“David Husack!”

“Aw, what! Listen to this. ‘… She moved out into Elliott Bay, the last rays of the setting sun revealed cruelly every line and bruise and wrinkle and flabby peeling skin of this degraded old hag, once so beautiful, so magnificent, so queenly. Then, quietly, smoothly, calmly, like the great lady she was, she staggered once, righted herself, fell forward like a Victorian grande dame in a faint, and slipped into the watery depths with a softly hissing sigh of relief. Or was it scorn?’ ”

He looked up now. The table was silent.

“Millions,” Czar said, quietly. “She was going to bring in millions.… Let’s be sensible. It was the machinery. Built like a Swiss watch. That’s what you said. And you put in cheap junk engines. You try putting a hunk of iron in a Swiss watch.… Those men’ll sue. And the dead ones’ wives.”

“Let’s go home, David. Let’s go home.”

Husack’s bloodshot protuberant eyes found Christine’s shocked face and rested there. “Bad luck. I told you it would be. When that bottle slipped out of your goddamned silly hand. Bad luck.”

26

MEETING THOR STORM on Gold Street, or dropping in at the Northern Light office with a bit of news, or to insert an ad, his Baranof townsmen would say, “What’s the news of Chris? She given us old sourdoughs the go-by for good? I hear she’s going to marry Dave Husack’s son.”

“Christine hasn’t written me about that. Nor Bridie. She writes each of us a long letter twice a month. You know Christine. She makes up her own mind about what she wants to do, and she usually does it.”

“Yeh, well, pretty girl like that, all the money in the world—or will have when Czar kicks off—she’d be a fool to stay here in this icehouse the rest of her life. Ice Palace, hell! And the Glittering North, like the ads say. I’d get out myself if I could.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Well, I don’t know, I been thinking about it, my old lady keeps beefing about it.”

“You’ve been here in Alaska a long time now, haven’t you, Mel? How many years is it?”

“Let’s see now—it’s—ten—twelve—gosh, going on fifteen years! Say, I’m an old sourdough right. Maybe, like they say, the spell of the magic North has got me, but don’t mention it to the old lady, she sure would like to swap it for a spell in California.”

From its days of almost utter isolation, Baranof—and all of Alaska—had retained its love of gossip. It was not so much gossip, perhaps, as interest in all local and territorial manifestations. Science, World War II, the Dew Line, the vast peacetime Army Bases, Alaska Communications Service, and airplanes airplanes airplanes daily—hourly in cities such as Juneau, Anchorage, Baranof, Fairbanks—had brought Japan and all Scandinavia and the North Pole and California and Hawaii and Seattle within a few hours’ reach of almost any Alaskan settlement, from the remotest Eskimo village squatted on the tundra to the capital of the Territory. But all Alaska still retained its love of local news, its pioneer curiosity in the small private details of its neighbors’ lives.