Free Anita Mills by Bittersweet Page B

wearily. By day, they held sway, feasting on everything from bread dough to meat cooking on a spit over fire, drowning themselves indiscriminately in coffee, milk, and gravy. Then at night, the mosquitoes from the Platte River took over, attacking any exposed inch of human skin in an insatiable quest for blood.
    Today, the supposedly dry heat was anything but, and within the confines of the tent, the humid air was stifling. Between swats, she had to stop to mop the sweat from her face. Telling herself she had an easier life than Jesse, she uncovered the bucket long enough to fill the dipper and wet a rag with the tepid water. After wiping her face, arms, neck, and the crevice between her breasts, she felt a little better, but as she reached to put the piece of wood back, she realized she was too late. Two flies were already swimming in the bucket.
    People who thought hell was a fiery pit deep in the earth hadn’t been to Nebraska in July, she decided as she secured the towel covering the bowl of bread dough. Sighing, she picked up the almost full bucket and carried it outside, where she tossed the flies out with the water. She supposed if she’d been like the men, she’d have just strained out the flies and drunk what was left, saving herself a lot of trouble. Bucket in hand, she headed to the river for water she’d have to strain and boil before she used it.
    While Jesse had it hard, too, she couldn’t help resenting how much of himself he was willing to trade to the railroad for that good pay. All William Russell had to do was dangle a little more money in front of him, and Jesse’d volunteer to do anything, work anywhere, even if it meant he had to work six and one-half days a week so far away that he only got back to camp twice a month, and then for just long enough to spend the night and pick up a clean change of clothes before he left again.
    He was doing it for her, he said, but she knew better. She hadn’t asked him to, she didn’t want him to, and no matter how much money he made, no dream was worth what he was doing to himself. She’d been alone through years of war, waiting for him to come home, and she was alone again, only this time she was fifteen hundred miles from home, living in a tent smack dab in the middle of a camp of the roughest, dirtiest men she’d ever laid eyes on. It was hard to dream in a place like this.
    But perhaps the worst aspect of the situation was that for the first time in her life, she found herself regarded as a liability. Jesse’s foreman had made it more than clear that he preferred hiring bachelors. In his opinion, a man’s having a wife gave him divided loyalties and kept him from giving his all to the railroad. There wasn’t any place for a decent woman here, he’d told Jesse. And when he’d seen her, he’d suggested she ought to go back to North Carolina, which was impossible.
    She and Jesse had sold her homeplace for just enough money to get them out there, so they’d have to make the best of things, she told herself resolutely. Her only other choice right now would be to go back to Omaha and stay there until fall, when the Union Pacific would be setting up winter quarters farther west. But she didn’t have anyone in Omaha, either.
    The one thing that Mr. Russell had been right about was that there weren’t any decent women out here, or if there were, she hadn’t seen them. But there sure wasn’t any dearth of the other kind, the hard-eyed hussies who plied their unfathomable trade in tents a few hundred yards beyond the camp. Hog ranches, those places were called. After pay envelopes were handed out, the unwashed, unkempt men streamed across the staked rail beds to stand in line, money in hand, for a ten-minute turn with a girl dozens of men had already been with that day. And when they came back, drunk and loud, they’d brag about how such and such a girl wouldn’t be able to sit for a week.
    No, she’d just have to get by alone until fall, she told