Her own mother called her “useless” and sold her to a rugged mountain man for just $20 and two goats. Temperance, 18 and broken by years of abuse, thought she was being sent to her death. But when she arrived at Obadiah Stone’s isolated cabin, she found something she never expected: a warm meal, a soft bed, and a teacher who would change her destiny.
The transaction was cold, brutal, and final. In the freezing interior of a crooked wooden house in Blackwater, a mother looked at her 18-year-old daughter with eyes devoid of love and made a deal that would make the devil blush. Constance Whitmore, a woman whose bitterness had long ago curdled into cruelty, sold her own flesh and blood—her daughter Temperance—for twenty dollars and two goats.
