Wildest Dreams - By Rosanne Bittner Page 0,184

Mrs. Brown had been hired to assist the town's only other teacher, Howard Task, who had been hired out of Kansas through an ad the Billings citizens had placed because of a great need for a school for the evergrowing community. Her father and other businessmen had built a large, two-room school last summer, and already two teachers were needed. Sometimes Katie also helped teach, but most of her time was spent organizing the hundreds of books that now lined the shelves of the library.

She had spent hours setting up a method of keeping records of all the books that came in, as well as a way to keep track of books by title, author, and subject, and records of books checked out. She knew her mother supported her new "job" because it kept her busy, and being busy meant less time to dwell on ugly memories. People treated her as though nothing had ever happened, and she felt important and needed. It felt good to hear people tell her how clever and industrious she was for coming up with the idea for a library and being willing to stay in town to run it. Many had already visited her, some of the older ones unable to read but wanting books for their children. They also brought with them or dictated to her information about their families and backgrounds so she could incorporate the information into the ledger she kept for the future museum.

Everyone had been eager about both ideas, making it easy to raise the necessary money to maintain the building and buy more books. All the shelves inside had been built by Phillip Crane, a fairly new resident of Billings. Crane was a carpenter and furniture maker, and to show his support of the town, he had donated the material and his own labor to build the shelves. His contribution had immediately put him in a favorable light, and already the man's carpentry and furniture-making business was rapidly growing, as many of the female citizens of Billings and the surrounding area were anxious for new furniture in their homes or to have old furniture refinished. Now his biggest project was to put the finishing touches on the new four-story Hotel Fontaine, which her father had had built over the past winter. Already Luke Fontaine's latest business venture was doing well, and soon a plaque would be placed on the front of the library reading Billings Library, Est. 1880 by Luke and Eletta Fontaine.

She breathed deeply of the smell of fresh pine as she laid the newly arrived books on a desk, thinking what an important role her mother and father had played in settling the area. She went outside to get more books from the freight wagon that had been parked in front of the library by a man from Hendrixon's Freighting and Supply, through whom the books had been ordered. It would take a while to unload all of them, but she didn't mind. She opened another box, having to take a few books in at a time because a full box was too heavy to carry.

She stopped for a moment to open one of the books and sniff it, enjoying the wonderful smell of new pages; yet she also loved the smell of older books. It was reading that had gotten her through the past two years and had helped take her away to places of the mind, where she could forget about what had happened to her. It was books that had helped her heal, as well as spending this time in town organizing the library. Luke and Lettie had not wanted her to leave home, but they understood that for now, maybe this was best. She had a good roommate in Mrs. Brown, who was a childless, middle-aged woman who enjoyed the same things Katie enjoyed, reading, learning, and teaching. She was proud to be living partly on her own at sixteen, and she felt comfortable at the boardinghouse because she used to go there to see Will and Henny when she was little. The house had been enlarged several times so that now the original cabin was nothing more than a large dining room where boarders gathered for daily meals, but Katie remembered playing in that very room when she was small, chasing Henny's several cats, some of which still hung around the property. Martin Stowe and his wife had added on ten rooms, and with the three extra rooms that had already