She did find the house. And she did have a share, with Paul, in shaping the Territory’s battle against the rapacious enemy. The house was a time-ravaged and abandoned saloon, known in its heyday as The Placer Gold. The business center of the town had grown away from the once-pretentious two-story building. Now its dirt-filmed broken windows stared out like old cataracted eyes, upon a respectable residence street. Gold Street, three blocks distant, had become the main business thoroughfare. Neighborhood housewives and house-owners had, for years, indignantly demanded that the building be condemned and demolished. But it was one of the many pieces of property owned by the town’s most fantastic character, Butterfly Megrue. Even the City Council, the Chief of Police, and the Citizens Committee for a Bigger Busier and Better Baranof shrank from tangling with Butterfly. Butterfly, fifty years ago, had been a Baranof dance-hall girl in the best fictional tradition of those lively ladies. Fragile-seeming, in those days, her eyes had been a heartbreaking violet, her hair a true golden, her skin pink and white and poreless as Chinese porcelain. Strangers, now encountering Butterfly tramping the streets of Baranof in a mismated pair of men’s broken shoes, rags of castoff clothing and a travesty of a picture hat topped by a gangrenous flower, thought that this was, indeed, a Butterfly broken on the wheel. Little did they know of the punishment the wheel had taken. Thriftily and cannily she had come by her real estate in the early days of the gold rush. Now she lived off scraps, she hoarded old bottles and newspapers and cardboard boxes and tin cans. She was said to collect fabulous rents, her taxes were second only to Czar Kennedy’s, she lived in a one-room rat’s nest. Her invective was blue as a king’s blood. Baranof regarded her with every courtesy, compassion and kindness. There was something touching and truly spiritual in the town’s protection of this raddled relic.

There was considerable risk attendant on venturing a “Good morning, Butterfly!” She might return the greeting with a smile that would have been poignantly lovely had it not been for the broken brown teeth; or she might envelop you with a spume of obscenity. Once, on a particularly gaudy television program celebrating Baranof’s old Sourdough Days, Bridie Ballantyne had rashly invited Butterfly to speak as one of the many guests. The Mayor had spoken; the President of the City Council; the town’s leading merchant, Wade Zangs, of the Far North Trading Company; Ott Decker, Secretary of the Baranof Chamber of Commerce.

Bridie cast a tardily apprehensive eye at the next speaker, and went into a somewhat nervous introduction.

“You’ve listened to what the well-known men citizens of Baranof have had to say. The Old-Timers, the Young-Timers and the Good-Timers. So now let’s hear something of the thoughts of a lady who has been a citizen of Baranof since its earliest days—though she doesn’t look it. Successful in real estate, in commercial ventures …”