Third Girl from the Left

The independent, rebellious Sarah Adams Goodhue has different things in mind for herself. She will not spend all her life in Dewborne, Maine, and die with the epitaph “Dearly beloved drudge, gone home.”

When she reads an ad for a wife to live on a Montana cattle ranch, she dashes off a reply before she can lose her courage. Only a few weeks later, in the cold of 1885, Sarah makes the long journey west by train, and then by bone-rattling stagecoach ride to Dillman, Montana, clutching the photograph of her intended husband, Alex T. Proud.

But the man who meets her, marries her, and takes her through a freezing storm to his ranch cabin is not quite the same Alex as the one in the photograph. Shocked and betrayed, Sarah nonetheless decides to make the best of things. She can’t go home again – not in defeat, admitting a mistake.