“Now you know why I kept writing you not to come, though I wanted you so. I wanted to get a decent home for you, first. There isn’t a house in town. Not a shack, even. The week before you came I began to think about how I could murder a whole family—any family living in any house—without being caught at it. Oh, God, look at the slant of that chest!”

“It’s perfect,” Addie said in a tone that would have convinced anyone who was not looking at the room. And at that moment the big press out front began to run off the weekly edition, thump thump thump thump, shaking the whole rickety building. They looked at each other, grinning, then they broke into hysterical laughter, leaning on each other for support or perhaps solace, their arms tight about each other.

They settled down in Baranof without a honeymoon. Perhaps settling down was scarcely the term to apply to the newly wed Addie. She was, some thought, a shade too bossy for a bride. She called him Barnett, for example. Not Paul, but Barnett. When she did this he looked bemused with adoration, as though she had addressed him with some fragrant endearment distilled from the very essence of love.

“Look, Barnett,” she said now. “I’ve traveled across the entire United States from coast to coast, and then across all this water, whatever it’s called, to get to you. And I’ve got. Here I am. Honeymoon or no honeymoon, I want to stay and catch my breath. I don’t want to start to go back Outside where I just came from.”

“Start to go back Outside where I just came from,” he repeated, his head critically cocked. “What sentence construction for a Radcliffe girl!”

“Someday we’ll have a honeymoon. We’ll go to California or Honolulu or Greece or Italy. Just now, Barnett darling, can we afford a house or something—if we can find it?”

“I’m not—we’re not poor. Of course nobody’s rich in Alaska. Except, perhaps, Czar Kennedy. It’s just that everything costs three times as much as it does anywhere else. Everything goes out of Alaska, and nothing stays in. Including money. Nobody can save any money—that is—money.”

“I know. You’ve written me so much about it, and of course I’ve read all the editorials and articles in the Northern Light. But I want you to talk to me about it. Because we’re going to work on it, aren’t we? And on getting a house. A house in order, and then Alaska in order. Golly, Barnett, this is going to be wonderful!”

Paul Barnett was no worm. “My brain and your drive, we’ll have to watch it. That’s the way dictatorships are made, if you’re not careful.”