Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

Is that seamanly behaviour, now, I want to know?

SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keep

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

From the ship we could see nothing
of the house or stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if
it had not been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the
first that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the
seas.

"You're a good lad, Jim," he said; "and you're all in a clove hitch,
ain't you?

You mought call me captain.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

Here you comes and tells me of it plain; and
here I let him give us all the slip before my blessed deadlights!

"Pew," he cried, "they've been before us.

Every day when he came back
from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the
road.

This even tint
was indeed broken up by streaks of yellow sand-break in the lower lands,
and by many tall trees of the pine family, out-topping the others--some
singly, some in clumps; but the general colouring was uniform and sad.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

There is no time to dilly-dally in our work.

I found
he was an old sailor, kept a public-house, knew
all the seafaring men in Bristol, had lost his
health ashore, and wanted a good berth as cook to
get to sea again.

"Doctors is all swabs," he said; "and that doctor there, why, what do
he know about seafaring men?

I
set off, overjoyed at this opportunity to see some more of the ships and
seamen, and picked my way among a great crowd of people and carts and
bales, for the dock was now at its busiest, until I found the tavern in
question.

"I have
drawn blood enough to keep him quiet awhile; he should lie for a week
where he is--that is the best thing for him and you; but another stroke
would settle him."




3

The Black Spot

ABOUT noon I stopped at the captain's door with some cooling drinks
and medicines.

Much company, mate?"

"Why, in a place like this, where nobody puts in but
gen'lemen of fortune, Silver would fly the Jolly Roger, you don't make
no doubt of that.

There was nothing left for me but death by
starvation or death by the hands of the mutineers.

It was a long, difficult business, for the coins were of all countries
and sizes--doubloons, and louis d'ors, and guineas, and pieces of eight,
and I know not what besides, all shaken together at random.

The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the
beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat,
his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head.

Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
up my chest.

"Come, Bill, you know me; you know an old shipmate, Bill, surely," said
the stranger.

A turn ashore'll hurt nobody--the boats are still in the water;
you can take the gigs, and as many as please may go ashore for the
afternoon.

When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
(as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
was present.

Well, then, you get on a horse, and go to--well, yes,
I will!--to that eternal doctor swab, and tell him to pipe all
hands--magistrates and sich--and he'll lay 'em aboard at the Admiral
Benbow--all old Flint's crew, man and boy, all on 'em that's left.

"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated
grog-shop.

The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the
beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat,
his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head.

And the
coxswain, Israel Hands, was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman who
could be trusted at a pinch with almost anything.

The doctor had to go
to London for a physician to take charge of his practice; the squire was
hard at work at Bristol; and I lived on at the hall under the charge of
old Redruth, the gamekeeper, almost a prisoner, but full of sea-dreams
and the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures.

"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum,
the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

"I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off.

The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out
the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of
hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed
to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores.

She would swear the same, in a manner of speaking, before
chaplain."

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

We'll take Redruth, Joyce, and Hunter.

Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
up my chest.

When I'm in
Parlyment and riding in my coach, I don't want none of these sea-lawyers
in the cabin a-coming home, unlooked for, like the devil at prayers.

The lubbers is going about to get the wind of me
this blessed moment; lubbers as couldn't keep what they got, and want to
nail what is another's.

"Take the
Georges, Pew, and don't stand here squalling."

Suddenly he--the captain,
that is--began to pipe up his eternal song:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman...

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

This, when it was brought to him,
he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still
looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

Dr. Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow.

There were several additions of a
later date, but above all, three crosses of red ink--two on the north
part of the island, one in the southwest--and beside this last, in
the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the
captain's tottery characters, these words: "Bulk of treasure here."

The whole schooner had been
overhauled; six berths had been made astern out of what had been the
after-part of the main hold; and this set of cabins was only joined to
the galley and forecastle by a sparred passage on the port side.

"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me.

Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but
the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.




2

Black Dog Appears and Disappears


IT was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the
mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you
will see, of his affairs.

The man at
the helm was watching the luff of the sail and whistling away gently
to himself, and that was the only sound excepting the swish of the sea
against the bows and around the sides of the ship.

Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon
knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like
a beaten dog.

I was
wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the
swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from
the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale through
stage after stage, for when I was awakened at last it was by a punch
in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still
before a large building in a city street and that the day had already
broken a long time.

