Summary
A sun-bleached patch of Missouri bottom-land, mortgaged to the hilt, becomes the stage for a young woman’s life-long duel with debt. From pig-tailed childhood through calloused adulthood she hurls every copper penny, every dawn-till-dusk chore, every splinter of her will toward a single vanishing horizon: lifting the crushing lien held by the iron-souled banker Jarvis. When drought, depression and compound interest finally outrun her, the wolf-faced creditor offers a sordid bargain—her body for the deed. She instead flips the power dynamic, vowing to auction one year of her labor, flesh untouched, to the highest bidder. The town’s elite, scenting both sport and scandal, gather like crows; telegrams fly; bids climb; and her long-absent sweetheart gallops in too late, a prince without a kingdom or courage. The gavel falls, the chain of servitude snaps shut, yet the mysterious buyer never appears to collect his prize. Twelve lunar cycles of anxious freedom pass—fields are re-ploughed, prayers whispered, pride re-forged—until the truth stalks in: Jarvis himself cast the winning bid, moved by a repressed, almost self-loathing devotion. Stripped of artifice, the two stand amid threshing shadows and wheat-lit gold, their transactional beginning transmuted into a sober, earned partnership that feels less like romance than like two battered souls agreeing to shoulder the same yoke.
Synopsis
The story concerns a young girl who spends her entire life in trying to obtain money to pay off the mortgage on her farm. But the day comes when she can no longer meet the claims, and Jarvis, the man who holds the mortgage, gives her the alternative of selling herself to him in return for the land. She spurns his offer, but adopts a plan to sell herself in service for one year to the highest bidder. Her old sweetheart arrives too late to save her and later proves that he was not worthy of her. The year passes without her "master" claiming her. Then the girl learns that Jarvis had bought her services because he had really loved her and she, having learned to care for him, marries him. - New York Dramatic Mirror, July 27, 1918.
