“Just Mr. Haskell,” he said, in answer to her first question. “Or Mead. We don’t do much about titles and forms and ceremony in Alaska. I suppose it’s because everybody’s working so hard, and there’s a kind of all-in-it-together feeling.”

“Aren’t you young to be minister—pastor—anyway, head of a church like that?”

“I’m only an assistant—and a part-time assistant, at that. I’m a missionary. I fly back and forth between the Eskimo villages.”

Now she turned to look at him more closely. Intelligent compassionate eyes, rather good-looking in a conventional way. He might have been mistaken for an advertising man, an insurance salesman, a lively young merchant.

Paul patted her knee proprietorially. “No, he isn’t called the Flying Parson. Up here they’re just about all flying parsons—the Catholic priests and the Protestant ministers and the missionaries. Mead used to be Air during the war. Now he buzzes all around the Arctic in a little Piper Pacer, carrying nurses and women missionaries and medicine and phonograph records and stuff.”

Even Addie appeared momentarily unable to digest this. “Phonograph records?” she repeated.

“I try to teach the young Eskimos something beside God and religion,” Mead explained, matter-of-factly. “Their taste in music is awful, like most kids’. The boys buy those old twenty-five-cent records. They like hillbilly tunes. That dismal nasal whining, over and over, seems to fascinate them. It’s soothing, I suppose, in that ice-locked world. And the really cheap stuff. Lyrics. ‘I told you I loved you in twenty-two bars. Now you can buy your own beer.’ Sometimes I get so fed up with it I yank the record off the spindle and take it outside and spin it whirling and flipping and skipping across the snow and ice the way you’d skip a flat stone across a pond. I suppose I shouldn’t do it. I bring them good records.” He seemed to be brooding about this. Then he glanced up, peered out. The Ice Palace. “Here we are. There’s Nick in the window.”

Nick had arranged a corner in the vast private banquet room. “It looks like a barn in here, one table. But you don’t want ’em all crowding in on you, day like this.” He turned his back a moment. There was the unmistakable pop of a champagne cork. “On me.” He held the smoking bottle aloft for a moment. “Bollinger ’47. The bride and groom!”

“Now, Nick,” Thor remonstrated. “You know this is my party.”

“That’s right. The champagne’s just so I get in good with the press.” And vanished.

“I’m going to like it here in Alaska,” Addie said. She looked around the table. “I like it already.”

“Wait,” Ross Guildenstern said, “until the Eskimos boil you in seal oil, and the polar bears gobble you up, and the snow is over the rooftop, and there’s nothing to eat but caviar and champagne and Persian melon and tenderloin of beef.”

“Are all Eskimo men as handsome as you are?” Addie asked.

“My bride,” Paul Barnett said, plaintively, “on her wedding day.”