Free (1986) Deadwood by Pete Dexter Page A

something Jane said in the morning to the ugliest ones and the youngest ones, to keep them from falling in love.
    Boone went back outside and lost what was in his stomach. It was mostly pink, from the gin and bitters. "So whatever you got in mind this morning," she said from inside the tent, "think of that redskin. It's Sunday morning and I save that for the Lord."
    When he felt better, Boone looked again, this time without moving anything. Sometimes things was easier to see if you wasn't looking as hard. And there it was. Jane sat up and spit, and the bag was where her head had been. She'd been using Frank for a pillow. He picked it up before she could lie back down. "You got no respect for personal property, Jane," he said.
    She laughed at him, and said, "Gee," and "Haw," which was the words she'd used when it was still Saturday night, to tell him which way she wanted him to move.
    Jane had arrived in Deadwood that same day from Fort Laramie, where she'd been hired to replace a bullwhacker that had come down with torpid fever on the way out from Cheyenne. He was yellow-skinned and depressed by the time Jane saw him, and she doubted if they'd got him to town in time to save him. .The cure for torpid fever was Tutt's Pills and Phosphoric Air. You took the pills in the morning and took Phosphoric Air at night, and the pain in your head went away if it was in time, and you went soft-brained if it wasn't.
    Jane was a natural nurse. The sight of a sick man brought something out in her. She knew cures for all the diseases that had cures, which worked for what, and she took the sick bullwhacker's job with a sorry heart over the circumstances.
    The man who owned the bull train had a sorry heart too. Jane had done some bullwhacking for him before. She could swear with the best, but where a man would use a whip to influence the oxen left or right, Jane would get drunk and abuse their hides. It wasn't intentional, but whenever Jane ran a wagon, the cattle came in scarred. Open scars were collecting spots for grubs, and grubs would cripple the oxen until they were only good for slaughter and hides. Not that scarred hides were worth much.
    But Jane was the only unemployed bullwhacker in Fort Laramie at the time the train came through, and the man who owned it offered her thirty dollars to take the sick driver's team the rest of the way into Deadwood. She wanted to go back to the Hills, and swore to stay sober.
    She had been there before with Lieutenant Colonel Richard T. Dodge's expedition in 1875, when all the boys got the summer complaint drinking bad water from Beaver Creek. Jane dressed like a soldier and rode like a soldier and panned the creeks like a soldier, until she was finally discovered by California Joe Milner, who had guided the expedition into the Hills, getting lost sometimes for two and three days at a stretch. He'd caught her doing business. She was charging the Army boys a dollar a turn, half the regular rate. Jane was never one to exploit the U.S. Army, which, to her thinking, was a damn sight more than you could say for California Joe.
    He came into her tent—there was two or three boys waiting outside—and caught her with a corporal. Recognizing her, he called Jane a notorious harlot. The corporal was trying to put all his clothes on at the same time. She lay back, her Army uniform open here and there, and congratulated California Joe for finally finding something he knew what it was.
    Lieutenant Colonel Dodge decided against sending her back because of the Indians, but they watched her every minute after that, and it was never in Jane's plans to be watched except at her invitation.
    They were five weeks in the Hills and she was glad to leave, but later she pined to return. It wasn't that the Hills had looked that good the first time—Jane never cared much for scenery—but the stories made it sound brand new.
    And it was someplace to go. She had about wore out Fort Laramie.
    There was another reason, too. She'd