"I'm Too Young to Marry" — "We've Been Waiting For You for 7 Years", Three Mountain Men Answered

The first snow of October rode down the saw to ridges like a slow white wide army, swallowing the pass road inch by inch. Below, in a shallow basin, a single trading post stood with its chimney crooked against the wind. Inside, lamplight, a brass bell on a counter, a ledger opened to a column of figures, and at

the top of the page, two words no girl should ever read about herself. Peek received $300 for a bride somewhere on that same mountain. Three riders moved along a crust of fresh snow, a black man chestnut, a dun with white socks, a leggy bay, rifles slung, beards frosted, no wasted sound. A child was lost up there, and beneath

an overhang of granite by a thin curl of fire smoke, a girl with honeyccoled hair, pressed her palm over an oil skinned pouch listened to the wind change and tightened her grip on the handle of a knife. On the morning Lynette Farweather turned 17, her aunt sold her for $300 and did not even look up from the

ledger. The pass road into Sawtooth County was never kind in October. It climbed between two ridges of lodgepole pine, narrowed over a wooden bridge no wider than a wagon, then opened into a shallow basin where the fair weather trading post stood alone against the mountain. One story, cedar shakes gone silver with weather, a crooked chimney, and a

handpainted sign hanging from a rusted iron hook. The paint had faded. The letters barely held. But travelers coming down from the high country still knew the place by the smell long before they saw it. Mint, yarrow, dried bergamont, pine sap stewing in a cast iron kettle at the back door. That smell was lin fair weather. She was