Sergeant Ruffino whispered something—I caught the words “looser regulations than in the army.”

Ignoring him, the captain wheeled on me. “You’re the junior leader here, Trawnley,” he said. “If you want to keep the position, start doing your job.”

“But—”

“Didn’t you hear me say not to answer back? You are first in line for responsibility for this building, and from now on it had better look as good as A Barracks looks. In fact, I think you should go see how A Barracks does look, and while you’re there, ask Junior Leader Compton how he manages his job.”

“Yes, sir,” I managed. Heat was seeping up the back of my neck. He’d no call to humiliate any of us like he was doing.

“Well? What are you waiting for?” he asked. “When I say to do something, I mean to do it now!”

I felt all my guys watching me as I got my jacket and walked to the door. Most gave me looks of sympathy, and all looked bewildered or angry, or both.

Bewildered and angry. As January wore on, that description fit all of us more and more. Fellows from both barracks were like a bunch of bees whose hive had been broke into, and each new grievance set off a new round of buzzing.

Captain Hakes caused a good bit of the resentment, when, day after day, he wanted this job and that done over. It was like nothing we did was ever quite spit and polish enough to suit.

And on top of that, little things began to go wrong. We’d been fueling the barracks stoves with coal, but when a shipment came in late, we had to make a freezing trip into the woods to get firewood. And when the coal did come, it was such a poor grade that it smoked up the room and turned the stoves filthy in no time.

Then a stew made with iffy beef gave everybody the heaves for a night.

“What happened?” I asked Romeo. We were in our bunks, curled up in misery. “Didn’t anybody in the kitchen notice the meat was bad?”

“It might have smelled a tad off,” he answered. “We did comment on that. But it had just come in, part of a new supply order, so we figured it had to be fresh.”

But what caused the most grumbling was the lack of anything meaningful to do. Snow and cold had stopped outside work, and we’d painted about every inside wall there was to paint. The education adviser hadn’t arrived yet, so we didn’t have any classes to keep us busy. And the Soil Conservation Service and the army had legal work to wrap up before we could even start learning about the camp’s main projects.