Jed rolled over on his belly, looked and fired. Down went the target to come up again with another dead-center marker. "He did it again," the radioman declared to the corporal. Weisbaum was beginning to get an awed look on his face. "Go on, hillbilly, keep firing." Behind the corporal and the recruit, the radioman was talking softly to the pits. "He's in position ... he's aiming ... he's holdin--" The operator stopped talking and shook his handset and held it again to his ear. Jed fired. A split second later the radio burst into voice. "... Did it again," the pit operator yelled excitedly. Jed fired all twenty rounds into the exact same hole and the range firing came to a screeching halt. By the time he was on the final round, all other firing had stopped and range officers and safety NCO's were gathered in a semicircle around the prone mountain boy. Weisbaum pounded Jed on the back as the young recruit scrambled to his feet and dusted his fatigues. "Man, what an eye. Wait 'til the old man sees this. Look," he took Jed by the arm, "you shoot like this all the time back in them hills you come from?" Jed nodded. "I thought so," Weisbaum cried happily. "Go sit down and take it easy. I want the old man to come out and see this." * * * * * Jed smiled happily and walked off the firing line amidst the admiring stares of his fellow recruits. He flung himself on the ground in the shade of a stack of ammunition boxes and grinned to himself. Shucks, all that excitement over a little shooting. Back home he did it all the time. But it'd make Ma proud to know he could do something real good. He let his mind travel for the first time in weeks. On the range road a few feet away, a convoy of trucks carrying another recruit company to the ranges farther down the line, suddenly spluttered and came to a stop as their engines died. "Ma," Jed thought, "you busy?" Behind the cabin in Bluebird Gulch, Ma Cromwell laid down the axe she had been splitting firewood with and closed her eyes. "'Bout time you remembered your maw," she replied. "You all right, Sonny?" "I'm jest fine, Ma. An' I did somethin' good, too, Ma. I just showed these Army fellers what us Cromwells kin do with a rifle gun." Jed lay in the warm sun and let the light filter through his closed eyelids. He paid no attention to the clanging of truck hoods and the muttered curses of a half dozen truck driver as they clambered over the front of their vehicles trying to figure out what was causing them to have engine trouble. "What did you do, Sonny?" Ma asked. "Tweren't really nothing, Ma," Jed replied. "I shot this here newfangled gun they gave me at a big ol' target 'n hit it, Ma. Honest, Ma, that black circle they got in that thing is jest 'bout as big as the hind end of a black bear and it ain't no further away than the bottom of the cornfield from the cabin door." In the range control tower, Corporal Weisbaum was getting madder every second.