As Christine rose swiftly to go to him there was a heavy knocking at the door, then the outer door slammed, heavy footsteps in the entrance. Thor had disappeared through the doorway, now he reappeared, he was strangely alert again, and incisive, as though fully awakened from a dream. And at that moment the telephone rang with that strange note of urgence with which the insensate instrument seems to presage a message of importance.

“There are a couple of Territorial Police outside, they want to take you back to the Ice Palace right away, Bayard Husack,” Thor said.

Uncertain laughter, rather bewildered raillery. Say, Bay, you’re a fast worker! Got here this morning and the cops already—–

Ross Guildenstern had answered the telephone, he turned to the room now. “It’s your father, Bay. It sounds very—–”

“What—–!” He picked up the telephone, he heard, he hung up. “My mother.”

“Bay!” Chris cried.

He nodded. One of the Territorial Police stood in the doorway. “Excuse me, sir. We’re taking you to the Ice Palace, Mr. Husack. They’re trying to connect with a plane and a pilot, but this time of night—–”

“I’ll get you the plane,” Cale Korf said. “Come on, let’s get going.”

Ross Guildenstern came forward. “I’ll take it—if you need a pilot.”

“Let’s get going,” Korf said.

Half an hour later Bridie, the guests gone, cushions plumped, ash trays emptied, glasses rinsed, was limping her way in too-high heels out to the car in which the faithful Ott Decker had returned to take her home. Her arm rested on Chris’s.

“He said,” Ott reported, not happily, “that they’ll be back this spring, probably April or May. That’s what he said. So I guess they mean business.”

“That girl’s look!” Bridie said, settling herself in the seat beside Ott. “I was looking straight at her when the news came. It was like a candle had been lighted behind her face. Radiant. That’s the only word for it. Radiant. Governor’s wife, me eye!”

Through the open door the sound of the telephone again. Chris ran up the icy path and into the golden room and snatched the receiver.

“Chris!”

“Yes, Bay.”

“Wait for me.”

29

ALL THROUGH THE SPRING Thor spent odd moments working on his new boat. It wasn’t a powerboat, it was nothing at all modern. It was an old-fashioned square-ended skiff such as fishermen in the old Scandinavian countries and fishermen in the new world New England sat in hopefully, peacefully in the middle of a flat body of water, the line and the flat-bottomed boat both moving almost imperceptibly. It was a boat for a man who, for days or weeks or months at a time, could live happily with, or without, people.

Both Chris and Bridie, as the long hard Baranof winter drew to a close and the ecstasy of the long golden days and rosy summer nights began to tingle through the sluggish fibers and nerves and tissues and blood and skin of the winter-weary Alaskans—both these women who loved him developed and followed a plan of campaign.