He closed his note-book.

“How many weapons can we count on altogether?” Arthur asked Van Deventer.

“In the bank, about a dozen riot-guns and half a dozen repeating rifles.  Elsewhere I don’t know.  Forty or fifty men said they had revolvers, though.”

“We’ll give revolvers to the men who go with the fishermen.  The Indians haven’t heard firearms and will run at the report, even if they dare attack our men.”

“We can send out the gun-armed men as hunters,” some one suggested, “and send gardeners with them to look for vegetables and such things.”

“We’ll have to take a sort of census, really,” Arthur suggested, “finding what every one can do and getting him to do it.”

“I never planned anything like this before,” Van Deventer remarked, “and I never thought I should, but this is much more fun than running a bank.”

Arthur smiled.

“Let’s go and have our meeting,” he said cheerfully.

But the meeting was a gloomy and despairing affair.  Nearly every one had watched the sun set upon a strange, wild landscape.  Hardly an individual among the whole two thousand of them had ever been out of sight of a house before in his or her life.  To look out at a vast, untouched wilderness where hitherto they had seen the most highly civilized city on the globe would have been startling and depressing enough in itself, but to know that they were alone in a whole continent of savages and that there was not, indeed, in all the world a single community of people they could greet as brothers was terrifying.

Few of them thought so far, but there was actually—­if Arthur’s estimate of several thousand years’ drop back through time was correct—­there was actually no other group of English-speaking people in the world.  The English language was yet to be invented.  Even Rome, the synonym for antiquity of culture, might still be an obscure village inhabited by a band of tatterdemalions under the leadership of an upstart Romulus.

Soft in body as these people were, city-bred and unaccustomed to face other than the most conventionalized emergencies of life, they were terrified.  Hardly one of them had even gone without a meal in all his life.  To have the prospect of having to earn their food, not by the manipulation of figures in a book, or by expert juggling of profits and prices, but by literal wresting of that food from its source in the earth or stream was a really terrifying thing for them.

In addition, every one of them was bound to the life of modern times by a hundred ties.  Many of them had families, a thousand years away.  All had interests, engrossing interests, in modern New York.