“I’m working up to it,” I said, but Maggie didn’t buy that for an instant.

“Well, when you finish working up to it,” she said, “let me know.” She put fifteen cents on the table. “I enjoyed the pie, Mrs. Jensen.”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m treating to that.”

But Maggie was across the floor and out the door like I hadn’t spoken.

If my afternoon in town ended less than great, I seemed to be the only one wishing for things to have been different.

The pool hall crowd spent the truck ride back re-counting, shot by shot, their games of snooker. A couple of guys were pleased about town girls they’d met. Sam clutched a stack of library books. And Romeo had a corner of the truck to himself, because of the string of rainbow trout he was taking to Beggar and Thief.

I felt downright warmhearted toward them all. Straightforward, they were. Good fellows who didn’t throw you a curve when you weren’t expecting one. I hadn’t noticed any of them worrying if I’d caught up on my letter writing.

Maggie could take a lesson.

Beatty, too, for all I knew.

Chapter 31

I got back to camp to find another letter from Beatty waiting for me. She still didn’t seem angry I hadn’t written. Just, maybe, on the sharp side of perplexed.

But her letter brought a complication. Annie Boudreau, the woman pilot who had her own flying business and had taught Beatty to fly, was planning a trip to the new airport just outside Yellowstone Park. Annie’s thinking about flying tourist groups up and wants to see the facilities, Beatty wrote.

I’ve got permission to take a Friday off from school so I can go up with her. We’ll get in around dinnertime May 1 and leave the following afternoon. I’ve been studying a map, and it looks like Monroe’s less than two hundred miles away. I know that’s not real close, but it’s not a hopeless distance, either. Could you possibly come down? I’d so much like to see you.

My heart kind of bounced a bit at the idea of it. She still wanted to see me.

But there wasn’t a chance in the world Hakes would give me a weekend pass.

No point in even asking.

There was just too much going on at work as we raced the season.

And the project was turning around. Where things had been looking more torn up with each day, now they started taking on the shape of how they’d be.

It sorrowed me Pops wasn’t around to see the first of the willow starts go in the ground. Not that they looked particularly promising.

But then at lunchtime just a couple of days later, when everybody was sitting around eating our baked-bean sandwiches, Apple suddenly exclaimed, “Would you look yonder!”