the Swearingens?

"It's right south of your lower forty on the old Carnahan land, Alice.
I'd figure it at about a mile from your place. Lots of people down
there."

And then there was the call from Mrs. Abbey who told her she'd come
from the crash site and wasn't it a peculiar plane with those funny
windows and that once-broken-one somebody had patched up from the
inside.

"The sheriff won't let anybody go near it," Mrs. Abbey said. "He says
it's a space ship and the army ought to have a look at it first. But I
saw him trying to find where to get in. Except for that broken window
and that crumpled nose it don't look too bad off. Big clouds of smoke
were shooting out the tail when I first got there but it's not smoking
any more. Really, you ought to go down and see it, Alice."

Alice told her husband about it. He had gone back to the barn and she
didn't see the severed hand anywhere on the way there.

"So that's where it come from," he said. "Good thing it didn't land
on my place." He spat and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his
overalls. It always bothered Alice when he did this because the stain
was so difficult to get out but she had long ceased trying to change
him. "If it'd landed here I'd of blown it up like a stump."

"Shouldn't we go down and see it?" Alice asked, knowing too late she
had phrased the question the wrong way.

"Curiosity killed the cat," he said, and there was the faintest
glimmer of a smile on his face but it was only fleeting. "Let
everybody else go down and I'll get my work done while they're
standin' around with their mouths hangin' open. I'm runnin' a farm and
I aim to run it right."

"I think I'll go down." She tried to make it have resolve but didn't
quite succeed.

He glared at her and spat again. "Then git," he said. He threw down a
large forkful of hay and she had to jump out of the way. She went
right after dinner.

She saw a silver cylinder that looked ever so much like pictures of
guided missiles she had seen in the newspapers except that this one
was bigger than any of them. Its nose was dug she could not tell how
far into the earth and some of the metal on the sides was battered and
bent and the tail was she guessed about a hundred and fifty feet in
the air. It was about twenty-five feet across.

There were clusters of people about and she recognized many of them
she hadn't seen for a long time and she was glad she had come because
it gave her a rare chance to visi