“Better yet! Better yet, pardner. What a story that would be! What testimony I could produce, what witnesses I could call, what deeds I could unfold, what secrets I could relate!”

Oscar Bogard’s clashing of metal against glass as he attempted to restore order sounded like the efforts of a Swiss bell ringer. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” He now thwacked the table with the flat of his hand. “This is not Alaska of the Nineties! This is Alaska today.” He turned his gaze away from the offender. “General, my apologies. Commissioner, please believe that this is not the way Alaskans behave. We may be a little crude and even rough in ways, but our manners—–”

“Slaves!” roared Thor Storm. “Worms! Second class citizens of the greatest democracy in the world! Voteless tax-paying men and women of Alaska, and your fathers and mothers before you for sixty years. Manners! Manners! Wholesale plundering by them for another fifty years, or freedom for you! Read it! Read it! Read it!”

There was a rustling like the sound of a sudden wind rushing through the leaves of a forest as the members of the Baranof Chamber of Commerce opened the pages of the weekly Northern Light and began to read.

Chris Storm plucked her white parka from the back of her chair and came over to the patriarchal giant standing there, facing the room. She linked her arm through his, she looked up at him.

“Let’s go now. You were wonderful, but you know the doctor said you weren’t to get excited. Let’s go now.”

Dina Drake had been concentrating on the application of a fresh coating of lipstick, her gaze intent on her own reflection in the tiny mirror. Now she glanced up. “What’s the matter? Is he crazy or something?”

“Like a fox,” Bay Husack said.

8

FROM THE BEGINNING no two men could have been more unlike than Thor Storm and Czar Kennedy. Yet here they were in Baranof, the town to which they had come half a century ago, each bound to the other by unbreakable bonds of love and hate, of hardship shared, of common adventure, of family blood, of tragedy, and—strongest of all—by Christine Storm, their granddaughter. The intricate fabric of life that united these two septuagenarians was now of indissoluble weave, light as the dry Baranof snow, strong as the sinew of a caribou.

Together they had come to this weird wild land. They had planned and worked and fought together, each had been left wifeless and childless in young manhood, neither had remarried, each waged a silent persistent battle for the welfare—as they saw it—of the girl Christine. Each loved Alaska in his own way. Baranof had been their home for fifty years and more. They were a universe apart.

Thor Storm still lived in a log cabin as he had in his virile twenties. It boasted electricity and plumbing of a sort now, but structurally it was basically unchanged. Baranof and the whole Territory respected him, admired him, were baffled by his way of life. Here was a pattern they could not quite understand. Books. Always blatting about freedom and democracy. Well, hell, too much freedom here in Alaska if you ask me, the unknowing said. When tragedy came upon both men the town thought they would leave the North Country to go back Outside, away from the sights and sounds that had so brutally twisted their lives. They had stayed.