Giới thiệu
In late 1864, the Shenandoah Valley burns under General Sheridan's scorched-earth campaign. Walter Finch, an embittered retired miller who lost his right hand to his own waterwheel, lives in bitter isolation. He refuses to take sides, obsessing only over the physical purity of his grains while the world around him turns to ash and local families starve in the woods. Clara Barton arrives at the Finch Mill with a ledger of starving families, begging Walter for emergency grain rations. Simultaneously, scouts warn that Lieutenant Cole Ryan's torch squad is less than two days away, forcing Walter to make a choice: let his life's work burn, or construct the experimental, anaerobic underground bunkers detailed in a set of stolen double-agent engineering diagrams. Union forces occupy the mill as their local headquarters, forcing Walter to dig and seal the final subterranean silos directly beneath their boots. He turns the heavy, creaking waterwheel to maximum speed to drown out the noise of his manual iron-hook excavations. As moisture and oxygen threaten to rot the buried grain, Walter must crawl through tight clay airlocks to grease the manual wooden valves with tallow, all while Silas, a desperate farmhand, threatens to betray the silo's location to Lieutenant Ryan for safe passage north. Although Silas attempts to sell out the location, Clara Barton and a weary Union cooper named Henry Miller stall Ryan's search party just long enough for the clay seals to cure. Lieutenant Ryan order the mill burned to the ground; Walter is dragged out by Clara as the structures collapse in fire. The next morning, amidst the smoking charcoal ruins, Walter digs down and cracks open the subterranean airlock to find the grain cool, sweet, and perfectly preserved.