Run Cold

That would make your blood run cold."

—Robert W. Service, "The Cremation of Sam McGee"

Jack Mabie claims to be the meanest man in Alaska, yet the old sourdough seems to be just one of the crusty geezers in every roadhouse bewildered by how his lawless frontier life has morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue.

Sonia Petrievich, an editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly pro-statehood paper, ...