ut 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