"It's thick," Robinson remarked to the skipper.
Billy Topsail, now grown old enough for the adventurous voyage to the Labrador coast, was aboard; and he listened to this exchange with a deal of interest. It was his first fishing voyage; he had been north in the _Rescue_, to be sure, but that was no more than a cruise, undertaken to relieve the starving fishermen of the upper harbours. At last, he was fishing in earnest--really aboard the _Fish Killer_, bound north, there to fish the summer through, in all sorts of weather, with a share in the catch at the end of it! He was vastly delighted by this: for 'twas a man's work he was about, and 'twas a man's work he was wanting to do.
"Thick as mud," said Robinson, with a little shiver.
"'S mud," the skipper responded, in laconic agreement.
And it _was_ thick! The fog had settled at mid-day. A fearsome array of icebergs had then been in sight, and the low coast, with the snow still upon it, had to leeward shone in the brilliant sunlight. But now, with the afternoon not yet on the wane, the day had turned murky and damp. A bank of black fog had drifted in from the open sea. Ice and shore had disappeared. The limit of vision approached, possibly, but did not attain, twenty-five yards. The weather was thick, indeed; the schooner seemed to be winging along through a boundless cloud; and there was a smart breeze blowing, and the circle of sea, in the exact centre of which the schooner floated, was choppy and black.
"Thick enough," Skipper Libe echoed, thoughtfully. "But," he added, "you wouldn't advise heavin' to, would you?"
"No, no!" Robinson exclaimed. "I'm too anxious to get to Indian Harbour."
"And I," muttered the skipper, with an anxious look ahead, "to make the Thigh Bone grounds. But----"
"Give her all the wind she'll carry," said Robinson. "It won't bother me."
"I thinks," the skipper continued, ignoring the interruption, "that I'll shorten sail. For," said he, "I'm thinkin' the old girl might bleed at the nose if she happened t' bump a berg."
While the crew reduced the canvas, Robinson went below. He was the Hudson's Bay Company's agent at Dog Arm of the Labrador, which is close to Indian Harbour. In January, with his invalid daughter in a dog-sled, he had journeyed from that far place to Desolate Bay of Newfoundland, and thence by train to St. John's. It had been a toilsome, dangerous, incredibly bitter experience. But he had forgotten that, nor had he ever complained of it; his happiness was that his child had survived the surgeons' operation, had profited in ease and hope, had already been restored near to her old sunny health. Early in the spring, word of the proposed sailing of the _Fish Killer_ from Ruddy Cove had come to him at St. John's; and he had taken passage with Skipper Libe, no more, it must be said, because he wished Mary's mother to know the good news (she had had no word since his departure) than because he was breathlessly impatient once more to be serving the company's interests at Dog Arm.