«At least,» she said, disengaging herself a little, «you are with me, my most dear lord, and so there’s nought to fear.»

They looked around, water running off their noses and chins. Shea’s heavy woolen shirt was already so soaked that it stuck to his skin, and Belphebe’s neat hair was taking on a drowned-rat appearance.

She pointed and cried, «There’s one!»

Shea peered toward a lumpish dark mass that had a shape vaguely resembling Pete Brodsky.

«Shea?» came a call, and without waiting for a reply the lump started toward them. As it did so, the downpour lessened and the light brightened.

«Curse it, Shea!» said Brodsky, as he approached. «What kind of a box is this? If I couldn’t work my own racket better, I’d turn myself in for mopery. Where the hell are we?»

«Ohio, I hope,» said Shea. «And look, shamus, we’re better off than we were, ain’t we? I’m sorry about this rain, but I didn’t order it.»

«All I got to say is you better be right,» said Brodsky gloomily. «You can get it all for putting the snatch on an officer, and I ain’t sure I can square the rap even now. Where’s the other guy?»

Shea looked around. «Walter may be here, but it looks as though he didn’t come through to the same place. And if you ask me, the question is not where we are but when we are. It wouldn’t do us much good to be back in Ohio in 700 A. D., which is about the time we left. If this rain would only let up.»

With surprising abruptness the rain did, walking away in a wall of small but intense downpours. Spots and bars of sky appeared among the clouds wafted along by a brisk steady current of air that penetrated Shea’s wet shirt chillingly, and the sun shot an occasional beam through the clouds to touch up the landscape.

It was a good landscape. Shea and his companions were standing in deep grass, on one of the higher spots of an extent of rolling ground.