The shouts of the savages were audible, where they crouched in the brush just beyond the line of fire. They were whooping with anticipatory triumph and showering the cave-mouth with their flaming missiles. Acrid yellow smoke was welling into the cave in clouds. Peter had shoved Greta to the floor where the air, so far, was a little purer. He too was coughing; and Alan felt the clutch of the resin-smoke in his own throat. To stay here another five or ten minutes would be death. If only his time-traveling mechanism would take more than one person! But it would not. He himself was safe, of course.... He had taken a step toward the cave-mouth, and abruptly he recoiled as an arrow whizzed narrowly past his shoulder. Nothing safe about this! And then he knew what he must try to do. "You two stay here, just a few minutes," he said swiftly. "Keep down by the floor, both of you--air's still much better down there. I'm going away, but I'll be back." He gazed down at them from his stalwart, six foot height as they crouched terrified at his feet. He was smiling a little as his fingers shoved the lever of the time-mechanism on his chest to the first stop. He could see the astonished horror and awe on their faces as slowly he faded, vanished before them. A little movement forward in time. Just about twenty-four hours. The blurred and shadowy cave briefly was filled with daylight, and then with the darkness of night again. Alan switched off the current. Night was here, deep and silent, enshrouding the forest. No warwhoops; no glare of flaming arrows and burning brush. That had been last night. From the empty cave Alan walked slowly out into the woods. A northward vista of the broad river for a moment was visible. A little blob was out there in the river--an English frigate awaiting the outcome of the parley of Nichols, emissary of the Duke of York, with Governor Stuyvesant. Alan selected a flat-topped rock which stood about a hundred feet off to one side of the cave-mouth--a rock whose top was some twenty feet above the surrounding rocks and thickets. He climbed it; stood on its summit. If only this would work! Despite his efforts at calmness, he was shuddering inside. Not for his own safety--was it for his wife and their little son, out there in 1942? Absurd thought; but somehow it was turning him cold with apprehension. He set his tiny time-dial for the moment of his departure from the smoke-filled cave, last night, and turned the current on again. Twenty-four hours backward into time. A retrogression of that same swift daylight again. Then the previous dawn, swiftly fading into night....