He smiled. “Do you mean you realize how precious those blank spaces are?” Again he craned weakly over the bundle and stared down at the map. The thought again occurred to her that his look was like the look a wanderer turns home. Wondering about him she hardly listened to the words he was saying, how the kingdom of the unknown shrinks and shrinks and soon shall vanish from the maps—worse still, own no dominion any more over the minds of men.
Whether he was indulging some fantasy of fever she could not tell, but the scarred face wore a look so high and sorrowful that she found herself saying, “Surely the only value of the empty space is that some man may one day set a name there.”
He threw her a pitying look. And he stroked the oilskin as a child might caress a kitten.
“I see,” she said, trying in self-defense to be a little superior, “you don’t, after all, sympathize with the explorer spirit.”
At which the strange eyes rewarded her with sudden smiling. “If you mean you do,” he said, “think for a moment what a power the unknown has been in history. Think what it’s done for people—a mere empty space upon the map—”
“Yes,” she threw in, “it has made heroes.”
“It has made men.” But for all the restrained quietness of tone his look evoked a glorious company.
“Yes,” she agreed. “It made Columbus, and it made Cortez. It made Magellan, Drake, and Cook, Livingstone and—”
“And all the millions more,” he interrupted, still on that quiet note, “who only planned or dreamed.” But while he spoke his maimed fingers wandered over the oilskin—a brain-sick miser guarding his gold. And though she listened to what he said, her eyes, against her will, kept surreptitiously revisiting the uncouth bundle he was fondling with abhorrent hands.