He took a step forward. For a second the two looked utterly incredulous, as though disbelieving the evidence of their eyes. And then they shrank away with terror on their white faces. The youth whirled the girl behind him, confronted Alan. "What--what do you want?" he faltered. It was English, curiously and quaintly intoned. "Are you real? Where do you come from?" The lad was recovering rapidly. "You speak English, but not like the traders or my teacher. What are you?" Alan tried to smile. "I won't hurt you," he repeated. "I'm a friend. A visitor, from--from a far-off place," he floundered. It would never do to say that he came from 1942. Already they were staring at him as though he were mad, huddled back against the wall of the cave. Abruptly behind Alan there was a whiz; a thud; and the cave was lighted by a flickering, yellow-red glare. It made the youth momentarily overlook his astonishment, his terror at Alan, so that he gasped to the girl: "Oh, Greta--a fire-arrow! They are out there just as we feared." Alan turned. An Indian fire-arrow had whizzed into the cave-mouth from the forest outside. It quivered, sticking upright in the guano floor of the cave--a little torch of flame with thick, resinous smoke surging up from it. With a sidewise kick Alan's foot knocked it loose and he trampled on it. He swung around with a leap so that he was close to his cowering companions. "Indians are out there?" he demanded. "Is that what you were afraid of, before you saw me?" The girl was coughing with the drifting smoke already choking her a little in the fetid air of the cave. "Yes," the lad muttered. "That is it. They saw us in the woods as we came up from the Bouwerij. So we ran in here." Another arrow came flaming. It barely missed Alan, struck against the rockwall and fell nearby, still flaming. He and the lad rushed at it; they stamped it out together. "You have no guns?" Alan demanded. "Guns?" "To shoot with. To fight our way out of here." "Oh, not guns on a ship--you mean fowling pieces? No, we have none." Despite his terror at the flaming arrows of the Indians outside the cave, the frightened Dutch boy was forcing himself to answer Alan's questions, but still both he and the girl were incredulously staring at their miraculously appearing companion. "Greta was showing me the way up from the town," the Dutch boy was murmuring. "She has a boat at the river bank. Then I was going up with the tide. In the fog last night, an English frigate got past our forts at the Bowling Green. It is up the river now, and Stuyvesant has sent me--" * * * * *