“But, Papa!” shouted a great resonant voice from the crowd in the doorway. “I’m over fifty years old, I know the facts of life, I want to live before you kill me with the greed you call paternalism.”

“Oops! Here we go!” said Ott Decker.

“It’s Grandpa Storm of course,” Chris said. “I sort of hoped he wouldn’t, this time.” But her face was brilliant with a smile of anticipation.

Dave Husack faltered, stopped, he turned a look of outraged dignity upon Oscar Bogard. “Mr. Chairman!”

The faces of Oscar Bogard, Czar Kennedy, Dave Husack, Sid Kleet were identical expressions of scowling resentment. They knew an old enemy. Only General Cass Baldwin and Wilbur K. Distelhorst seemed puzzled and uncomprehending.

“Dad’s blood pressure,” Bay Husack said to Dina.

There was a stir in the doorway. A towering figure came forward. Every head in the room swung toward him.

“Excuse me, will you, if I interrupt for just a minute? I haven’t been asked to speak here today, and I’m not going to make a speech. I just want to distribute a few copies of this week’s Northern Light.”

“Now, Thor!” Oscar Bogard remonstrated. “This is an outrage! You can’t start all that again.”

Under his arm Thor Storm carried a sheaf of newspapers, neatly folded. In a region of tall men his height was notable. The frame was big-boned, unburdened by fat. The hood of his parka was pushed back, its border of wolf formed a nimbus above the gold-and-silver hair, the pink cheeks, the startlingly blue eyes. It might have seemed an almost cherubic face except for the eyes. There was nothing angelic about these as, moving swiftly, he placed a neat bundle of newspapers at the end of each long table.

“Just pass these along, will you, one to a person?” His manner was genial, his tone conversational, his enunciation curiously cultivated and charming. “It won’t be news to you, Dave; or you, Sid; or you, Oscar; and certainly not to you, Czar old pardner, as they used to say in those Rex Beach books. But it will be news to the rest of you Chamber of Commerce people and all Alaska. You won’t find it in this afternoon’s Baranof Daily Lode.” Suddenly he stretched forward his great right arm, his forefinger pointing, he looked strangely like a prophet of old as he stood there. “Bayard Husack!” he thundered.

But this time it was Czar Kennedy who interrupted, his voice leisurely, almost purring. “Just a minute, Thor. I can have you arrested, you know, for causing a disturbance in a public place.”

Thor Storm turned a beaming face toward Kennedy. “Will you do that, Czar?” His tone now was earnest to the point of entreaty. “I’d consider it a favor. Paul and Addie here would send it out A.P. and every newspaper in the United States would run it. Canada too. Do that, will you please, Czar, old pardner?”

“You’re getting senile, you know,” Czar observed, as though the two were engaged alone in a private bitter quarrel of long standing. “I could have you committed.”