I nodded.
"You've never been there—of course?"
"No," I said, "and I'm not likely to go again."
I would have told him why I was going if I had not already begun to feel ashamed of my idiotic errand.
"I guess you're going to look at those birds of his," continued Lee, placidly.
"I guess I am," I said, sulkily, glancing askance to see whether he was smiling.
But he only asked me, quite seriously, whether a great auk was really a very rare bird; and I told him that the last one ever seen had been found dead off Labrador in January, 1870. Then I asked him whether these birds of Halyard's were really great auks, and he replied, somewhat indifferently, that he supposed they were—at least, nobody had ever before seen such birds near Port-of-Waves.
"There's something else," he said, running, a pine-sliver through his pipe-stem—"something that interests us all here more than auks, big or little. I suppose I might as well speak of it, as you are bound to hear about it sooner or later."
He hesitated, and I could see that he was embarrassed, searching for the exact words to convey his meaning.
"If," said I, "you have anything in this region more important to science than the great auk, I should be very glad to know about it."