“I don’t blame them,” I said. “But what’s being done to fix things?”

“Nothing,” Nate said, his voice suddenly hard.

“What do you mean, nothing? Why not?”

“The guys are on strike,” he said.

For a moment all I could do was stare. “But why?”

“Because of you, to start with,” he said. “Compton didn’t waste any time Friday letting everybody know you’d been demoted. I don’t know what he expected . . . that it would be some kind of lesson, I guess.

“But it just made fellows mad. Everybody—even the guys in Compton’s barracks—knew you’d worked your tail off on the reservoir. And, hell, you’d had a hand in just about everything good about the camp.”

“But . . .”

“And then somebody said we ought to slow down work for the rest of Friday in protest. Guys were saying that’s what organized labor does sometimes.”

I said, “So guys aren’t exactly on strike?”

“Oh yeah,” Nate answered. “Getting angry about you was just the start of things. Compton made a lot of threats he couldn’t carry out, and that got people even madder.

“And then yesterday, when word came in about the spillway starting to fail—along with the rumor it was because we’d been supplied with bad cement—Hakes pulled Saturday passes and ordered everybody to work shoring it up.

“That’s when somebody said he’d built the dam once but he’d be danged if he was going to build it twice, and especially not on his weekend off.”

That didn’t sound at all like the guys I knew. “But Sam? Apple? What did they say?”

“I didn’t wait to hear,” Nate said. “That’s when I left.”

It was a lot to take in.

I asked Nate, “What are you going to do here?”

“The only things we can. Spread some straw, sandbag as best we can, and hope the worst of the rain’s over. We need the reservoir to drop back some, not fill up more.”

We both looked to the window, being hit by occasional drops.

I pulled on my jacket. “At least I can give you a hand with the straw. I’ll go get started.”

Mr. Lundgren spoke from the foot of the steps. “We’ll get along without your help.”

“But I’d like to . . .”

Turning his back to me, he said to Nate, “Tell him I don’t want any more to do with the CCCs. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have a dam above our fields.”

Nate didn’t repeat it, of course, but he didn’t say anything else, either, and after a moment I awkwardly took my leave.

I’d hardly got back on the road when Maggie came running after me. She was still wearing her nightclothes. A quilt she’d wrapped around herself flapped out.