Marilou looked down her button nose as she picked a brown spot from the apple. "Hmmph, I'll tell 'im he's wrong," she said. "He thinks he knows so damn much!" "Marilou!" Aunt Twylee exclaimed as she looked over her glasses. "A sweet child like you shouldn't use such language!" Marilou giggled and popped the remaining portion of the apple in her mouth. "Do your parents know where you are, child?" Aunt Twylee asked, as she took the bowl from Marilou's hands. She began dicing the apples into a dough-lined casserole. "No, they don't," Marilou replied. She sprayed the air with little particles of apple as she talked. "Everybody's gone to the hills to look for the boys." "The boys?" Aunt Twylee stopped her work and looked at the little girl. "Yes--Jimmy an' Eddie an' some of the others disappeared from the settlement this morning. The men're afraid they've run off to th' hills an' the renegades got 'em." "Gracious," Aunt Twylee said; her brow knitted into a criss-cross of wrinkles. "Oh, I know those dopes. They're prob'ly down at th' canals--fishin' or somep'n." "Just the same, your mother will be frantic, dear. You should have told her where you were going." "I don't care," Marilou said with unadulterated honesty. "She'll be all right when I get home." Aunt Twylee shook her head and clucked her tongue. "Can I have another glass? Please?" The old lady poured the glass full again. And then she sprinkled sugar down among the apple cubes in the casserole and covered them with a blanket of dough. She cut an uneven circle of half moons in it and put it in the oven. "There--all ready to bake, Marilou," she sighed. "It looks real yummy, Aunt Twylee." "Well, I certainly hope it turns out good, dear," she said, wiping her forehead with her apron. She looked out the open back door. The landscape was beginning to gray as heavier clouds moved down from the mountains and pressed the afternoon heat closer, more oppressively to the ground. "My, it's getting hot. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we didn't get a little rain this afternoon, Marilou." She turned back to the little girl. "Tell me some more about your daddy, dear. We Martians certainly owe a lot to men like your father." "That's what he says too. He says, you Martians would have died out in a few years, if we hadn't come here. We're so much more civi ... civili ..." "Civilized?" "Yeah. He says, we were so much more 'civ-ilized' than you that we saved your lives when we came here with all our modern stuff." "Well, that's true enough, dear. Just look at that wonderful Earth stove," Aunt Twylee said, and laughed. "We wouldn't be able to bake an apple cobbler like that without it, would we?" * * * * * A rumble of thunder shouldered through the crowded hot air. "No. He says, you Martians are kinda likeable, but you can't be trusted. He's nuts! _I_ like you Martians!"