“Nope!” he murmured. “It’s not coming down.”
“What’s not coming down?” Goggles asked quickly.
“That airplane. It’s been circling way up high there for a long time.”
“I should hope it wouldn’t come down,” Goggles laughed good-naturedly. “What d’ye think? Think they’d come right on down and land square in the middle of the ball field?” He laughed again.
Johnny did not reply. Truth was, he did not know what he had expected. It was strange about that airplane. He had been watching it off and on for twenty minutes. All that time it had been circling above the ball field. At first it had seemed little more than a speck against the dull gray of a leaden sky. Moment by moment it had circled lower.
“Saw an eagle do that once,” he had told himself as a little thrill ran up his spine. “Old eagle soared and soared and soared until he was maybe a hundred feet from the ground. Then he folded his wings and dropped. And such a drop! Straight down! When he came up he held a half-grown rabbit in his talons. He’d had his eye on that rabbit all the time.”
Strangely enough, as he watched the airplane circle above the ball field where two fine teams were contending for high honors, fantastic as it might seem, he had gained the impression that this plane, circling as the eagle had circled, would in the end make one straight drop to the ball field.
“What nonsense!” he whispered to himself. “Why should they do that? Crack up! Everyone in the plane would be killed. Eagle’s a different sort of bird. He could recover balance and rise again. That plane—”
All the same, the impression remained a haunting suggestion until, with the end of the first half, a shut-out for the opposing team, the Centralia boys went trotting off the field. Only then did the airplane go skimming away into the hazy distance.
“It is as if the eagle had been watching the rabbit only to see the rabbit scurry into his hole,” he told himself.