And now you see, mate, I'm pretty low,
and deserted by all; and Jim, you'll bring me one noggin of rum, now,
won't you, matey?"

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me.

Of course I said I would go with my mother, and of course they all cried
out at our foolhardiness, but even then not a man would go along with
us.

When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
(as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
was present.

I got her through my old friend, Blandly, who
has proved himself throughout the most surprising
trump.

The blind man clung close to me, holding me in one iron fist
and leaning almost more of his weight on me than I could carry.

"Come here, sonny," says he.

That's short and sweet."

And
that was all we could learn of our guest.

As for the captain, he had carried his over his
shoulder by a bandoleer, and like a wise man, lock uppermost.

Some of the men who
had been to field-work on the far side of the Admiral Benbow remembered,
besides, to have seen several strangers on the road, and taking them to
be smugglers, to have bolted away; and one at least had seen a little
lugger in what we called Kitt's Hole.

He was plainly blind, for he tapped
before him with a stick and wore a great green shade over his eyes and
nose; and he was hunched, as if with age or weakness, and wore a huge
old tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him appear positively
deformed.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

"Flag of truce!"

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

"Aye, aye, sir," answered the cook, and touching his forelock, he
disappeared at once in the direction of his galley.

But
you're able to hear, I reckon; leastways, your ears is big enough.

"Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave," cried one voice.

"It's to you, Abraham Gray--it's to you I am speaking."

I saw the most wonderful figureheads, that had all been far over the
ocean.

I'll stay here a bit," he continued.

All well, I hope; all
shipshape and seaworthy?"

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

Oh, I
see what you're at--there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces
on the threshold.

"Nay, mate," said he; "marooned."

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

Ben, run and help Harry.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

And here, sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a spy-glass under his arm,
bless his old 'art, to be sure.

He was not only useless as an officer and a bad influence amongst
the men, but it was plain that at this rate he must soon kill himself
outright, so nobody was much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark
night, with a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more.

Long John Silver, he is
called, and has lost a leg; but that I regarded as
a recommendation, since he lost it in his
country's service, under the immortal Hawke.

The arms are easy found, in the sand-hill, N.
point of north inlet cape, bearing E. and a
quarter N.
J.F.

That was all; but brief as it was, and to me incomprehensible, it filled
the squire and Dr. Livesey with delight.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

Now, if I can't get away nohow, and they tip me the black spot, mind
you, it's my old sea-chest they're after; you get on a horse--you can,
can't you?

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

Hawkins shall come as cabin-boy.

Well, then, you get on a horse, and go to--well, yes,
I will!--to that eternal doctor swab, and tell him to pipe all
hands--magistrates and sich--and he'll lay 'em aboard at the Admiral
Benbow--all old Flint's crew, man and boy, all on 'em that's left.

Of all the beggar-men that I had seen
or fancied, he was the chief for raggedness.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

People were frightened at the time, but on looking
back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and
such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
terrible at sea.

And here, sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a spy-glass under his arm,
bless his old 'art, to be sure.

"But look here," he went on, "here's what I want to know, Barbecue: how
long are we a-going to stand off and on like a blessed bumboat?

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

Underneath there
was an old boat-cloak, whitened with sea-salt on many a harbour-bar.

Perhaps it was this--perhaps it was the look of the island, with its
grey, melancholy woods, and wild stone spires, and the surf that we
could both see and hear foaming and thundering on the steep beach--at
least, although the sun shone bright and hot, and the shore birds were
fishing and crying all around us, and you would have thought anyone
would have been glad to get to land after being so long at sea, my heart
sank, as the saying is, into my boots; and from the first look onward,...

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated
grog-shop.

You and me'll just go back into the
parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we'll give Bill a little
surprise--bless his 'art, I say again."

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

In the
first place, the little gallipot of a boat that we were in was gravely
overloaded.

To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and
ditch was the worst of nightmares.

John Trelawney

Postscript--I did not tell you that Blandly,
who, by the way, is to send a consort after us if
we don't turn up by the end of August, had found
an admirable fellow for sailing master--a stiff
man, which I regret, but in all other respects a
treasure.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

I been in places hot as pitch, and mates
dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the
sea with earthquakes--what to the doctor know of lands like that?--and I
lived on rum, I tell you.

