"I don't think it likely," said Raed. "We may all venture to go to sleep, I guess, and trust to Guard to keep watch for us."
"I don't know about that," Kit remarked, patting the old fellow's head. "He's eaten so much of our woodpile, that he will be but a drowsy sentinel, I'm afraid."
The fire was replenished with blubber; and we all lay down on our mossy beds inside our fresh-smelling tent.
The sun must have been still high in the north-west; but so wild and dark were the clouds, that it had grown quite dark by nine o'clock. The damp wind-gusts sighed; the surf swashed drearily on the rocks. Despite all our efforts to bear up and seem gay, a weight of doubt and danger rested heavily on our spirits. "Where is 'The Curlew' now?" was the question that would keep constantly recurring, followed by a still more ominous query, "What would become of us if she should not return?"
"Isn't there a town out on the Atlantic coast of Labrador, a town or a village, settled by the Moravian missionaries?" Raed asked suddenly, after we had been lying there quietly for some minutes.
"Seems to me there is," Kit replied after a moment of reflection.
"There's one indicated on our geography-maps, I'm pretty sure, called Nain, or some such scriptural name. Don't you remember it, Wash?"
I did distinctly; and also another, either above or below it on the coast, called Hopedale, colonized by missionaries from South Greenland.
"Those Moravians are very good folks, I've heard," Wade said. "They're a very pious, Christian people. I have read, too, that they have succeeded in Christianizing many of the coast Esquimaux."
"Those Huskies must make queer Christians!" exclaimed Donovan.