got up from the chair and put an arm around her shoulders. "Walk me outside. I want to visit Tex's grave."
"I'll order a stone as soon as you decide what should be engraved on it."
Luke stopped and took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. "I've already been thinking about it. I wrote this upstairs in the bedroom. What do you think?"
Lettie took the paper and opened it. "'Here lies Tex,'" she read aloud, "'who gave his life for another. Died September fifteenth, 1881. About fifty. Good friend and devoted ranch hand. May God take him to his fold.'" The words caught in her throat and she refolded the paper. So many good friends lost... Tex, Hank Kline, Jim Woodward, Will and Henny. She looked up at Luke, saw the tears in his own eyes. "It's perfect," she told him.
They walked outside together, and from his back bedroom upstairs, Robbie was looking out the window. He watched his parents walk to the grave, watched his father kneel beside it. It seemed only fitting that at that very moment Pearl was playing a hymn on the grand piano downstairs, the music floating out across the lawn on a gentle wind.
Robbie's lips puckered and his eyes teared anew. He realized the only reason he was alive was because of Tex, that if it hadn't been Tex who had died in that fire, his own mother or father would have died in an effort to save him. His tender heart ached for the rugged, mysterious ranch hand who used to frighten him a little when he was smaller. "'Bye, Tex," he whispered. "I love you."
CHAPTER 30
May 1883
LUKE FONTAINE FOR TERRITORIAL DELEGATE! Luke's supporters had strung up a banner that hung across the main street of Billings, but farther up the street attorney Sydney Greene and his wife Helen had also draped a banner reading NIAL BENTLEY FOR DELEGATE! The Greenes had managed to rally some support for their son-in-law, who had declared that because of cattle ranches he owned in Wisconsin and Nebraska, his higher education and world travels, he was the better man to represent cattlemen in the territorial legislature.
Montana Territory had far surpassed the required population of sixty thousand to apply for admission to the United States. Officially the territory had a population of close to ninety thousand, something that amazed Luke and Lettie, considering how desolate it had been when they came there twenty years ago. Billings had just been a little log village. Now it burst with new settlers, who had come because of the completion of the Northern Pacific. New gold finds in the western part of the territory had brought in more settlers, and the huge copper find around Butte was the talk of the whole country. Newspapers were declaring
Butte Hill "the richest hill on earth," and the areas around the mines and around Helena were also growing rapidly.
People gathered around the Fontaine buggy as Sven drove it through the main street of town, now lined with more new businesses and yet another hotel. Luke had added two more floors to the Hotel Fontaine, and the Stowe's boardinghouse had also been enlarged. More lawyers had come to town, another doctor, two more teachers, and a dentist. One of those teachers was needed to replace Yolanda Brown, who had decided to go back to Chicago to teach. The timing was perfect, as Pearl was also going to Chicago, to study under a Professor John Bansen, a German pianist of great renown, who ran a private school for only the very best. Bansen had responded to a letter from Lettie, offering to listen to Pearl play and decide if she had the talent for advanced music lessons. All they had to do was get their daughter to Chicago. Miss Brown had agreed to be Pearl's chaperon.
Luke was not pleased with sending his sixteen-year-old innocent off to a big city to study under a stranger, but Lettie had corresponded with the parents of other students of Bansen for over a year, and had taken every precaution to ensure that the man and his school were reputable.
Pearl was not the least bit afraid to leave home for a big city, but Lettie worried that the change might be more of a shock than Pearl realized. All she had ever known was the remote life of living on a Montana ranch. The biggest and only town she knew was Billings, but at least Pearl was traveling with a reputable woman who