“Part of my granddaughter’s life has been spent with me in the very fine old cabin I’ve lived in for fifty years, off and on.

“It would be a disgrace. It would be the talk of the Territory. Czar Kennedy’s granddaughter living in a barracks at Baranof College—if you can call it a college.”

“I didn’t say she was going to. I said, if she wanted to. She’s a woman now, even if you don’t admit it. I think she should make her own decision.”

“And you have the money for all this? Two years of this?”

“I will have, from month to month.”

“Your paper is in a state of permanent bankruptcy, I understand.”

“I wouldn’t say that. We have a fine circulation, but never enough advertising to balance that. Perhaps you know a little more about the reason for that than I do. Long ago you barely prevented them from stopping my advertisers altogether with threats. My tardy thanks for that, Czar.”

“Who told you that!” He stopped himself, abruptly. “That’s ridiculous. Why should I bother with such small potatoes? Even if I wanted to.”

“That’s the catch in being a plotter, Czar. You’re plotting with plotters, you never can be sure that one of them isn’t plotting against you.”

“You haven’t any money—that is, what I’d call money.”

“You’re right, Czar, old boy. Not money as you think of it—you and Husack and Caswell and Kleet and all the yacht-and-Cadillac crowd. But a living. And the Northern Light is a living for the Barnetts, too, and the others in the front office and the back shop. It earns its way. I don’t take much out, myself. Anything that comes in to me I try to feed back into the paper. Keeping it healthy and functioning. It isn’t just a newspaper, you know, Czar.”

“I could wipe it off the map tomorrow by lifting my hand.”

“You could, once. Maybe you still could. I’m not so sure now. And even if you did, another one would come to take its place. Lately there’s been a little tremor—a barely noticeable shakiness—in that hand. Figuratively speaking, of course. All over the world, I mean. If you’ll excuse my calling attention to it. Perhaps you may have noticed it, yourself. Almost everybody’s got the shakes, in one form or another. Yours might be called the lobby shakes. Virulent in Washington D.C.”

“Commie talk,” Czar observed, not even taking the trouble to be disdainful. He rose, now, like royalty ending an interview.

“Wrong there, Czar. They’ve got the shakes worse than any of us.”

“Let’s be practical. I’ll do this for you—or for her, rather. She can live part time at the house, as she always has, and part time at your shanty, though it’s a bad arrangement, now that she’s a young woman—as you say.”

“She’ll decide that for herself—as a young woman.”

“You can’t meet Christine’s expenses for two years.”

“She’ll have everything the other girls have. The salmon fishing brings me in quite a bit, if it’s a good season, and your friends’ fish traps don’t take them all. Writing a piece now and then for one of the magazines, Alaska’s getting to be quite fashionable, Bridie told me there was a piece about it in Harper’s Bazaar, she says Florida and the Riviera are now out. Bridie knows about these things. It’s wonderful, all the things Bridie knows.”