“Get the men on it if you’re going to, and don’t forget to run a line over here,” he said. “But it’s your responsibility.”

I had a crew attaching one end of a cable line to the mess hall door when it dawned on me why Compton hadn’t wanted to run the operation himself. He didn’t want the blame if Hakes returned and disapproved of the lines as an unnecessary precaution.

But that, anyway, wasn’t going to happen.

The blizzard moved in full force while we were eating supper, and the only way fellows got back to their barracks was by hanging on to the lines we’d strung. Without them, a guy could have walked within a couple of feet of a building and not even seen the lights inside, visibility was so poor.

“How long do you think this will last?” I asked Nate.

“Till it’s over,” he answered. Then he laughed, probably at how dismayed I must have looked. “Likely it’ll end by morning.”

He was wrong about that. Snow continued piling up through the night and into Sunday. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, the air suddenly stilled and the sky turned bright blue.

By then, though, the camp was a rolling plain of white, with low spots filled in and drifts reaching to roof edges. Wind had pushed the snow into parallel lines over the central field, making it look like a vast washboard. The canvas tops of trucks sagged under the snow’s weight.

Telephone and electric fines were down, but we didn’t need a phone call to know Captain Hakes and his staff wouldn’t make it back that day.

“Think we’ll get plowed out soon?” I said to Nate, hoping he’d have encouraging news about how the Monroe area handled blizzards.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he answered. “The county’s forever short on equipment, and what there is will be plowing out highways, not poking back here.”

Compton and I consulted, or, anyway, he let me know his mind. “I’ve already checked with the kitchen,” he said. “There’s food enough, so that’s not a problem. It’s up to us to keep things running in the captain’s absence, just as if he were here.”

“There’s a pipe busted in the B Barracks latrine,” I said. “I shut the water off and aim to get a crew fixing it.”

“Don’t try, if there’s a chance you’ll make things worse.”

I gave him a look before heading off.

“I mean it, Trawnley,” he called.

Of course we got the pipe fixed okay. After all, the group of us who’d been on the construction cadre had installed it to begin with, and it felt right good to be working with wrenches and such again.

As we worked, though, I occasionally caught Nate staring out a window, chewing on his lower lip.