Now, sir, it's got to come
to blows sooner or later, and what I propose is to take time by the
forelock, as the saying is, and come to blows some fine day when they
least expect it.

I assure you I was quite of the squire's way of thinking, and hated the
captain deeply.




10

The Voyage

ALL that night we were in a great bustle getting things stowed in their
place, and boatfuls of the squire's friends, Mr. Blandly and the like,
coming off to wish him a good voyage and a safe return.

All this while, as I say, I was still running, and without taking any
notice, I had drawn near to the foot of the little hill with the two
peaks and had got into a part of the island where the live-oaks grew
more widely apart and seemed more like forest trees in their bearing and
dimensions.

He was clothed with tatters
of old ship's canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork
was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous
fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin.

I've seen his top-sails with
these eyes, off Trinidad, and the cowardly son of a rum-puncheon that I
sailed with put back--put back, sir, into Port of Spain."

All they would do was to give me a loaded pistol lest we were
attacked, and to promise to have horses ready saddled in case we were
pursued on our return, while one lad was to ride forward to the doctor's
in search of armed assistance.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated
grog-shop.

I been in places hot as pitch, and mates
dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the
sea with earthquakes--what to the doctor know of lands like that?--and I
lived on rum, I tell you.

The squire had had everything repaired, and the
public rooms and the sign repainted, and had added some furniture--above
all a beautiful armchair for mother in the bar.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

"There's a strong scour with the ebb," he said, "and this here passage
has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade."

The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence.

PART TWO--The Sea-cook




7

I Go to Bristol

IT was longer than the squire imagined ere we were ready for the sea,
and none of our first plans--not even Dr. Livesey's, of keeping me
beside him--could be carried out as we intended.

Well, mother was upstairs with father and I was laying the
breakfast-table against the captain's return when the parlour door
opened and a man stepped in on whom I had never set my eyes before.

The blind man clung close to me, holding me in one iron fist
and leaning almost more of his weight on me than I could carry.

The thicket stretched down from the top of
one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until
it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest
of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage.

Put 'em ashore like maroons?

It was a long, difficult business, for the coins were of all countries
and sizes--doubloons, and louis d'ors, and guineas, and pieces of eight,
and I know not what besides, all shaken together at random.

Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon
knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like
a beaten dog.

Between this and that, I
was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of
the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he
had ordered in a trembling voice.

My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

There is a class of men in Bristol
monstrously prejudiced against Blandly.

Rum! Rum!"

I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen
out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still
getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running
in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor.

Dr. Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow.

The marsh was
steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled
through the haze.

I had heard the word, and I knew it stood for a horrible kind of
punishment common enough among the buccaneers, in which the offender
is put ashore with a little powder and shot and left behind on some
desolate and distant island.

It's been meat and drink, and man and wife,
to me; and if I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee
shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab"; and he ran on
again for a while with curses.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

I was so much startled that I
struggled to withdraw, but the blind man pulled me close up to him with
a single action of his arm.

He was clothed with tatters
of old ship's canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork
was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous
fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin.

He had hobbled down there that
morning, he said, to get a smell of the salt.

And I was a civil,
pious boy, and could rattle off my catechism that fast, as you couldn't
tell one word from another.

"And I'll take this to square the count," said I, picking up the oilskin
packet.

A few small coins, a thimble,
and some thread and big needles, a piece of pigtail tobacco bitten away
at the end, his gully with the crooked handle, a pocket compass, and a
tinder box were all that they contained, and I began to despair.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
insist on having more.

There's the key; you fill a pannikin and bring it up."

They wasn't so high and dry, nohow, but took their
fling, like jolly companions every one."

The
workpeople, to be sure--riggers and what not--were
most annoyingly slow; but time cured that.

I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd,
outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an
open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with
a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak
in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

"We sail tomorrow!"




8

At the Sign of the Spy-glass

WHEN I had done breakfasting the squire gave me a note addressed to John
Silver, at the sign of the Spy-glass, and told me I should easily
find the place by following the line of the docks and keeping a bright
lookout for a little tavern with a large brass telescope for sign.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

In the meantime, the captain gradually
brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon
the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence.

