As you can imagine, they gaveup pretty quickly after that.Well, didn?t my buttons burst when we heard the first news bulletins backhere. They asked Cl...ire to stay over in Washington, and the next night,there was our girl on the Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze,accepting a special medal from the president. We don?t have a televisionat home, in fact I doubt if there are a dozen in the entire town, soMartha and I had to watch with a crowd at Norton?s Store, where the G.E.sets on sale at. Elaine and I settled quickly down to the new order of things now that we were a hand shorter than before. As I said previously Elaine started to take on the dogs completely by her self and I had more of the horses to do. That is not to say that I had everything to do for the horses, Elaine still helped with them but only after the dogs were done. It was maybe three to four weeks after Robert had left that I eventually went down to the kennels to see why Elaine was taking so long.Long before I. Naturally, though, she wasn't going to sleep with Mom forever. Mary had been the one to ask for her own bedroom. After all, she was almost fourteen. So, she took over what Goldie had told her was called "the dog house". Anthony (she was NOT going to call him her Step-Dad!) hadn't been using it, probably keeping it free for her. She had spent the first night there not getting much sleep either. So, even though she was in the exact same bed now, the room was different, the company was. After the third such apology, I jokingly told her she could make up for it by introducing me to someone else.“Who?” she asked.I randomly pointed at a group and said “Her.” My finger was pointed directly at a strawberry blonde knockout who was hanging on the arm of some low IQ muscle head. I wondered if she dated guys who didn’t end every sentence with “Bro.”Much to my surprise, she walked over and pulled the girl away from the group and led her over to me. “Jace Bradshaw, I’d like you to meet.