Apple and I had us a great time in Yellowstone, hiking around the bubbling mud pots and watching the geysers shoot off. He flirted some with a waitress in the big lodge there, and I wrote Beatty two postcards. I aimed to return to Muddy Springs once my second hitch was done, and I wanted her to be there, waiting for me.

Then Apple and I returned to camp early to meet the new fellows. The morning they were to arrive, we headed out to get a couple of stake trucks to bring them back in. Sergeant Ruffino and a corporal had already gone ahead in a car.

Apple got behind the wheel of one truck, and Beggar jumped onto the seat beside him. I climbed into the other truck, started the motor, and saw the gas gauge sitting on empty. “You go on,” I called. “I’ve got to swing by the fuel pump.”

Waiting for the tank to fill, I looked out over the silent camp. “Don’t worry,” I told Thief, who was watching me warily. “Beggar’s coming back.”

It was a bluebird day—clear skies, warm sun, growing things everywhere. As different as could be from the bleak night I first saw the camp, when it wasn’t anything but tents and piles of raw lumber.

Now it was a finished place. A home, really. Mine, anyway, for now.

On my way out, I stopped to straighten the COLD DAY CAMP sign at the entrance. And while there, I took a moment to admire the rock monument. I remembered how carefully we’d put our initials in the concrete.

There was Apple’s E. D. I could just hear him saying, I’m kind of proud of this camp . . . I want it official. I had a hand.

Him, and all of us. There wasn’t a nickname anyplace.

I got into Monroe just as the train pulled in. By the time I’d parked, the first new enrollees were already milling about the station platform, their hands full with suitcases and duffle bags, guitars and . . . Was that really a bag of golf clubs?

I guessed so, judging from the look on Apple’s face.

Well, there had to be a story behind that boy, I thought, as Beggar went to investigate.

And wouldn’t Beatty get a tickle, when I wrote her we’d got a fellow thought he was coming to a country club.

The new guys, fresh from conditioning camp, were a skinny, weak-looking lot, for sure, but that would change. Three squares a day and steady work in the outdoors would do the trick.

I pulled back my shoulders and waded into the crowd as a kid who reminded me of Romeo came over. Fifteen? Not even. Face like peach fuzz, except for what looked like a knife scar down one side.

“You in charge?” he demanded. “’Cause I’ve got a complaint.”