Free Reap the Whirlwind by Terry C. Johnston Page A

of punk sticks kept lit in every doorway, the sweetish fragrance of opium pipes the Chinese laborers preferred to the puke-bellied whiskey, the thick and oily perfumes the whores used hopelessly to cover up the forwardness of their sweat-slickened bodies.
    She had watched her mother finally all but abandon her family, going off to pursue what a middle-aged woman could of that good life Alder Gulch offered. But right from the start Charlotte Cannary was unable to compete with the younger, firm-breasted, flat-bellied working girls. Besides that, Charlotte was simply too hot-tempered and quick-tongued to make her fortune flat on her back. Her dreams ended one night after Martha Jane had gone back to her father’s shanty to care for the younger ones. All there was the next morning were whispers of the argument, the rising voices, the threats and oaths over this man or that old insult, and finally the gunfire exchanged between the two whores.
    Martha Jane had helped her pa wrap his unfaithful wife in a greasy blanket, helped dig the hole and bury her mama on the slope of a nearby hill near the end of that cruel winter of 1866. Come spring, Bob took his family away from Blackfoot, Montana Territory, and moved south to Salt Lake City. But a short year later he too died, leaving his three teenaged children to fend for themselves in the land of the Mormons.
    With nary a shred of reluctance that following spring,Martha shuffled off for Wyoming Territory to find work for the army at Fort Bridger and Fort Steele in 1868. After a season hauling supplies over South Pass from Cheyenne City, she found employment with the construction gangs of the Union Pacific working out of Piedmont. And ran smack into Allegheny Dick—the frontier’s most noted card shark besides being the most handsomest man-type of creature that ever walked the earth. Without complaint, Janey allowed the pasteboard shuffler to take her heart in ransom—but suffered a cruel dash of love’s bitter gall when one gray morning after many weeks of using her soft, scented, moistened woman’s equipment to the best of her ability to trap and hold a man, she awoke to find Allegheny Dick gone. And gone for good.
    A woman scorned, Martha Jane once more donned teamster’s clothing, a masquerade that allowed her to move about in the rough company of these men on the edge of this frontier. Besides, she told herself: the more layers of clothes, the better—all the better to hide her wounded, mourning heart.
    Time is said to heal all things, she had heard. By the time another winter had come and gone, Janey knew some scar tissue lay weathering on the surface of her heart. A heart destined to be broken once more with the advent of spring, the warming of the prairie, and the blooming of wildflowers that carpeted the high prairie.
    Throwing caution to the wind, Martha Jane once more left her masquerade long enough to don hoop dresses, brush her hair, and rouge her cheeks—all so she could give herself fully to a handsome and lonely soldier, a Lieutenant Somers—and promptly got herself with child.
    To tell her lover of the coming event would have been a joy—only to find a few days later the gay blade of an officer was off to a new duty station, having requested the change of scenery himself. Only in his leaving did he finally fess up to the fact that he was already very much married.
    Once more mending her broken heart and with her newborn babe turned over to an upright family, Martha Jane again donned men’s clothing and plunged back into the world of males on the rough frontier. Not a strange thing to do, to remember it now as she unloaded freightfor Crook’s army. Not strange at all, for she was only carrying on what she had learned at no less than her own mother’s knee—this lunging, gasping chase after life’s rawest excesses.
    Her pa, Bob Cannary, a young and innocent farm boy on a visit to Cincinnati, had become entranced with a young woman’s beauty and forwardness