D'Alord broke the silence that followed. "What a fighter!" he exclaimed. "And now he is gone. Well, on, friends!"
So we rose again from the roof, above the body-choked streets, where we knew the conquistadors of Cortez strove with the city's people. The car rose high, and then raced east with the power opened to the last notch.
In the hours that followed, as we rocketed over the gray Atlantic at a speed of nearly ten miles a minute, we were again speeding into the past, back still farther, so that when the green, leg-shaped peninsula of Italy lay beneath us, we had gone back to the First Century of the Christian era, as nearly as possible to the year which Fabrius claimed as his own.
We left him there, on a bare, grassy hilltop outside the city of Rome. Before parting, he too unbuckled his heavy shortsword and handed it to me. "Ixtil gave you his sword," he said, "and when it is your car that has brought me back to my own world, I can do no less." He stepped back and said simply, "Vale!" and then we had sped on into time and left him.
We turned, now, in time, sped on to the first year of the Seventeenth Century, and in space fled north till we hung over southern France. And with D'Alord guiding our course from the window, exclaiming at every familiar landmark on the ground below, we came finally to the little village where he desired to be left.
"'Twas there I was stationed when the Raider seized me, curse him!" he told us; "so set me down outside it."
Again the car came down to the ground, in a field beyond the village, just at sunrise. D'Alord opened the car's door, then hesitated.
"Sacré!" he exclaimed. "When I was in the pit I was afire to get back to my own time, but now I half wish that we could have stayed together, comrades. But Kethra was right. Every man to his own time."
He drew and regarded his long, heavy sword. "It's for you, comrade," he told me. "Like Ixtil and Fabrius, it's all I can give you. Though I don't think you'll need it to make you remember our fight on the stair, eh?" His laugh rang out. "Dieu, what a fight was that!"
He grasped the hands of Denham and of Lantin and me, and with forced gayety slapped us on the back, then sprang quickly out of the car, and stood beside it. I closed the door, and our car rose swiftly above the field. And looking down, I saw the receding figure of D'Alord, still standing where we had left him, waving his hat toward us in a final gesture of farewell, the wind of dawn blowing through his hair.