Butterfly Megrue had been washed brushed dressed. Even the cruel glare of the camera’s eye, and the years of neglect and malnutrition were defied by the triumphantly lovely bone structure of the face. Battered, beaten, degraded, the line from the cheekbone to the jaw, from the brow to the mouth, from the mouth to the chin, still had the indestructibility of marble.

“Butterfly,” Bridie cooed, “will you tell us what you think of Baranof today, compared to the town you knew so many years ago?”

Butterfly stared out, a direct and malevolent glare. “I sure will. I’ll tell you what I think of those sonsabitchin’ government tax collectors—–”

Instantly she was off the air. Neither the Lode nor the Northern Light would use it, naturally. But the mukluk grapevine served as well.

It was this formidable nymph against whom Addie Barnett, the newcomer, was to do battle for a home. The bride had been six months in Baranof and three months pregnant before her desperate eye alighted and lingered, with a horrible yet fascinated speculation, on the gruesome shambles of what had been the old Placer Gold saloon. Its elaborate fretwork, its second-story gabled overhang, the proportions of the erst-while barroom, set her imagination soaring. She picked her precarious way around to the side of the structure and, partially cleansing a small surface of dirt-encrusted window with a handkerchief and spit, made a shield of her hands as she peered. A high-ceilinged room, surely forty feet long and twenty wide, wainscoted with what actually looked to be mahogany. Remnants of what once had been a mirror still clung to one wall, but the long bar had vanished with the bearded faces that had been reflected. Her heart pumping hotly with excitement she slithered and teetered to the rear of the house, ascended the four steps to the back door, tried the knob, the door yielded. The remnants of a kitchen. Mice droppings, cobwebs, the dust of years. With a fearful glance about her she went into the big front room. For some reason she tiptoed. A broken stairway led to the second floor. She paused. Then, with a look behind her, she cautiously ascended the stairs. One small room at the back. A second room. And at the front a third with a fine semicircular curve that once had been a bay window. That was the overhang she had noted outside. Three rooms. Three bedrooms! In this last room there was a broken slop jar and, on the floor in a corner, a large china washbasin ornamented with a pattern of flowers and faded gilt. As she stared at these mementoes Addie recalled having seen a washbowl like it filled with flowers in the window of one of Boston’s Arlington Street antique shops. Price, fifty dollars.

She stood a moment, breathing deeply, her eyes shut. She clattered swiftly down the perilous stairs, was out of the house (shutting the back door carefully). Paul Barnett, bent over his desk in the Northern Light office, sprang up startled at sight of her. She was breathing fast, her eyes were wide. “What’s the matter! What’s happened!”