"They all seem to avoid me," she told Ogilvie one day when he had come out of a house with a tiny child in his arms, which had slid down and run away at sight of her. "Do they think I'm the bogey-man or the plague?"
He laughed aloud at her petulance. "They don't stop to think," he said. "They are as timid as chipmunks, or as any other hunted woodland creatures."
"Oh, hunted!" she cried, as if to repudiate what he implied. "I've heard you talk like that before! Do you still believe in that nonsense about the secret stills and the Government spies, and all that?"
"Yes, I believe in it."
"I have been here eight weeks, and I have not heard another soul speak of it!"
"How many of the 'natives,' as you call them, have you met?"
She pursed her lips. "I don't believe there are many to see!"
"Allow me to remind you again of my feeble simile of the chipmunks!" he laughed. "And believe me, it is more apt than you think. For instance, have you seen the little Allen children?"
"What, the queer little animals that bend their arms over their eyes when you meet them, and live in that shanty back of Father Cary's pasture?"
He smiled at her description. "Precisely! The Carys' nearest neighbors, scarcely a mile away. And have you seen their mother?"