Sharply Bridie said, “Chris Storm, you’ve been kind of play-acting all your life, I’ve begun to think. Like Bay Husack said down at the airport, Alaska’s Joan of Arc. Dramatizing yourself.”

“Goody! Lunch!”

With a rustling sound like a flock of pheasants the Caribou Café waitresses bustled into the room, crisp and starched and tray-laden. They were young, they were hard-working, they were serious. Tucked into the breast pocket of her fresh blouse each wore a brilliantly flower-patterned handkerchief whose border burgeoned into a sunburst of color. “Parm me,” they said as they deposited at each place a plateful of Chamber of Commerce provender—beef stew, dumpling, pallid string beans, a little saucer of coleslaw with a ruby fleck of red pepper nestling in its bosom. Chris began to eat her lunch with the methodical thoroughness of a young healthy woman who has eaten worse food and would again; who has breakfasted hours ago in the dark of the Alaska winter morning, who knows that it is past noontime, and that life is sustained by food.

Ott Decker had made his way to the head table, he had bent solicitously, a true Chamber of Commerce Secretary, over Wilbur Distelhorst’s anguished head. “Something I can do, Commissioner?”

Distelhorst leaned back, he screwed his head around, he spoke out of a corner of his mouth, one open hand shielding his lips. “These people,” he mumbled, and jerked his head a little in the direction of the luncheon throng. “They’re a little different than I looked for. Would you just give me a line on the general make-up and so forth? Those good townspeople of yours.”

Ott Decker looked down at the face so close to his, automatically he replied in Chamber of Commerce terms. “They’re wonderful people, sir. They don’t come finer than these Alaska folks.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But I mean what do they do, what’re they here for, what do they represent, what’re they doing here in Alaska?”

Ott thought, I’d like to turn Chris and Bridie loose on him, they’d shred him. Politely he said, “Uh, didn’t they brief you, sir, in Seattle or in Washington, before you came up?”

Distelhorst’s head jerked round sharply as he glanced up at Decker. The bland face reassured him. “Naturally I am reasonably informed on Alaska and so forth. But as Miss Storm so ably put it, the people are interesting too. Now if you can give me just a quickie on these good folks here.”

Ott Decker straightened, he looked out over the faces of the men and women. His was the middle-class commercial mind, his business was to sell, not actual commodities, but the plans and schemes and hopes of those who sold them. He was ambitious, he was sentimental, he had not quite made the football team at the University of California; shrewd enough to know that he should by now be pursuing his profession in his native California, or in Kansas City Missouri or Columbus Ohio or Terre Haute Indiana, rather than in this half-tamed half-wild northern territory. He should, he knew, be married to a pert pretty girl who enjoyed scurrying in and out of the supermarket aisles in one of those bustling conventional cities. But the magnetic North had him in its grasp; and the heady Chris had spoiled him for blander misses.