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

I had
to cling tight to the backstay, and the world turned giddily before my
eyes, for though I was a good enough sailor when there was way on, this
standing still and being rolled about like a bottle was a thing I never
learned to stand without a qualm or so, above all in the morning, on an
empty stomach.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

We'll have to do sentry-go and ease off a point or so on the
rum.

"Blabbed, I mean.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
(as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
was present.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

'As
for you, Benjamin Gunn,' says they, 'here's a musket,' they says, 'and
a spade, and pick-axe.

Or cut 'em down like that much pork?

Now, treasure is ticklish work; I don't
like treasure voyages on any account, and I don't like them, above all,
when they are secret and when (begging your pardon, Mr. Trelawney) the
secret has been told to the parrot."

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

We never had
a night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work; and I was
dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe
and the crew began to man the capstan-bars.

"Mr. Trelawney, out and away," said I.

"Mr. Trelawney, will you please pick me off one of these men, sir?

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

I was
wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the
swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from
the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale through
stage after stage, for when I was awakened at last it was by a punch
in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still
before a large building in a city street and that the day had already
broken a long time.

The captain, for
his part, stood staring at the signboard like a bewildered man.

I observed the doctor sniffing
and sniffing, like someone tasting a bad egg.

"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me.

My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good.

And altogether I paid pretty dear for
my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

And here, sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a spy-glass under his arm,
bless his old 'art, to be sure.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

What with the
steepness of the incline, the thick tree stumps, and the soft sand, he
and his crutch were as helpless as a ship in stays.

I
have a boatswain who pipes, Livesey; so things
shall go man-o'-war fashion on board the good ship
HISPANIOLA.

This appeal seemed to produce some effect, for two of the fellows began
to look here and there among the lumber, but half-heartedly, I thought,
and with half an eye to their own danger all the time, while the rest
stood irresolute on the road.

In the
first place, the little gallipot of a boat that we were in was gravely
overloaded.

I
have a boatswain who pipes, Livesey; so things
shall go man-o'-war fashion on board the good ship
HISPANIOLA.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

Almost at the same time a
pistol-shot, flash and report, came from the hedge side.

"Mate," he was saying, "it's because I thinks gold dust of you--gold
dust, and you may lay to that!

"I have a chart here," says Captain Smollett.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

By good fortune Hunter pulled a good oar.

They lives rough, and they risk
swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise
is done, why, it's hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings
in their pockets.

Let's have a go of the rum."

"We was a-talkin' of keel-hauling," answered Morgan.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

Dr. Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow.

"It's the name of a buccaneer of my
acquaintance; and I call you by it for the sake of shortness, and what I
have to say to you is this; one glass of rum won't kill you, but if
you take one you'll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you
don't break off short, you'll die--do you understand that?--die, and go
to your own place, like the man in the Bible.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

This, when it was brought to him,
he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still
looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd,
outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an
open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with
a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak
in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.

He looked to the priming of his gun.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

But I am responsible for the ship's
safety and the life of every man Jack aboard of her.

I could hear as well as see that brandy-faced rascal Israel Hands
plumping down a round-shot on the deck.

Tired
though we all were, two were sent out for firewood; two more were set to
dig a grave for Redruth; the doctor was named cook; I was put sentry at
the door; and the captain himself went from one to another, keeping up
our spirits and lending a hand wherever it was wanted.

Was that you drinking with him, Morgan?

They are
putting the powder and the arms in the fore hold.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

Double grog was going on the least excuse; there was duff on odd days,
as, for instance, if the squire heard it was any man's birthday, and
always a barrel of apples standing broached in the waist for anyone to
help himself that had a fancy.

"Budge, you skulk!" cried Pew. "Dirk was a fool and a coward from the
first--you wouldn't mind him.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

They had the gun, by this time, slewed round upon the swivel, and Hands,
who was at the muzzle with the rammer, was in consequence the most
exposed.

But now John put his hand into his pocket, brought out a whistle, and
blew upon it several modulated blasts that rang far across the heated
air.

In the meantime, the captain gradually
brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon
the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence.

Some
news of the lugger in Kitt's Hole had found its way to Supervisor Dance
and set him forth that night in our direction, and to that circumstance
my mother and I owed our preservation from death.

