Lanni Caldwell slung her backpack over her shoulders, picked up her suitcase and crossed the gravel road that ran past the mobile office for Midnight Sons. The small airline—which served the Alaskan interior—had been mentioned in the news several times during the past month. Her curiosity piqued, Lanni had read the Anchorage paper eagerly and watched the television reporters tell their tale. And what a tale it was. Midnight Sons had apparently spearheaded a campaign to attract women to Hard Luck with offers of jobs and housing. Leave it to a bunch of lonely bush pilots to come up with such a crazy scheme! A number of single women had already arrived, and more would soon be joining them. TV reporters from down south were calling them “mail-order brides”—they weren’t—and referring to Hard Luck as “the frozen north.” It wasn’t, at least not in July. The sun shone bright and golden in a clear blue sky. The weather was in the comfortable seventies, with wildflowers blooming in a lively array of colors that stretched from one end of the tundra to the other.
