"Oh! two or three days, for a guess," Donovan thought.
"After that, what?" said Wade.
"It's no use to trouble ourselves about that now," said Kit: "the Bible expressly forbids it. Besides, we've had trouble enough for one day. I'm for turning in and having a nap."
"Not much fun in turning in on a bare ledge, I fancy," Wade replied. "We shall miss our mattresses."
"A bare rock is a rather hard thing to bunk on, I do think," Raed remarked, peeping under the walrus-skin. "If we were in Maine, now, we should qualify that with a 'shake-down' of spruce-boughs. Didn't see any thing of the evergreen sort among the rocks, did you, Wash?"
We had not. It then occurred to me that we had observed several little shrubs common to the mountains of Labrador, and known to naturalists as the Labrador tea-plant.
"Any thing is better than the bare rock," Raed remarked, when I spoke of this shrub; and we all sallied out to glean an armful.
While thus engaged, Wade and Kit espied a bed of moss in a hollow between the crags, a portion of which was dry enough for our purpose. After bringing an armful of the tea-plant, we made a trip to the moss-patch. What we could all bring at once piled upon the coarse shrubs made a bed by no means to be despised by—cast-aways.
"I presume there's no need of mounting guard or setting a watch here," Donovan said.
"How do we know that some party of Huskies or Indians has not been watching our movements all day?" Weymouth suggested.