I’d thought to myself, that must be some job for Mr. Whitney to travel back and forth so far. Or maybe Sam had just said the first thing that came to mind, to avoid embarrassment.

He never read aloud anything from the letters he got.

Then Nate’s sliding the truck into a snowbank drove Sam from my mind. “Couldn’t help it,” Nate said, as he pulled out shovels. “The road’s getting worse by the minute.”

The third time we got stuck, he said, “I really don’t care for the looks of this.”

“You think the weather’s going to get worse?” I asked.

“It might. We’d be smart to pick up the adviser and get ourselves turned around as fast as we can.”

The person we’d gone to pick up didn’t get off the train. No one did. And after Nate and I discussed what to do, I got the stationmaster to put through a telephone call to Pops.

“Don’t worry about it,” Pops said. “You boys drive back to camp while you still can, and the missus or I’ll check trains till the new man shows up. He can stay the night with us if need be.”

I couldn’t have said how Nate and I made the drive back to camp, except Nate knew how to lay on the gas going downhill, and he kept the accelerator floored when I’d have been pumping the brake pedal. We slipped and slid and fishtailed till I thought the back half of the truck might disconnect from the front.

But I had to hand it to Nate. He got us to the 597th in one piece. Actually, I had to give Nate credit for even finding the camp. By the time we reached the entrance, snow had hidden the lane into it and made the buildings almost invisible.

“We ought to string some safety lines,” Nate said. “This is becoming the kind of blizzard a body can get lost in.”

I took Nate’s suggestion to Compton, who argued that we didn’t have authorization to make the camp into a spiderweb.

I bit back what I wanted to ask: Do you need permission for getting up in the morning? For blowing your nose?

“We don’t have to do the whole camp,” I said. “But we need to make sure guys can at least get between the barracks and the mess hall without getting lost.”

“I can’t believe the situation is going to get that bad,” he said. “And I don’t know what we’d use for line, anyway.”

“There’s some spools of cable left from camp construction.”

Compton, scanning the slanting snowfall from the A Barracks steps, appeared undecided. Then a swirl of snow wrapped us, so that for a moment I couldn’t see him and likely he couldn’t see me.