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....
Again his time-movement stopped; and the forest sprang into ringing warwhoops and crackling yellow-red glare of torchlight and burning brush. On the top of the little butte Alan stood poised. An amazing figure, he came out of nothingness, solidifying before the astounded eyes of the stricken savages. The warwhoops died into a tense, terrified silence. To Alan it was a breathless moment of apprehension. His fingers went to the time-lever; alert to shove it if necessary. And then in the wave of silence which flooded the pallid forest glade he flung out his arms. Drawn to his full height, with arms outstretched as though in benediction he stood gazing down upon the silent savages. A pale cathedral shaft of moonlight was filtering through the overhead branches and it struck upon him, illumined him with its eerie glow.
The tense moment passed. The Indians, their war-painted bodies glistening in the glare of the burning brush, were all silently staring. There seemed a hundred or more of them. Then one of them, with a faint awed cry, flung himself prostrate with forehead to the ground in terrified homage to this shining god of the rock who had appeared so suddenly.