“If we waited for some one to come for us,” he said presently and in a very serious tone, “we’d be waiting here until all these provisions that we landed to-day are gone. And there’s a good full year’s supply for us two up there under the canvas. Did you suppose we are going to wait here?”
The boy looked thoughtful.
“But we can’t get the yacht off the rocks, and she’d sink if we did. And anyhow you couldn’t sail her home. You told me only yesterday that you didn’t know a yacht from a battleship, Martin.”
“I told you the truth, at that,” Martin chuckled. “But I’m something of a navigator all the same. I can navigate a craft as well as poor old Captain Roberts himself, only I use a different craft, and I navigate her on land. And, what’s more to the point, I’ve got the land to do it on, the craft, and the crew.” And Martin pointed successively at the pile of supplies in the distance, the two dogs, and Larry.
“I don’t understand at all what you mean,” the boy declared; “tell me what you intend to do, Martin, won’t you?”
“Why, boy, if I started in to tell you now you’d be asleep before I could get well into the story,” said the old hunter.
“No, I wouldn’t,” the boy protested. “I never was more wide awake in my life. I feel as if I could do another day’s work right now.”
“That’s the meat and potatoes and coffee,” old Martin commented. “It’s marvellous what fuel will do for a tired engine. Well, if you can keep awake long enough I’ll tell you just what we are going to do in the next few weeks—or months, maybe.
“Here we are stranded away up on the Labrador coast, at least two or three hundred miles from the nearest settlement, perhaps even farther than that. And the worst of it is that I haven’t the least idea where that nearest settlement is. It may be on the coast, somewhat nearer than I think; and then again it may be ’cross country inland still farther away than I judge. What we’ve got to do is to make up our minds where we think that settlement is, and find it. And we’ve got to go to it by land and on foot.”
“On foot!” Larry cried in amazement. “Three or four hundred miles on foot in the winter time in a strange country where nobody lives!”