He held a small brass flashlight between his back teeth, the metal freezing cold against his lips.

An old farmer named Hank Vance stood in the icy wind holding a halogen work lamp over the open feeder house.

“She snapped right as I hit the north quarter,” Hank shouted over the rattle of sleet on the tin roof of a barn nearby.

“I’ve got sixty acres of wet corn sitting out there in the dark.”

Nate pulled a heavy steel drive chain link into line with his bare fingers, his knuckles scraped gray with cold grease.

He set a steel pin into the master link and tapped it home with three sharp blows of a ball-peen hammer.