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Chapter Fourteen

Medicine Bow must have grown during the past year. Ned Avery had no trouble filling out a dance card with a new schoolteacher in town, the banker’s daughter, a widow roughly his age who danced even better than Katie and the Presbyterian minister’s cousin from Ohio.

He remembered not to mumble one two three when he waltzed, came up with enough small talk to get him through a dance and stepped on nothing except the wooden floor.

By the time the dance ended, Ned had the name and address of the banker’s daughter, and had promised to take Sunday dinner with the minister’s cousin before she left for Ohio in the spring. The schoolmarm spent more time dancing with a rancher ten miles farther out of town; she’d find out soon enough he was a widower with five rowdy children.

Still, they weren’t Katie. Besides, if Katie had come with him, she could be filling up a dance card and looking over the local bachelors. She could also be dancing with him. He missed the sweetness of her breath on his neck when he whirled her around the kitchen.

He found himself comparing his dancing partners with Katie. Excepting the widow, none were as light-footed. The schoolmarm appeared as trim as Katie, but the whalebone corset he felt against his hand suggested otherwise. On the plus side, they were all easy to understand. He made a joke with the schoolmarm at Katie’s expense, imitating her Maine accent until the lady laughed, then felt ashamed of himself. Katie couldn’t help where she came from.