They turned the final corner. The Ice Palace came into view.

“Say!” Distelhorst exclaimed, inadequately.

“Look!” Dina’s voice, the elegance regained, had a note of incredulity. “A log cabin. It’s a prop, of course.”

Quietly Chris said, “No, there are a lot of log cabins in Baranof.”

“There’s even a two-story log cabin,” Ott interjected, happy that the conversation had veered from the personal.

“That,” Chris laughed, “always has seemed to me the last word in pioneer snobbery.”

Wilbur Distelhorst was not interested in log cabins. “That there’s an office building, I suppose.”

Ott Decker took over in his Chamber of Commerce capacity. “That’s the Kennedy Building. We call it the Ice Palace. It’s an apartment house—kind of like an apartment hotel, really. We’re quite petted on it, and brag a lot. Maid service, restaurant, elevators, laundromats in the basement with twenty machines. Drugstore. Supermarket. The works. It’s a town under one roof. See ads.”

“Say!” Distelhorst exclaimed again. “Who had the nerve to build it? Heh, wait a minute, don’t tell me. Was it—–?”

“That’s right. Czar Kennedy. You can’t miss.”

“Look! There are curtains and everything in the log cabin,” Dina said. “I know about apartment hotels, but nobody lives in the log cabin, do they?”

“Well—yes,” Ott Decker said, soothingly. “It’s been lived in by one person and another for the past fifty years or more.”

“Who? Who in the world is crazy enough or poor enough to have to live in it now?”

“I am,” Chris said. “At least, I do.”

Every branch of the big spruce in front of the cabin was etched in light snow dry as cotton trimming on a Christmas tree. The walk was neatly shoveled. In the yard a cream-colored Malemute with a black muzzle like a mask set up a keening as they drove past.

“Alone?” Dina asked, a shade too roguishly.

“Nobody’s alone much in Baranof. We’re huddlers. We’re company crazy. Breakfast lunch dinner. Come in tomorrow morning and I’ll give you sourdough pancakes and bacon and coffee and Alaska raspberry jam and rose-hip jelly. And orange juice. And lovely coffee.”

“No cream,” Ott Decker added as they stopped at the Ice Palace entrance.

Chris laughed ruefully. “No cream. But lovely canned milk.”

“Rose-hip?” Distelhorst’s pencil still hovered over the pad Too late now.

The yellow taxi containing the two airplane hostesses drew up just ahead of Ott’s car. The girls, in their twin blue topcoats and their pert caps and smart pumps stepped out into the snow, they paid the taxi driver and picked up their little blue bags and, with an amiable smile in the direction of the world in general, scurried into the Ice Palace, and the plane company’s personnel overnight quarters. They were trained, engaged and paid for being amiable, intelligent and pretty, they worked hard at it. Now, for a day, they could doff the hostess manner with the uniform, they could wrap themselves in the synthetic woolly robe and rest their tired feet in scuffs, and rinse out the pink underthings and cook their own dinner if they wanted to, with a nice dry martini at the beginning and a cigarette at the end. No trays to carry, no babies to feed, no leers to rebuff no questions to answer no mountain peaks to point out for the next twenty-four hours. Tomorrow night two other girls as like these as grapes in a cluster—friendly, pretty, intelligent—would occupy these rooms, sleep in the beds, sip martinis, relax; sit before the television or listen to the music of the radio with the other girls and the pilots in the big bright company room.