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“Haven’t I told you that I have brought no papers?” he said.

He spoke with a sudden violence of anger which startled me. Then he said something which made suspicion leap into my brain.

“You believed Nansen,” he said, “and Amundsen, and Sverdrup. They had only their story to tell. Why don’t you believe me?”

I had believed him. But at that strange, excited protest and some uneasy, almost guilty, look about the man, I thought, “Hullo! What’s wrong? This man protests too much.”

From that moment I had grave doubts of him. I pressed him several times about his papers. Surely he was not coming to Europe, to claim the greatest prize of exploration, without a scrap of his notes, or any of his observations? He became more and more angry with me, until for the sake of getting some narrative from him, I abandoned that interrogation, and asked him for his personal adventures, the manner of his journey, the weights of his sledges, the number of his dogs, and so on. As I scribbled down his answers, the story appeared to me more and more fantastic. And he contradicted himself several times, and hesitated over many of his answers, like a man building up a delicate case of self-defense. By intuition, rather than evidence, by some quick instinct of facial expression, by some sensibility to mental and moral dishonesty, I was convinced, absolutely, at the end of an hour, that this man had not been to the North Pole, but was attempting to bluff the world. I need not deal here with the points in his narrative, and the gaps he left, which served to confirm my belief....