<hr/><div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/6/69/Marguerite_Tuerny01.jpg)</div><br/><strong>Name:</strong>Marguerite Tuerny<br/><strong>Date:</strong>May 1, 1876<br/><strong>Time of Day:</strong>Afternoon<br/><strong>Location:</strong>Camp Gǒu<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Nathan Hunter, Closed<br/><hr/><div class="floatright">(http://www.kidcyber.com.au/IMAGES/goldrushchinese_jupiter.jpg)</div>Marguerite trod slowly through the labor camp, her back straight but her frame compressed by her heavy load.  She was dressed in dirty gray trousers cinched at the waist and baggy along the legs, the hems tied just under the knee.  The smock she wore was dark, a brown that was almost black and it was as loose as the trousers.  Hair as black as any Asian's was tied up in a bun and tucked under a broad-brimmed hat.  At five-eight she was taller than most here, but from any distance she seemed another of the countless coolies working in this camp, a yoke balanced along the line of her shoulders supported four large buckets filled with fresh water.  Or water as fresh as any available in this horrid place.  Here a woman was expected to earn her keep and no matter how well a woman pleased a man, or men, that involved productive labor.<br/><br/>There were few women in the camp, and she was perhaps the only white woman.  She had seen no other white women, and at first the Chinese women shunned her.  But she worked as hard as any of them - she hauled water and she cooked for the men in her tent and she did their laundry, scrubbing out the grime of hard work against rocks alongside the other women doing the same. She kept her mouth shut and her oddly pale green-brown occidental eyes open and she learned from the women.  She never complained and she was quick to lend aid to any in need.  She'd won the women over even before the men, and many of them she counted as friend.  She learned from the men too, and always displayed appropriate diffidence, never looking a man in the eye outside the tent.<br/><br/>So, with head bowed and back straight, she hauled fifty pounds of water through the camp, her bare white feet crunching along the gravelly track leading from the well to her tent, currently the center of her world.  It was a good tent, clean and well-maintained - tidy and organized and with amenities few others in the camp enjoyed - the fruits of her men's labor.  She'd been traded around the camp at first, most Chinese seeing little value in a white woman.  But word spread - she was quick of wit, entertaining both in and out of bed, and she worked without complaint.  So eventually she found herself where she planned weeks ago - in a tent shared by four of the guards.  Men with weapons, power, status, and more wealth than common laborers.  Men with more status than any except the foreman, and men that ate well even when the supply wagons were late, and that shared their meals with their whore.<br/><br/>For that was what she was - a whore bought and paid for by four small, brutal yellow men.  Not that she had opportunity to name her own price, or ever received direct payment for sexual favors - but not one of these men considered her more than an object to satisfy their needs - their base lusts certainly, but also other social and physical needs.  Like fetching the water, and getting their dinner cooked before they returned from their shift - which she wasn't going to do if she dawdled.<br/><br/>She'd grown expert at scanning the camp with her head bowed, at avoiding eye contact but still knowing who was around her.  So she saw the horse long before she approached the tent, and she noted the white man almost as quickly.  Rooster was taking him toward the central tents - where the foreman lived in a shack surrounded by the tents of higher-status men like the guards.  Like the tent she now called home.  She didn't look at the white man, nor at Rooster, though as one of the men in her tent she could have met his eyes - at least in private.  She sighed.  Rooster was so proud of his...  endowment.  But he was actually the least skillful or pleasant of her cohabits, and the most mean.  Almost, he was the strongest, but like everyone else in the tent he deferred to the solid, stolid Tom Phay.  Tom - a name that was almost English, expect for the intonation and inflection.  Tom, a man she could truly respect.  She didn't see him near by - but with a white man visiting the camp he was sure to show up soon.  Tom liked to know what was going on.  Strong and clever both, that one.<br/><br/>She turned her face away from the white man as she passed close, hoping her attire and the jet black of her hair were disguise enough to ward away his attention.  She could have circled wider, but her load was heavy and she was almost at the tent, why walk 50 paces when she was only a dozen away?