And Maggie stayed right at her father’s elbow, so intent on understanding the project models that she reminded me of Beatty, peering into the nose of an airplane.

Mr. Caldwell was there to explain it all. “Using strip farming, contour plowing, and regular rotation of soil-depleting crops with soil-maintaining and soil-building ones, you will not only stop wearing out your land, you will start improving it.”

“How about that back section along the old wagon road?” asked Mr. Lundgren, who’d caught on right away it was his own place he was looking at.

“It’s not suitable for cultivation,” Mr. Caldwell said. “There’s no way to irrigate it in the dry season, and the slope is too steep not to need permanent sod anchoring it. When you persist in trying to farm land like that, you feed dust storms and invite erosion.”

“No,” Mr. Lundgren said. “That’s not true. Back when we were getting decent rain—”

Maggie tugged on his arm and whispered, “Dad, just listen, please.”

She got looks from some of the other men like if she was their daughter, she’d know her place. One of them muttered, “I don’t know which is worse, a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears Roosevelt pups telling us what to do, or a female.”

Mr. Caldwell flushed. “At fifty, I’m hardly what you’d call a pup. And if you mean these CCC’ers, you just wait and see what they’re going to accomplish.”

Eyes turned to Mr. Lundgren, who hesitated a moment. Then he took Maggie’s elbow and moved her in for a closer look.

I had to admire him for it, and, seeing Nate’s expression, I suspicioned he was proud, too.

Then Mr. Caldwell ended any pretending that the model was a make-believe place. “Mr. Lundgren,” he said, “your son knows every foot of your holdings, and he helped come up with this plan.

“It uses your water resources well, it puts crops where they’re most likely to succeed, and it returns to natural growth a part of the prairie that should never have been plowed up. I’m asking you to give it a try.”

“Even if I wanted to,” Mr. Lundgren said, “I couldn’t afford it.”

“There’s government money available to mitigate the expense of making changes.”

“Just for him?” someone asked, and got told no.

“There’s a plan for reimbursing anybody who switches acreage out of soil-depleting crops, or who puts in such things as shelterbelt trees. We’ll even get you the trees,” Mr. Caldwell said.

I was watching Mr. Lundgren.

He appeared uncertain, like he didn’t know if he was being offered a gift or tempted with disaster wrapped up like one.

Then all of a sudden he looked straight at me. “You believe this will work?” he asked.