BARGAIN BRIDE

To be sold as an Oregon homesteader's bride by avaricious relatives must be unsettling for a fifteen-year-old girl, no matter how harsh her Aunt has been or how shy and kindly the red-faced, forty-year-old man who comes to fetch her on her birthday. But Lampman avoids the obvious initiation by making Mr. Mayhew have a stroke on the couple's arrival home; he dies the next morning, and the rest is about the virgin widow's first winter on the model farm her husband had prepared for her. Ginny is not alone, for on the first night she takes in a white neighbor's rejected squaw who has been hiding on her property--and who still must be hidden from the sympathetic but prejudiced townspeople who warn Ginny about the Injuns. And then there is young Jeff from town who comes in spring to help plow. . . . You know he'll stay on as husband. Sanitized hardship to be sure, but the girls who will sympathize with Ginny from the start, and hang on the details of her betrothal and frontier housekeeping, won't notice.