Ben got up and walked as fast as he could to the door, picked up the rifle leaning there, cocked it. Looking toward town he saw that Tom Pace had been on his way home, and the sound had caught him between trees. Tom hesitated, then turned and dived toward the tree he'd just left—because a rifle was there.
Ben saw men pour out of the doorways of the two habitable buildings on Main Street; they stuck close to the walls, under the porches, and they picked up rifles.
Motionless, hidden, in shadows, under trees, in doorways, behind knotholes, they waited. To see if the plane would buzz the town again.
It did.
It came down low over Main Street while the thunders of its first pass still echoed and rolled. Frightening birds out of trees, driving a hare frantically along the creekbank, blotting out the murmur of the creek and the tree-sounds, driving away peace.
They saw the pilot peering through the plexiglass, down at the buildings ... he was past the town in four winks; but in two they knew that he was curious, and would probably come back for a third look.
He circled wide off over the end of the valley, a vertical bank that brought a blinding flash of sunlight from one wing, and he came back.
Ben leveled his rifle and centered the nose of the plane in his sights. For some reason—probably because the valley walls crowded the town on both sides—the planes always lined up with Main Street when they flew low over the town.
The plane grew at startling speed in Ben's sights—it loomed, and the oval jet intake was a growling mouth—and he waited till it was about two seconds and a thousand feet from him; then he sent his bullet up into that mouth: a bullet aimed by a man who'd handled a rifle for sixty years, who could pop the head off a squirrel at a hundred feet. A running squirrel.
That was the signal, Ben's shot.