"I never lived in Emmet County," old Burr replied. "Some one else must have told you that about me. I come from Canada—of French-Canadian descent. My family were of the Hudson Bay people. I was a guide and hunter until recently. Only a few years ago I came onto the lakes, but my cousin came here before I did. It is his child."
Old Burr moved away and Alan turned to the mate.
"What do you make of old Burr?" he asked.
"He's a romancer. We get 'em that way once in a while—old liars! He'll give you twenty different accounts of himself—twenty different lives. None of them is true. I don't know who he is or where he came from, but it's sure he isn't any of the things he says he is."
Alan turned away, chill with disappointment. It was only that, then—old Burr was a romancer after the manner of some old seamen. He constructed for his own amusement these "lives." He was not only not the Burr of Corvet's list; he was some one not any way connected with the Miwaka or with Corvet. Yet Alan, upon reflection, could not believe that it was only this. Burr, if he had wished to do that, might perhaps merely have simulated agitation when Alan questioned him about the Miwaka; but why should he have wished to simulate it? Alan could conceive of no condition which by any possibility could have suggested such simulation to the old man.
He ceased now, however, to question Burr since questioning either had no result at all or led the old man to weaving fictions; in response the old man became by degrees more communicative. He told Alan, at different times, a number of other "lives" which he claimed as his own. In only a few of these lives had he been, by his account, a seaman; he had been a multitude of other things—in some a farmer, in others a lumberjack or a fisherman; he had been born, he told, in a half-dozen different places and came of as many different sorts of people.
On deck, one night, listening while old Burr related his sixth or seventh life, excitement suddenly seized Alan. Burr, in this life which he was telling, claimed to be an Englishman born in Liverpool. He had been, he said, a seaman in the British navy; he had been present at the shelling of Alexandria; later, because of some difficulty which he glossed over, he had deserted and had come to "the States"; he had been first a deckhand then the mate of a tramp schooner on the lakes. Alan, gazing at the old man, felt exultation leaping and throbbing within him. He recognized this "life"; he knew in advance its incidents. This life which old Burr was rehearsing to him as his own, was the actual life of Munro Burkhalter, one of the men on Corvet's list regarding whom Alan had been able to obtain full information!
Alan sped below, when he was relieved from watch, and got out the clippings left by Corvet and the notes of what he himself had learned in his visits to the homes of these people. His excitement grew greater as he pored over them; he found that he could account, with their aid, for all that old Burr had told him. Old Burr's "lives" were not, of course, his; yet neither were they fictions. They—their incidents, at least—were actualities. They were woven from the lives of those upon Corvet's list! Alan felt his skin prickling and the blood beating fast in his temples. How could Burr have known these incidents? Who could he be to know them all? To what man, but one, could all of them be known? Was old Burr ... Benjamin Corvet?
Alan could give no certain answer to that question. He could not find any definite resemblance in Burr's placid face to the picture of Corvet which Constance had shown him. Yet, as regarded his age and his physical characteristics, there was nothing to make his identity with Benjamin Corvet impossible. Sherrill or others who had known Benjamin Corvet well, might be able to find resemblances which Alan could not. And, whether Burr was or was not Corvet, he was undeniably some one to whom the particulars of Corvet's life were known.
Alan telegraphed that day to Sherrill; but when the message had gone doubt seized him. He awaited eagerly the coming of whoever Sherrill might send and the revelations regarding Corvet which might come then; but at the same time he shrunk from that revelation. He himself had become, he knew, wholly of the lakes now; his life, whatever his future might be, would be concerned with them. Yet he was not of them in the way he would have wished to be; he was no more than a common seaman.