In Search of the Unknown | Page 6

like the sound of a big fish rubbing its nose against a float."
Halyard clutched the wheels of his chair and stared at the girl in grim displeasure.
"Didn't you know enough to be frightened?" he demanded.
"No--not then," she said, coloring faintly; "but when, after a few moments, I looked up and saw the harbor-master running up and down the beach, I was horribly frightened."
"Really?" said Halyard, sarcastically; "it was about time." Then, turning to me, he rasped out: "And that young lady was obliged to row all the way to Port-of-Waves and call to Lee's quarrymen to take her boat in."
Completely mystified, I looked from Halyard to the girl, not in the least comprehending what all this meant.
"That will do," said Halyard, ungraciously, which curt phrase was apparently the usual dismissal for the nurse.
She rose, and I rose, and she passed me with an inclination, stepping noiselessly into the house.
"I want beef-tea!" bawled Halyard after her; then he gave me an unamiable glance.
"I was a well-bred man," he sneered; "I'm a Harvard graduate, too, but I live as I like, and I do what I like, and I say what I like."
"You certainly are not reticent," I said, disgusted.
"Why should I be?" he rasped; "I pay that young woman for my irritability; it's a bargain between us."
"In your domestic affairs," I said, "there is nothing that interests me. I came to see those auks."
"You probably believe them to be razor-billed auks," he said, contemptuously. "But they're not; they're great auks."
I suggested that he permit me to examine them, and he replied, indifferently, that they were in a pen in his backyard, and that I was free to step around the house when I cared to.
I laid my rifle and pack on the veranda, and hastened off with mixed emotions, among which hope no longer predominated. No man in his senses would keep two such precious prizes in a pen in his backyard, I argued, and I was perfectly prepared to find anything from a puffin to a penguin in that pen.
I shall never forget, as long as I live, my stupor of amazement when I came to the wire-covered enclosure. Not only were there two great auks in the pen, alive, breathing, squatting in bulky majesty on their sea-weed bed, but one of them was gravely contemplating two newly hatched chicks, all bill and feet, which nestled sedately at the edge of a puddle of salt-water, where some small fish were swimming.
For a while excitement blinded, nay, deafened me. I tried to realize that I was gazing upon the last individuals of an all but extinct race--the sole survivors of the gigantic auk, which, for thirty years, has been accounted an extinct creature.
I believe that I did not move muscle nor limb until the sun had gone down and the crowding darkness blurred my straining eyes and blotted the great, silent, bright-eyed birds from sight.
Even then I could not tear myself away from the enclosure; I listened to the strange, drowsy note of the male bird, the fainter responses of the female, the thin plaints of the chicks, huddling under her breast; I heard their flipper-like, embryotic wings beating sleepily as the birds stretched and yawned their beaks and clacked them, preparing for slumber.
"If you please," came a soft voice from the door, "Mr. Halyard awaits your company to dinner."

IV
I dined well--or, rather, I might have enjoyed my dinner if Mr. Halyard had been eliminated; and the feast consisted exclusively of a joint of beef, the pretty nurse, and myself. She was exceedingly attractive--with a disturbing fashion of lowering her head and raising her dark eyes when spoken to.
As for Halyard, he was unspeakable, bundled up in his snuffy shawls, and making uncouth noises over his gruel. But it is only just to say that his table was worth sitting down to and his wine was sound as a bell.
"Yah!" he snapped, "I'm sick of this cursed soup--and I'll trouble you to fill my glass--"
"It is dangerous for you to touch claret," said the pretty nurse.
"I might as well die at dinner as anywhere," he observed.
"Certainly," said I, cheerfully passing the decanter, but he did not appear overpleased with the attention.
"I can't smoke, either," he snarled, hitching the shawls around until he looked like Richard the Third.
However, he was good enough to shove a box of cigars at me, and I took one and stood up, as the pretty nurse slipped past and vanished into the little parlor beyond.
We sat there for a while without speaking. He picked irritably at the bread-crumbs on the cloth, never glancing in my direction; and I, tired from my long foot-tour, lay back in my chair, silently appreciating one of the best cigars I ever smoked.
"Well," he rasped out at length, "what do you think