“That’s just lovely. Congratulations.”

“Well, thanks. Say, I suppose you wouldn’t—an old friend and all—I suppose you wouldn’t want to act as b—uh, no.”

“Thanks awfully. Tuesday is all jammed up. I’m going off skiing with a boy friend, and I’ve got a dinner date that evening, and then another friend has asked me to get together with the bunch at his place—–”

Bridie herself always was willing to act as temporary mother of the bride, chaperon or matron of honor. But she felt that a young girl should be in attendance. “Gray hair is kind of grim,” she said, “I mean, at the altar. A young face is what you want, not one that looks like a warning.”

Chris’s first wedding was that of Paul Barnett and Addie. Addie was twenty-six when she arrived in Baranof for her wedding, and to the seventeen-year-old Christine she seemed middle-aged, or almost. A college girl. Majored in journalism, had run the college paper, and had even had a year of general reporting on a Boston daily.

Chris knew about newspaper offices. Since her childhood she had had the freedom of the grubby little composing room, editorial office and print shop of Thor Storm’s Northern Light. The big building which housed Czar Kennedy’s Daily Lode was a different matter. Czar did not want his granddaughter running about that humming hive. “A newspaper office is no place for little girls,” he said. “You get caught in one those rollers, or a belt or something.”

“I don’t go there. I like the front office where they come in with the news, somebody killed or something, and they sit down and rattle it off fast, it’s exciting. I think a daily paper is more exciting than a weekly, I wish Grampa Thor’s was a daily, too. And I like the linotype machines, the way that arm reaches over, and takes a handful of type, and drops it, just like a human being, almost.”

“You just keep away from there, Christine, hear me.”

So she spent hours, ink-smeared and happy, in the dim dusty little shop of the Northern Light, listening to shoptalk, hearing almost heedlessly the news, the politics, the sociological problems, the social life, the scandals and tragedies and merriments of the region. Some of this she did not understand, but much of it stayed in her mind, and as she grew older she was, unconsciously, a modern gold mine of Alaska riches.

In time Thor Storm’s weekly Northern Light actually was to exceed in circulation Czar Kennedy’s Daily Lode. This was due to Addie Barnett. This dynamic redheaded girl was gifted with a natural sense of news gathering and news dispensing as other women might possess a talent for acting or singing or cooking or designing or buying or selling or painting. It was at the Barnett wedding that Christine Storm met Ross Guildenstern for the first time. It was spring and the long days and the white nights had already begun in Baranof. The little wedding party had assembled to meet the incoming bride. It might have been considered a rather odd little wedding party in any place but Alaska, which was so much less provincial than, say, New York or London or Los Angeles. Besides the bridegroom there was Bridie Ballantyne, matron of honor; Thor Storm (Barnett’s boss); Christine Storm, bridesmaid; Ross Guildenstern, groomsman.