The terrible loneliness of distant places sometimes was too much for them. The curious lack of pressure, the strange, almost hypnotic power of the climate and the magnetic air, wooed others. For some, the boundless fishing and hunting made a male paradise. They sent for wives and children; or they married local girls, they became Alaskans. Then there always were those who, seized with the claustrophobia familiar to the region, bound to any one of a score of towns ringed by towering mountains, vast waters, morasses of tundra, wastes of snow and ice, went berserk. These crowded the courtrooms, filled the jails.

Anything with four walls and a roof, in which a man could stand upright, was a dwelling.

Paul and Addie Barnett lived in an abandoned saloon. It had been a relic of Baranof’s early gold-rush days. In two years Addie had transformed the battered boarded-up structure into one of the most attractive dwellings in town, and certainly the most popular. Before his marriage Paul’s bachelor quarters had been one grubby room at the rear of the Northern Light print shop. A cot-bed, a chair, a lop-sided chest of drawers, a shelf for books (they had overflowed onto the floor) and such flotsam and jetsam as might wash up from the front office; galley proofs, a pile of old Outside newspapers, a spirit lamp, a coffeepot; a gun, a fishing rod—standard Alaska equipment, these—though Paul was not inclined toward sports.

Before Addie’s arrival Paul had desperately tried to find a house or part of a house or two rooms somewhere, anywhere. The Ice Palace was an unattainable dream. Defeated, he had attempted to lighten the grimness of his little room. Bridie and Christine took over. They hung curtains. With a cover and gay cushions they tried to transform the bed into what they termed a studio couch. Paul, with Addie’s red hair in mind, fondly painted the walls the clear blue she loved. Linoleum now covered the gritty floor, a blue cotton rug in front of the couch broke the bareness of the room. Finally, on the day of her arrival as though in desperation to convince himself that this now was a home fit for a bride, Paul had bought and hung a somewhat grim local painting of mountains, ice, and snow, and had arranged a bowl of flowers on the precariously slanting chest of drawers.

In Boston, Addie had had a smart little two-room apartment on the top floor of an old remodeled mansion facing the Charles. Her more solvent beaux, her editors, her old Boston family friends and an occasional lavish newspaper interviewee had accustomed her to the dim cosiness of the Ritz bar and the delectable cuisine of the stately pillared Ritz dining room facing the Public Garden; or to the succulent broiled lobster at Locke-Ober’s, the scarlet shells and claws gleaming in contrast with the smoke-blackened oak walls.

After the wedding, Addie and Paul, his arm about her, had stood in the doorway surveying this wistful little make-shift dwelling. For the tenth time, Paul repeated the plaintive facts.