"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—"
Under Alan's urging questions, the boy and girl swiftly explained. This was a Dutch boy, born here in Nieuw Amsterdam, but he had lived most of his life in London. His name was Peter Van Saant. She was Greta Dykeman; her father was one of Governor Stuyvesant's burghers of the Town Council. The English fleet was here off the Hook, and yesterday, Nichols, emissary of the Duke of York, had come ashore to demand that the Dutch surrender the city. Henceforth, according to the demands of the Duke, this would not be Nieuw Amsterdam, but New York—a British settlement with a destiny of greatness, here in the New World.
As he mutely listened, Alan's mind again swept to his own time-world of 1942. This same space! And he envisioned the huge city of 1942, when this cave and forested glade were mid-Manhattan, where giant buildings towered and the great ramp of the automobile highway bordered the river.
Another flaming arrow came whizzing into the mouth of the cave. Peter rushed for it, stamped it out. The woods beyond the cave-mouth now were lighted with torch glare, and echoing with the warwhoops of the Indians, emboldened because no fowling pieces of the trapped palefaces were exploding to hurl lead at them. Outside the cave, arrows were continuously striking; the brush was on fire, with a red-yellow glare that came in here and painted Alan and his two confused, terrified companions with its lurid sheen.
"I've got to get up the river to that frigate," the lad was muttering. "If I got killed here—or even Greta got killed—what matter? But I've got to reach the frigate."
He was a secret emissary of Stuyvesant, this momentous night—sent to the English commander of the frigate—sent because he spoke English so well and they would trust him.