I got another letter from Beatty, a chatty catch-up on airport doings. An additional flight in each direction was going in and out each day. Kenzie, the mechanic I’d worked with, had finally retired. I know you’re busy. Write when you can.

Not a Dear John at all, but its own kind of problem, since I still hadn’t written her.

And a Brooklyn kid named Melvin received notification that his little brother had been sent to a different foster home. I couldn’t do much for Mel except help him read the long words.

Well, read almost all the words. Mel hadn’t ever gone to school but for a couple of years.

It made me wish the camp’s education adviser would get to work before all our hitches ended.

The man Nate and I went to pick up the weekend of the blizzard had got only as far as Butte before telegraphing the CCC that no paycheck in the world was worth living in Montana in the winter.

And then when his replacement, a Mr. Romsteder, had arrived, he’d settled into the education building quiet as a barn cat slipping into a kitchen.

About all he did was post a sign-up sheet for appointments so we could talk over where we were, educationwise, and put up a bulletin board with the question WHAT DO YOU WANT TO LEARN? Under it, he put class suggestions that ran from GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURE to PRACTICAL MATHEMATICS.

“What?!” Apple said. “He expects us to volunteer to go to school nights? In our free time? I’d sooner watch grass grow.”

That was pretty much everybody’s attitude, despite all the griping about how there wasn’t anything to do.

“It doesn’t have to be a school class,” Sam said. “I heard him talking with Captain Hakes about how he’ll try to provide whatever we want, though academics is certainly a possibility.”

Sam sounded pretty excited, for a guy who’d declared school was behind him.

“What I want is some time away from here, preferably with a sweet girl,” someone said, and of course after that whatever point Sam had been trying to make got lost in the fellows’ carryings-on. Girls were a distracting topic, always.

Later on, though, when it was just him and me talking, Sam said the conversation he’d overheard had been Captain Hakes chewing Mr. Romsteder out, as much as anything.

“I think Mr. Romsteder wants to put together a good program,” Sam said. “But Hakes wants it all done right away—everybody signed up for something—so the numbers on this month’s report to district will look good.”

“That again!” I said. I was getting sick and tired of how everything kept coming down to Hakes’s wanting to put on a good show. “Still, I hope Mr. Romsteder pulls it off, for the fellows’ sakes.”