“When are you planning to be married, Bay?” She had not meant to ask this. There it was.

“Whenever you say.”

“Same old Bay, never a dull moment.”

“Don’t play dumb. You know about this charade.”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“I don’t know what I see in you, you’re just a Girl Scout. Wouldn’t it be a joke on me—and some others—if I really did end up just another White House captive, all because it might soften you up!”

“You can’t want to be Governor. Anyway, it’s too ridiculous, even for the Seattle crowd.”

“I haven’t anything else to do, it might be fun.”

“These people won’t stand for it. Not when they know. You are absolutely ignorant of Alaska, you think this is just one of your cynical perverted jokes.”

Dinner was finished, they were concentrating on him.

“Mr. Husack …”

“Mr. Husack …”

“Mr. Husack …”

“Call me Bay.”

Chris knew that he was grinning inside at his own imitation of the homey politician he despised.

They were talking at him and to him.

Dina Drake did not talk. She sat, glowing in her crimson dress, and glowering, though becomingly. Once she brightened expectantly at the sound of new footsteps at the door, but the figure that entered, wistfully, was that of the redundant Wilbur K. Distelhorst.

“Say, this is more like it!” he shouted. “I snuk out and walked over here, I just remembered you could steer your way by the Ice Palace, they call it.”

“You all know Mr. Wilbur Distelhorst. Mrs.… Mr.… Mrs.… Mr.…”

“Pretty stuffy over there at old Kennedy’s—excuse me, Miss Storm—say! Anyway, they’re talking Washington—D.C., I mean—and Seattle and so on, well, I didn’t come to Alaska to talk Washington politics. Now you folks, I bet you’re talking about stuff that will interest me. Go on. Go right along. Talk as if I weren’t here. Or I’m just a tourist.”

Bridie: “Tourists tourists, we don’t get enough of them because we’re not ready for the tourist trade. Folks, traveling, will look at anything if you just lead them to it. Churches. Caves. Tombs. Mounds. The Empire State Building. Chicago stockyards. Cheshire cheese. Why’n’t we fix up some of these log cabins the way they used to be in the old days, instead of tearing everything down! Out to the creeks, get a couple of pans and an old screen and pickaxes and leave them there. That house of yours, Addie, if that had been done up again like the old dance-hall saloon the way it was once—–”

Addie: “Don’t listen to her, Mr. Husack. It’s bad enough as it is. My five-year-old came home from school crying, he wanted to know if it was true he had been born in a bar, he didn’t even know they used to be called saloons. Oh, you’ve never seen my house, of course. It used to be an old gold-rush saloon.”

Professor Derwent: “… That letter to Major McNally, Storm used it in a Northern Light editorial last November. I cut it out, it’s memorable. Listen to this: ‘We are a very naïve nation, aren’t we? That was, perhaps, a rather engaging trait one hundred and fifty years ago. But now we are too old for naïveté. It doesn’t become us. And life is too perilous for such a quality in a people. Russia. Hungary. Egypt. Hitler …’ ”