"Oh Jonah, just stop! The Leah Steelgrave Hospital, if that ever got out the whole project would be ruined!" She said, but not in a serious tone, even though such a rumor could, and probably would damage the credibility of the hospital. Something they just couldn't afford to have happen.

"And Jonah Courting you is not going to cause a fuss with the old biddies of this burg?" Josiah wanted to know. "Seems to me Miss Steelgrave, your name alone should have done that already."

"My thoughts on this were quite simple, most everyone that lives here has seen he and I together on many occasions, so, why not have it out in the open? I mean honestly Josiah, people aren't blind, or dumb, they've been talking about this for as long as we were first seen together." She giggled, "hopefully this will quell the Miggins Effect."

"I see." Doctor Boone responded, "In that case my advice to you is, have old Phineas McVay put that in his newspaper if they haven't run that rascal out of town already!"

"Advertise our courtship?"  Jonah wasn't too keen on that, and he didn't think Leah would either.  But he followed her lead and shook his head.  "I'm afraid it would take more than that to extinguish the Miggins effect," he lamented, "once it gets going..."

Shaking his head, he sighed.  "I'm not sure there is a cure for the Miggins, we'll just have to slink away in the middle of the night and hope it doesn't follow us!"

"There is no exact cure for the Miggins effect that's for sure. The woman nearly sank my presentation to the Kalispell Ladies." Leah replied. Goodness knows we have been an item of gossip for well over a year." Then she laughed.

"And no, placing our private lives in the Union would hardly be appropriate, now if Mister Mc Vay were to do this on his own, or at the behest of someone he trusted, there would be little we could do. Besides, the real news is the hospital and how close we really are. Getting everything here, and the completion of the second story which should go rather quickly. That is the real story."

"Well, I'm certainly not keen on being in the gossip pages!"  Something that might actually be hard to avoid, since the comings and goings of ordinary citizens were noted in the paper, and Leah Steelegrave was anything but ordinary!

"Hopefully, building will go rather quickly from here, now that Winter is over."  Jonah glanced at Leah.  "We have most other things in place, we should be able to open...what do you think?  By Summer?"

Leah and Josiah laughed, "Like we haven't been there already? I mean, you and I are common knowledge to anyone with a pair of eyes."

"The young lady is right Jonah. As far off as Columbia Falls, folks there have been wondering when you two would get married. There's just no secrets in the territory, at least none abound these parts." Josiah informed him. "Besides, that kind of rumor cannot harm either of you and not this hospital either!"

"We have bigger fish to fry, I'd like to get the things for the ground floor out here and at least inside, if not set up for use." She reminded both of them. "God willing, the place won't be needed until the day she's completed and officially opened, but just in case, what with the mining operations and the coming roundups. no telling what could happen."

Married??

It was a little early for that, wasn't it?  Not that Dr. Boone was incorrect, Jonah and Leah had spent a good deal of time together for more than a year, and it wasn't all planning and plotting!  But...well, the idea of properly courting was still new to him, not that he didn't think the outcome would be anything else.

"Oh, well..." he blustered, moving the subject on, "it would make some sense to start gathering the supplies on the first floor as soon as we are able, if it won't interfere with the rest of the building."  After all, their supplies had to be stored somewhere, and using the close-to-complete ground floor for that would make it that much easier once the building was finished.

"Besides, at some point, folks are going to know that's going to be a hospital, and they might start going there before it's ready, so it won't do any harm to have some equipment there."

"So, we're that much closer..."  The idea was both terrifying and exhilarating, but Jonah knew that with all the help they had, this was going to work out well, and make the region all the better.  "And once Josiah and I have a chance to go over the lists, he can let us know what else he thinks we might need and we can get that started."

For so long, nothing had been happening, and now it was all moving so fast!  Before they knew it, the place would be up and operational, and they'd be seeing patients from across the region.

"Once we're up and running, we can have Mr. Mc Vey put out advertisements, and contact other newspapers in the area so folks know it's here."

"Up and running." Leah sighed. "It seems not so long ago I was fighting to get the thing started, now it's just a matter of time until the doors are opened and we are busy."

"How true that is. Robertson, I heard all but hid the right of ways so the trade would not go through and the town could hold the papers, and I heard that the idea was to cheat you out of the deal he had made with you for the hospital orphanage property." Josai pointed out with a hint of resentment in his voice, "I never would have thought that of him."

That was my father's doing, he finds ways to have people in his debt, or under his control. He'll have a hard time of it with Matthew, that's for certain!" Leah said. "And glad of it."

"I'd like to think that we are so far into this that the community would stand behind us if your father thought to cause trouble," Jonah observed, although there was no telling what Elias might do.  On the one hand, it seemed that if he was going to do something, he would have done it by now, but on the other, waiting until it was just about to open, with all the equipment inside would cause the maximum disruption.  Jonah shuddered at the thought.

"When we do start bringing in the equipment to store," he suggested, "we should hire guards, just...to be safe.  It would be a pity to lose everything because of...an accident."  He didn't want to suggest that Leah's father might be the cause of an 'accident'.