School children at their desks stared longingly out at the ice-sheathed schoolyard. It would be too dark, too dangerously cold for sliding or skating by the time school was out.

Air pilots counted on those two hours, hurtling in from Seattle with the big four-engine jobs, or from up north in the twin-engine DC-3’s, or the little single-engine Cessnas or Pipers. Big or small, they usually tried to make the run before the darkness came down again; though somehow the long long nights never were quite black here with that limitless chandelier up there sparkling with a million incandescent celestial watts. In the early autumn, the late winter, and early spring nights the northern lights made a wild aerial fantasy of the skies, the fliers said it made them feel kind of crazy. Still, pilots from Kinkaid and Morgenstern Air Force Bases said they would almost rather fly by Arctic night than by snow-dazzled day. But then, they were a race apart, everyone knew they were transformed from pink-cheeked lads to supermen, once they buckled into their gear and crawled into the cockpit. They screeched through the air in jets, day or night, flinging their lives into the constellations like gods, wing-tipped.

Bridie Ballantyne, walking up Gold Street from her apartment at the Ice Palace at eleven this winter morning was dressed as you might see women garbed on Michigan Boulevard in Chicago, or Madison Avenue, New York, or Sutter in San Francisco. No great clumsy mukluks or parkas for Bridie. No one knew how she did it but there she was mincing along, a small garnet velvet hat atop the carefully coiffed steel-gray hair, her ears unprotected. A good Pribilof seal coat. White gloves. A handsome black suède bag. Coquettish black suède pumps. Her step, what with the icy streets and her own high spirits, was a sort of prance with a slight swing. Old-timers who loved her said this was a relic of the day when, a girl of eighteen, she had whisked as a student nurse through the corridors of the old Seattle hospital. The evil and envious said, nurse, my foot, she was a waitress in a lunchroom on Skid Row down by the Seattle docks. Political enemies said that the swing and the prance were left over from the period of her first Baranof days when the town was a crazy new mining camp and Bridie a picture bride without a bridegroom.

Friends and opponents were stunned when, at sixty, Bridie had settled all this.

“Let ’em have it, fair and clear. I’ve been up to my scalp in Alaska doings for forty fifty years, politics and everything else, they’ve called me words you wouldn’t come on even in the Bible. I wouldn’t change a minute of it, not if three fairies were standing over me the way they do in the storybooks, with those sticks in their hands waving and sparks coming out.”

She herself had written her life story, breezily, with perhaps an occasional assist in the grammar department from Chris Storm or from Addie and Paul Barnett, editors and reporters on Thor Storm’s weekly.