Passengers for Point Barrow … Number Six Eight Nine arriving Gate Three … Fairbanks Anchorage Seattle leaving … Passengers Cordova … Sitka … Ketchikan … Juneau … Passengers for the North Pole …

Science had married the Wilderness and was taming the savage shrew.

Even in that crowded room it was easy to distinguish the arresting figure of Czar Kennedy. He stood tall and erect in a world of six-foot men. But it was the head that gave him distinction. Above the benevolent face your eye was caught by the spectacularly beautiful hair, wavy, abundant, vigorous. Its natural mixture of white and steel-gray imparted a silver-blue tone. Elderly Baranof matrons strove to achieve this effect at the Modish Mayde Beauty Salon. It was a standing joke. “Louella,” they said, after their shampoo, “give me a nice Czar Kennedy gray-blue rinse, now.”

The three late-comers made their way through the crowd toward the beacon of that distinguished head. Bridie and Ott, incorrigible greeters, halted their progress a dozen times to pat a baby’s behind, to shake a parent’s hand, to speak to the newsstand girl, to wave at a harried waitress rushing toward the lunchroom. Unerringly they spotted businessmen from Outside on the way to a waiting bus or taxi, and of these they cordially demanded to know how they liked Alaska. Ott darted out to the runway gate where the Big Brass stood stoically in Arctic full-dress splendor; the very best cloth, the very best leather, the very best fur, the goldenest gilt in the uniformed world.

Czar Kennedy and Oscar Bogard stood near the exit as Chris and Bridie came toward them. Ott, rushing in now, reported the plane’s imminent landing.

“Well, Bridie,” Czar Kennedy said gently, in indirect reproof to his granddaughter. “You would have done better to ride along with Oscar and me after all. We had time for a cup of coffee.”

“I never touch the acidy stuff. Tea is my tipple, as you well know.” Her high metallic voice cut through the roar of the incoming monsters outside and the outgoing humans inside. “You know what! I’d like to come down here and spend the whole day sometime. I’ve wanted to ever since they built the airport. Breakfast lunch and dinner at the counter, maybe a little bourbon highball toward evening, just visit around and watch the people and the planes in and out, it’s better than a movie.”

“Oh, now, Bridie,” Ott jeered. “You trying to make out you’re just a little girl from the farm? You fly all the time, you’re whizzing in and out of Baranof like a bluebottle.”

“Back east, when I was a little tyke,” Czar mused, aloud, “we used to go down to the depot to see Number Eleven come in. It was the big city train with the Pullman cars. People who got off, or even those who looked out through the windows, were from another world. Outside. It’s the same thing, planes or trains, today or yesterday.”