And there, flitting from one willow whip to the next was a red-winged blackbird, looking for all the world like he was on an inspection trip.

“Think he wants to homestead?” Sam said.

“Probably got a missus someplace who told him just what kind of nesting spot she wants,” a LEM named Scotty answered. A nice guy, though of course he wasn’t Pops. “Could be they’ll be our first residents.”

With Pops off to the spike camp, Scotty had taken over being foreman on the spillway work. We’d been pouring concrete in lifts over several days, but when we did our first batch for Scotty, he gave us the same lecture Pops had.

“Concrete,” he said, “is the result of a chemical reaction that happens when cement, water, sand, and gravel are mixed together. Get the proportions right and you will get a dam that will outlast anybody here. Get them wrong and you’ll have weakness.”

“How would we know?” someone asked.

“You can tell bad concrete by the color or by holes in it,” he said. “But you’re not going to be seeing any signs of weakness here because there won’t be any. Like Pops must have told you, you’re to be as careful measuring as if you were following your mamas’ recipes.”

The whole company gathered to watch the forms come off, and when I saw we had us a spillway smooth as a baby’s bottom, I couldn’t have been more proud.

It was plain gorgeous, six feet long and flanked on either side by the earthen berm. An honest twelve feet thick at the bottom, and tapering up on the spillover side. The top, instead of being straight across, was notched in the middle to take the control gate we’d be setting in it.

Scotty said, “Looks like a winner. It’s curing a mite different than I’ve seen concrete cure before, but there’s not an air pocket to be seen, or a band of unmixed material. Good work, men.”

Sam pulled out the camp camera—besides all Sam’s other jobs, Captain Hakes had recently assigned him to gather material for the camp yearbook that district wanted done. “Everybody,” he said, “group together so I can get a photo. Out on the berm.”

He took forever posing us, because of how hard it was to get a shot that didn’t have somebody in the way of somebody else. Or a guy making devil’s horns over another fellow’s head.

It gave me time to look around and be satisfied. And to notice, too, that over at the Lundgren place, the tractor was now pulling a seed drill.

We let the concrete set up one more day, for good measure, and then the whole company again gathered. This time we were celebrating removing the sandbags that had kept water from running through the reservoir while we were digging it.