Oscar Bogard cut short this little reminiscence. “Here’s the Barnetts,” he announced. His tone was less than cordial.

Chris Storm’s hands were outstretched toward the approaching couple while they still were ten feet away. “Paul!” she called. “Addie!” As one would hail rescuers. The intelligent civilized faces beamed affection upon her as they made their way toward the group.

Oscar Bogard greeted this couple with an unconvincing joviality. “What’re you folks doing down here! Meeting friends?”

Addie Barnett of the crisp red hair and the lively retort met this in character. “On the contrary.”

Paul Barnett, tall, stooped, gangling of frame, spectacled, might have passed for a post-graduate summer college student if it were not for the slight graying at the temples. Now the myopic eyes behind the thick lenses peered down at Oscar Bogard as a microscope centers on a bug. Slow of speech, almost drawling, his utterances often took on a misleading mildness. “You haven’t forgotten that Addie and I get out a weekly paper, have you, Oscar?”

“Not likely. I get more mention in one issue of your weekly than in a whole month of Czar’s daily. Not better—but more.”

Blandly, “It’s nice to know you read us, Oscar. By the time Addie and I get through the week of being editors, reporters, linotype operators, proofreaders, compositors—and then run the paper off the press—we don’t get a chance to poll the readers. How did you like Thor’s editorial this week?”

Oscar’s little eyes narrowed to slits. “You keep on with stuff like that against Czar, you’ll lose what little advertising you got.”

“That wasn’t against Czar. It was about him. Facts.”

“Facts! It’s funny how a man who’s a failure can always root up something to say against a man who’s a success.”

Paul Barnett seemed to consider this briefly. “Well, now, I don’t know. Czar’d have a hard time rooting up anything against Thor.”

“Czar!” Oscar yelled. “You talk the way you go twisting things in that column of yours.”

In each weekly issue of the Northern Light there appeared a Thor Storm editorial and a column of astonishingly unstilted, often witty and always courageous comment called—somewhat lamely—Deep Freeze. Served up from this receptacle were odds and ends political, casual, personal, pungent. Their origin was attributed to no one in particular, but it was known that Paul and Addie Barnett, Thor Storm, and even Chris Storm contributed to the savory dish. Now you occasionally saw bits and paragraphs quoted in Stateside papers. Sometimes a Thor Storm local editorial found its way, astonishingly enough, into the editorial pages of such big city dailies as the New York Times, the San Francisco Call, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as two decades earlier the wise and witty observations of another newspaper editor, William Allen White of the little Emporia Gazette, had so often been nationally reprinted.

Ott Decker was herding them to the runway gates. “Come on now, folks, they’ll be touching down in a second.” The little group stood in the brief pale winter light, their faces turned toward the moving shining thing in the sky, brighter than the Arctic sun itself. Old and new Alaska. Czar Kennedy, Oscar Bogard, Bridie Ballantyne. Chris Storm, the Barnetts, Ott Decker.