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The driver, a quiet 66-year-old man named Charles Albert Poland Jr., assigned him the seat because that's where he wanted younger children and those with behavioral problems. Ethan, who according to a great-uncle had already experienced a share of turmoil in his short life, had been found to have Asperger's syndrome. So he sat up front. He even had a name tag on his seat.

It seems unthinkable that even a man with a conspiratorial bent like Jimmy Lee Dykes, Ethan's kidnapper, would bear a violent impulse against the familiar small-town universe of school buses and name tags. And it seems hard to imagine, in turn, that this universe could stand up under Mr. Dykes's sort of violence. But over the past week, as the world of pot luck dinners and prayer meetings joined with the lethal efficiency of elite law enforcement, Mr. Dykes fought and lost.

"I'm happy that the baby is back with his parents," said the Rev. Melvin White of Clio Community Church, who had hauled two barbecue smokers to the scene of the standoff to make ribs for reporters and anyone else who happened by. "Sometimes we forget how crazy the world is until this happens here."

Sheriff Wally Olson of Dale County was home with a cold when he got a page that a gunman was on a school bus. By the time he was on the road, the news had changed. The driver was dead and, while 20 children had escaped because of his actions, the killer had taken a child into an underground bunker.

From the beginning, Mr. Dykes wanted to talk. According to local officials who had been briefed on the operation, Mr. Dykes was demanding a TV news reporter, preferably a woman, and a camera operator to whom he could deliver his message. Exactly what he was going to declare was unclear, though he had long harangued his neighbors with diatribes about the government and the inviolability of his property.

Early ideas were proposed and dropped. Filming the scene from across the highway was a man named Rickey Stokes, a local bail bondsman who runs a blog on happenings in the area,
RickeyStokesNews.com. Officials invited Mr. Stokes over, and discussed having him either go into the bunker with a camera and a gun, or teach a female F.B.I. agent to use his camera and go in.

Both of those notions were scrapped quickly. In any case, Mr. Dykes, wary of being tricked, insisted that his speech be live-streamed, not prerecorded.

Kirke Adams, the district attorney for Dale County who had been called to the scene from coaching high school girls' soccer practice, said Mr. Dykes never gave an inch.

"The demand he made was impossible to accomplish in the way he wanted it done," Mr. Adams said. "And he would accept no alternative." He added, "It was the consensus of the experts that this was going to be a long haul."

As the days wore on, the operations on Private Road 1539 grew. A bland-looking charter plane full of special agents landed at the little airport outside of town last Wednesday evening, prompting a flurry of local phone calls.

The Destiny Church, which sat down the grassy hill from the bunker, became something of a base of operations. Meals came in shifts: fried chicken, green beans, and macaroni and cheese from the Baptists; casseroles and sweet tea from the Methodists.

"One morning we had a different group of people coming in, a higher group I guess," said Tiffany Melansen, a fifth-grade teacher who helped run the volunteer support efforts. "It got to me that they wanted a big breakfast for them so I ordered 30 Big Breakfasts from McDonald's in addition to the 50 biscuits."

The man and the boy remained in the bunker. Federal agents had managed to smuggle a camera inside, and sent in a phone that Mr. Dykes was instructed to use for communication. But while agents were able to keep watch over Mr. Dykes, he was also able to watch them on the television in his bunker.

Across Highway 231, between a small dirt car lot called Garrett's Automotive and an abandoned building that had once been a strip club, an army of TV trucks began to form. Mr. Dykes's neighbors often wandered over to the cameras to offer their opinions of "the mean man" or "the shovel man" who had menaced those around his patch of soil for nearly two years. Mr. Dykes could see these interviews, too, and, according to people familiar with the operation, was not happy about it.