Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/282

264 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.

Benjamin Corvet, when he went away, had tried to leave his place and power among lakemen to Alan; Alan, refusing to accept what Corvet had left until Corvet's reason should be known, had felt obliged also to refuse friendship with the Sherrills. When revela-