makes mine look dated.”

Chris had not seen him in two years. She had not seen Dina Drake or Dave Husack or Sid Kleet in all that time. The future Mrs. Bayard Husack after all, Chris mused. Then, cattily for her, She’s certainly earned it. Bay looks set and sulky, I know that look.

The Air Force closed in on the General, the committee enveloped Dave Husack, Sid Kleet, Wilbur K. Distelhorst. Somehow young Husack and the mink-coated girl stood momentarily outside this cluster. In the flurry of greetings and the brief sorting of introductions Bridie’s loquacity emerged victorious. Above the murmured platitudes her hearty phrases loosely bound the group into a related bundle.

“You and Czar know each other, that’s for sure … and Miss Christine Storm, our Miss Alaska born and bred … the Barnetts … Bogard our Mayor … well now, you young folks standing way out there … we all know you, Bay Husack, leastways your pa … welcome to Alaska, Miss—mmm—uh—you sure came to the right place with that nice warm mink coat …?”

A shade too heartily Bayard Husack said, “Hello, Chris! Well, this is pretty wonderful it’s great to see you you’re looking lovely as always, here’s Dina dying to see you. And Dina you’ve met Mrs. Ballantyne haven’t you, at least you’ve heard me talk—–”

Yes, and you’re talking a little too much this minute, Chris thought, rather ill-naturedly for her. The two young women looked at each other, their hands met. The conventional smile arranged itself on their faces, they looked at each other, the tall black-haired girl whose eyes were an unexpected blue, the blond girl with the startling black eyes.

“It’s wonderful to see you again. And on your home grounds. What an enchanting coat,” Dina Drake said. “And the hood. If Paris could see it they’d announce the new Alaska look.”

“It’s a parka,” rather lamely. “We pronounce it parky. Don’t ask me why.”

“All that white fur! It’s so dramatic. Like a costume in a musical.”

A poker term came to Chris’s mind. You’ve tipped your hand early again, as usual. Well, if that’s the way you want to play.

“Everybody wearing mink in Seattle, I suppose, Miss Drake,” Bridie observed blandly. She never was one to bother with preliminaries.

“This?” Miss Drake glanced down at herself, absently, as though just reminded of what she was wearing. “I got this last winter in New York.” In a tone that states a self-evident fact. She now removed her hat, collapsed it in some magic way, and thrust it into her coat pocket. She then drew over her head a soft mammoth mink hood which had lain draped below the neckline of the sumptous garment. The modeling of the face and the look in the eye were, perhaps, too modern and too motivated for that soft fur frame. Ott Decker, emotionally vulnerable but no fool, bustling up to herd the group indoors, peered politely at the fur-framed face. A dish, he decided, and lots of style, but she looks like the wolf in Red Ridinghood.

“Miss Drake,” Bay was explaining, a bit too spaciously, no one having asked, “is Dad’s second secretary. I mean Miss Gurkin wouldn’t come, she’s a bit vintage anyway for a jaunt like this, and of course Mother couldn’t possibly, so—–”

Whew! Chris thought. Elaborate. Aloud she said, politely, “And how is your mother, Bay?”

But Mayor Bogard was shooing everyone into the waiting room.

“Any you folks like a cup of coffee here, or a little drinky or something? The luncheon’s twelve-thirty but you prolly got up before breakfast ha ha!”

Distelhorst said, virtuously, never eat between meals; and patted his stomach.

Dave Husack held up a protesting palm. “They fed us every minute on that plane from the time we left Seattle. Coffee first thing, and then a big breakfast of ham and eggs and juice and fried potatoes and those sweet rolls—why don’t we ever have those at home, I wonder?—and coffee coffee coffee.” He talked always in a jovial roar; the nostrils of anyone within ten feet of him were pricked by the artificial woodsy leathery tobaccoy sugary costly emanation of a widely advertised toilet water called His. When he whipped one of his fine imported linen handkerchiefs out of his pocket people in confined places had been known to reel.

As he talked he revolved slowly to include the whole group, the great dull red face beaming with good humor and self-satisfaction. In the vast golden-brown cashmere topcoat he looked, as he ponderously revolved, like a miraculously trained Alaska Kodiak brown bear balancing on its hind legs.

Now his small somewhat bloodshot eyes encountered the amused gaze of Christine Storm. He had encountered that gaze before today, he had been flicked by the dart of disdain that shone behind the amusement, he resented it, he rejected it, he rejected the dark intelligent eyes and the lovely girl herself, and everything and everyone she represented—except Czar Kennedy. Without Czar Kennedy and the pattern of plans and planners that stretched, an intricate web, from west coast to east coast, Dave Husack might have had to forego the creamy-soft cashmere coat, the jaunty yacht, the cars, the luxurious office suite, the massive handsome house high on the hills of Seattle, overlooking the overpowering view of sound, straits, lakes, mountains, skies, forests.

Now he put one great fur-gloved paw on Chris’s shoulder, with the other he patted her cheek. Perhaps he had even contemplated a hug, but she had stepped back just enough to elude this. “Chris!” he bellowed. “How’s Alaska’s Joan of Arc!”

Very low, without moving his lips, Czar Kennedy said to Mayor Bogard, “Get going.”

Obediently Bogard called in the high voice of a Boy Scout leader, “Now then, folks! Let’s get organized. Let’s see, now. Mr. Husack, how’s about you going in with—–”

“What’s this Mister stuff! Dave!”

“Thanks. Dave, if you’ll just come this way—–”

But now Ott Decker, the expert organizer, took over. He did not say well folks or now then. He had collected the baggage stubs, he had handily placed the luggage, he waved a hand toward the waiting cars.

“In, everybody! I’ll break trail if you’ll follow. The parade is just starting. Plenty of room, the General’s gone with the Base group, he’ll join us later at luncheon if they’ll give him a chance.… Mr. Husack—Dave, that is—you’re with Czar, of course, and you too, Mr. Distelhorst, and Sid Kleet, naturally. Bridie, I know Paul and Addie’ll be happy to take you in. Bayard Husack and Miss—uh—in my car, I hope, if that’s all right with you, it’s that lavender job over there it isn’t paid for yet so if you don’t like the color just say the word and I’ll—– Chris, in my car of course. Mayor Bogard—oh, he’s already climbed in with the skookum boys.”

Czar Kennedy made no move to order these arrangements, he wasted no energy on such details. Smiling gently now, his head a little to one side as though surveying a pleasing picture, he seated himself in his own good middle-class car. But then a disturbing mistake seemed to have been made. The Barnetts’ shabby car already was to be seen scooting down the airport road toward town. Bridie Ballantyne, seated amazingly between Dave Husack and Sid Kleet, was queening it in the back of Czar’s car; and in some mysterious way Wilbur K. Distelhorst was snugly ensconced between Dina Drake and young Husack in Ott Decker’s orchid equipage, which was on the point of leaving.

“Get out!” Czar said to the bewildered Bogard beside him. “Get out and tell that—tell Distelhorst he belongs in this car.”

But when Bogard had hurriedly clambered out and had conveyed this message, standing at the Decker car window and apparently encountering good-natured but stiff resistance, he turned his head to look piteously back at Czar.

“Says he’s doing fine.” He floundered back to the Kennedy car.