“But then the good land got scarce. You ever hear of Hardy Webster Campbell?” Nate said the name like it was poison.

“No.”

“He was big on dryland farming, telling people they could turn semiarid plains into cropland. That it was all right to plow up the sod. Campbell said it didn’t matter that the land got hardly any rain, because the trick lay in how you worked the surface. Lots of tilling.”

Nate waved a hand toward the dark fields outside the car. “It meant lots of topsoil left naked: unprotected, unanchored. Putting stock into such theories made about as much sense as believing that rain follows the plow, but there’re people still willing to believe that. My dad and the others scrambling to hang on around here—they’re all next-year farmers.”

“Next-year farmers?” I asked.

“Fools who always think their luck’s going to turn the next year.”

“Nate,” Maggie said, “you shouldn’t talk that way.”

“I’ll talk how I want and think how I want, too.”

I felt for Nate, but I also felt for Mr. Lundgren. He put me in the mind of my own pa, before just too many things turned wrong despite a lifetime of doing his best. Only Mr. Lundgren wasn’t giving up, and he wasn’t walking out on anybody.

I said, “It must be hard to hear that what you’ve spent years doing has been wrong. You’d feel betrayed, like whatever you put your faith in let you down. And you’d think twice before giving your trust again.”

Maggie’s head turned sharply toward mine. “That’s what Nate doesn’t understand,” she said.

We drove three, maybe five minutes before Nate quietly said, “Yes, I do.”

We said our good-byes to Maggie and leaned against the camp truck to wait for the other fellows.

“Look,” I told Nate, “Major Garrett said the reason we’re out here is to help the Monroe area. Maybe we will.”

“Sure,” Nate said. “When we couldn’t even put a few buildings up the way we’d planned.”

“They’re almost done.”

“Not on schedule.”

A commotion moved down the street. “Sounds like our crew,” I said.

It was, and the commotion was over a box of pies Pops was carrying. “Don’t know why the missus spoils you boys.” He settled the box on the truck’s front seat, telling Dave Malcomb, the CCC’er who was driving, “Now don’t you sample more than one.” Then Pops climbed in the back with everybody else.

“You going back to camp for the night?” someone asked him.

“Yeah, I want to get an early start on the work tomorrow. So, did everybody hit all Monroe’s hot spots?”

“Such as they were,” Riley Maxwell said. “Or we tried to.”

“We got thrown out of the bar,” Hal Linchfeld volunteered.

“Never let in, you mean!” someone said.