"Not for a very long time," Bard admits, "but that doesn't mean they weren't thinking about it. Smaug was very dangerous, after all, and with no dwarves nearby, there was no one to make new black arrows, so anyone who sought to kill him would only have the one chance. In the meantime, Girion's wife and child settled in Esgaroth, which was called Lake-town because it was built in the middle of the Long Lake, within sight of the mountain. They couldn't live the life of a lord's family there, but they were safe and happy enough. The black arrow and the tale of Smaug's attack were passed down in their family from parent to child for generations, always wary but comfortable enough that there seemed no need to risk waking the dragon, who hadn't come out of Erebor except to add Dale's gold to his great hoard."

How is he supposed to tell the next part? It's still fresh in his mind, memory rather than story, but it wouldn't be right to tell the story as it used to be and not address how it finally ended. So, just when the pause starts to seem like another prompt for Kara to say something, he says a little more.

"And then, one day late in the autumn more than a century after Dale and Erebor fell, a company of dwarves arrived."