Air Base Brass did not mingle with the ground, or very rarely. You did not see Air wives shopping in Baranof. They lived an intensely concentrated social life on the vast base, as did their martial male mates. The women belonged to clubs on the Bases, they attended teas, cocktail parties, dances, movies. Their children went to Base schools.

As Bridie put it, somewhat sniffily for her, “Air doesn’t mingle with us peasants. But those kids—those boys around—they kill me. The look on them.”

The girls began to arrive from everywhere. Again they were following the men into Alaska, but they were not at all like those girls who had come at the turn of the century. They looked terribly young in the inadequate pale blue coat and the little high-heeled pumps, hatless, the pretty dress belling out over the bouffant nylon petticoat, as they stepped off the plane into the icy airport.

No one in Baranof quite knew how Bridie Ballantyne had become unofficial welcomer, chaperone, witness, arranger and matron of honor for all these girls who, suddenly prim and apprehensive, descended out of the air into the waiting arms of an equally stiff apprehensive young man in Air Force uniform or in parka and mukluks.

Everyone in Baranof knew Bridie, so perhaps, in the beginning, one of the Air Force men or one of the construction workers or one of the Baranof College students had said to her, meeting her on the street or in the USO, “Uh, Mrs. Ballantyne, I’m going to be married day after tomorrow, I thought you’d like to know, you been mighty nice to me getting me acquainted round, and so on. I’m having some trouble getting her a place to stay overnight, she’s coming in on the noon plane from Seattle tomorrow.”

The girl on the plane had kept her hair in pins until the last possible moment and had then rushed to the lavatory to unpin the curls that sprang in lovely tendrils to frame the flushed or pale face; the eyes wide with sudden doubt, the heart hammering so that it was hard to tell which was heartbeat and which the throbbing of the great plane’s engines. She put her hand to her breast where his Air Force ring hung suspended by a slender gold chain. There had been young men on the plane, and these had eyed her with interest and speculation and longing, but now they relinquished their fantasies. Her face was pressed against the window; as the plane taxied in, her eyes searched the figures at the airport gate. There he was, and beside him and speaking to him was a white-haired woman who looked a little like her mother, only more smartly dressed. The eager young men in the plane said, one to another, give it up, boy. She’s fetched.

There had arrived dozens—scores—hundreds of these in Baranof in the past few years. Addie Barnett had been one of them, and Paul Barnett had been the man at the gate, peering nearsightedly at the figures spilling from the plane’s maw.