Wildest Dreams - By Rosanne Bittner Page 0,110

and now it couldn't snow deep enough that they couldn't see out their windows. The house sat even higher than the larger log home they had lived in for the past ten years. All the bedrooms were on the second floor, servants quarters on the third. There lived Mae Diggs, a middle-aged woman who had lost her farmer husband last summer when he was struck by lightning. Their two grown sons had given up on the hard farming life long before that and lived in Denver. With eleven-year-old Katie and eight-year-old Pearl getting big enough to help her with the housework, Lettie didn't need an extra maid. But Mrs. Diggs had been left destitute, and Lettie had given the woman the job just so she would have a place to live. It had all worked out well. Mae had turned out to be a wonderful cook, and she loved the children.

The children's tutor also lived on the third floor. Lettie had written to a school in Boston to inquire about having someone sent out, and the result had been Elsie Bansen, a lovely, blond twenty-year-old, who came from an orphanage. Elsie could not only teach reading and writing, but also knew how to play the piano. She was giving lessons to Pearl, who sat downstairs in the parlor right now plunking away at a lesson. Lettie loved the sound of the grand piano they had ordered out of Chicago. It filled the whole house with music, and sometimes she felt like crying at the sound of it, remembering when the constant wind was all there was to listen to.

Elsie had seemed uncertain at first that she wanted to live in such a remote area. But then she had fallen head over heels in love with one of Luke's new hired hands, Peter Yost, a handsome young cowboy who had come to the Double L because he "wanted to work for the biggest rancher in Montana Territory." It seemed that out here, if a man couldn't be a big-time rancher himself, the next best thing was to work for one, and at least if Elsie and Peter got married, they were almost sure to stay on at the ranch. With all the hired help, some with wives, the Double L was becoming its own little settlement, and there were no more horribly lonely winters.

Lettie rose and walked over to smooth the colorful quilt on the bed, a quilt she had made herself. She moved to the separate washroom then, just off the bedroom for Luke's and her private use. She cleaned up Luke's shaving table, poured water from a porcelain pitcher into a marble sink to wash it out. Luke had rigged the sink and a porcelain bathtub so that water ran outside through pipes. Old wash water would never again have to be carried out and dumped. Supplies of fresh water were kept in holding tanks built into a special room on the third floor, so that the rest of the house had running water through simple gravity, and a coal-fired boiler in the basement heated the whole house, as well as providing hot water for bathing.

She felt like the most modern woman who ever lived, although she knew there were even more advanced plumbing systems for people in places like Denver. For now, and for this part of the country, this was the height of elegance. Everything was still so new that she had not tired yet of looking at her grand home. The rooms were big and airy, cool in summers because of the wonderful cross-ventilation of the home's many windows. A veranda ran the entire circumference of the house, supported by white pillars that stood out beautifully against the red brick of the outside walls. The porch had not been part of the original design, but Lettie had insisted on having one, so the builder had obliged, and every window was graced with white shutters. Green grass surrounded the house, watered by ranch hands who sprinkled it by means of a hydraulic system from a creek higher in the mountains.

Fine mahogany and walnut furniture decorated the home throughout, from the elegant highboy in Luke's and her room to the magnificent buffet and the huge dining table and chairs that matched it in the dining room downstairs. The library was fast filling with books, works by great writers of the time, books for teaching the children, even books on banking and investments for Luke.

She walked downstairs, running her