"But you are so
confoundedly hot-headed and exclamatory that I cannot get a word in.

When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
(as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
was present.

There was a date at one end of the line and at the other a
sum of money, as in common account-books, but instead of explanatory
writing, only a varying number of crosses between the two.

Another pause, and then, not a quarter of a mile in front of me, I
beheld the Union Jack flutter in the air above a wood.

I held out my hand, and the horrible, soft-spoken, eyeless creature
gripped it in a moment like a vise.

The captain sat down to his log, and here is the beginning of the entry:

Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's
doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John
Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce,
owner's servants, landsmen--being all that is left
faithful of the ship's company--with stores for ten
days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew
British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island.

But at my last words he perked up into a kind of startled
slyness.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

When I returned with the rum, they were already seated on either side
of the captain's breakfast-table--Black Dog next to the door and
sitting sideways so as to have one eye on his old shipmate and one, as I
thought, on his retreat.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

The squire made no bones about the
matter; he despised the captain.

I could hear as well as see that brandy-faced rascal Israel Hands
plumping down a round-shot on the deck.

A great deal of blood was taken before the captain opened his eyes
and looked mistily about him.

But he was not destined to go far.

Almost at the same time a
pistol-shot, flash and report, came from the hedge side.

I could hear people
tumbling up from the cabin and the forecastle, and slipping in an
instant outside my barrel, I dived behind the fore-sail, made a double
towards the stern, and came out upon the open deck in time to join
Hunter and Dr. Livesey in the rush for the weather bow.

You never imagined a
sweeter schooner--a child might sail her--two
hundred tons; name, HISPANIOLA.

You don't catch me tasting rum so much, but just
a thimbleful for luck, of course, the first chance I have.

Some
news of the lugger in Kitt's Hole had found its way to Supervisor Dance
and set him forth that night in our direction, and to that circumstance
my mother and I owed our preservation from death.

There were several additions of a
later date, but above all, three crosses of red ink--two on the north
part of the island, one in the southwest--and beside this last, in
the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the
captain's tottery characters, these words: "Bulk of treasure here."

I'll put on my old cockerel hat,
and step along of you to Cap'n Trelawney, and report this here affair.

"I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off.

I been in places hot as pitch, and mates
dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the
sea with earthquakes--what to the doctor know of lands like that?--and I
lived on rum, I tell you.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

And again, "If it
comes to swinging, swing all, say I."

Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and
other noises--the chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel
followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black
Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn
cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder.

Rum! Rum!"

I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen
out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still
getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running
in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor.

"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum,
the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

I had
to cling tight to the backstay, and the world turned giddily before my
eyes, for though I was a good enough sailor when there was way on, this
standing still and being rolled about like a bottle was a thing I never
learned to stand without a qualm or so, above all in the morning, on an
empty stomach.

A full moon was beginning to rise and peered
redly through the upper edges of the fog, and this increased our haste,
for it was plain, before we came forth again, that all would be as
bright as day, and our departure exposed to the eyes of any watchers.

Dr. Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow.

We were not many
minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each
other and hearken.

God help the poor souls that manned her--coral
long ago."

The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence.

If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through
his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor
father out of the room.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

"And now that's done," said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly
left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy and nimbleness,
skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood
motionless, I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance.

"I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off.

But at my last words he perked up into a kind of startled
slyness.

I don't like this cruise; I don't like the men; and
I don't like my officer.

He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor
father was far gone in a decline that took him off.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

"Here's luck," "A fair wind," and "Billy Bones his
fancy," were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up
near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from
it--done, as I thought, with great spirit.

And I was going to sea myself, to sea in a schooner, with a piping
boatswain and pig-tailed singing seamen, to sea, bound for an unknown
island, and to seek for buried treasure!

Just then a sort of brightness fell upon me in the barrel, and looking
up, I found the moon had risen and was silvering the mizzen-top and
shining white on the luff of the fore-sail; and almost at the same time
the voice of the lookout shouted, "Land ho!"




12

Council of War

THERE was a great rush of feet across the deck.

With the men in the temper they were in, it seemed an even
chance if we should see the lad again.

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

She's been at Madagascar, and at
Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello.

Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round his neck, to have
both hands as free as possible.

Over on the back the same hand had written this further information:

Tall tree, Spy-glass shoulder, bearing a point to
the N. of N.N.E.

Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E.

Ten feet.

"Take your hat, Hawkins, and we'll see
the ship."




9

Powder and Arms

THE HISPANIOLA lay some way out, and we went under the figureheads and
round the sterns of many other ships, and their cables sometimes grated
underneath our keel, and sometimes swung above us.

Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark.

Often enough when the first
of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only
blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was
out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and
repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

I have seen him wringing his hands after such a
rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have
greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

"Black
Dog as ever was, come for to see his old shipmate Billy, at the Admiral
Benbow inn.

"I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off.

It's been meat and drink, and man and wife,
to me; and if I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee
shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab"; and he ran on
again for a while with curses.

It's always a ship, and they can get to
buccaneering again, I suppose."

"But look here," he went on, "here's what I want to know, Barbecue: how
long are we a-going to stand off and on like a blessed bumboat?

So the weeks passed on, till one fine day there came a letter addressed
to Dr. Livesey, with this addition, "To be opened, in the case of his
absence, by Tom Redruth or young Hawkins."

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

"Search him, some of you shirking lubbers, and the rest of you aloft and
get the chest," he cried.

My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

"There's Dirk again," said one.

For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for
I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms.

"Is this here table for my mate Bill?" he asked with a kind of leer.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

"I'll show these rogues that I'm an honest woman," said my mother.

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

Long John Silver unearthed a very
competent man for a mate, a man named Arrow.

Double grog was going on the least excuse; there was duff on odd days,
as, for instance, if the squire heard it was any man's birthday, and
always a barrel of apples standing broached in the waist for anyone to
help himself that had a fancy.

Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he
had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

From trunk to trunk the creature flitted like a deer, running
manlike on two legs, but unlike any man that I had ever seen, stooping
almost double as it ran.

Here he was interrupted by a loud report, and a cannonball came tearing
through the trees and pitched in the sand not a hundred yards from where
we two were talking.

All they would do was to give me a loaded pistol lest we were
attacked, and to promise to have horses ready saddled in case we were
pursued on our return, while one lad was to ride forward to the doctor's
in search of armed assistance.

Well, mother was upstairs with father and I was laying the
breakfast-table against the captain's return when the parlour door
opened and a man stepped in on whom I had never set my eyes before.

I
remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and
the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort
of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

In a jiffy I had slipped over the side and curled up in the
fore-sheets of the nearest boat, and almost at the same moment she
shoved off.

You
mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now?

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

"Six hours.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

Now, if you had sailed
along of Bill, you wouldn't have stood there to be spoke to twice--not
you.

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

We were heading S.S.W. and had a steady breeze abeam and a quiet sea.

Hunter
brought the boat round under the stern-port, and Joyce and I set to work
loading her with powder tins, muskets, bags of biscuits, kegs of pork, a
cask of cognac, and my invaluable medicine chest.

"We was a-talkin' of keel-hauling," answered Morgan.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

And I ran to the door in time to see Jim Hawkins, safe and sound, come
climbing over the stockade.




19

Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins: The Garrison in the Stockade

AS soon as Ben Gunn saw the colours he came to a halt, stopped me by the
arm, and sat down.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

"One at a time, one at a time," laughed Dr. Livesey.

Meantime, he ran on, little supposing he was
overheard.

If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through
his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor
father out of the room.

Once out upon the road, Black
Dog, in spite of his wound, showed a wonderful clean pair of heels and
disappeared over the edge of the hill in half a minute.

I am in the most magnificent health and
spirits, eating like a bull, sleeping like a tree,
yet I shall not enjoy a moment till I hear my old
tarpaulins tramping round the capstan.

Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he
had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

What I want to know is this: Supposing that I have here in my pocket
some clue to where Flint buried his treasure, will that treasure amount
to much?"

I'll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim."

He was growing more and more excited, and this alarmed me for my father,
who was very low that day and needed quiet; besides, I was reassured by
the doctor's words, now quoted to me, and rather offended by the offer
of a bribe.

One,
tailing out behind the rest, was a lad that had gone from the hamlet to
Dr. Livesey's; the rest were revenue officers, whom he had met by the
way, and with whom he had had the intelligence to return at once.

I'll have a glass of rum from this dear child here, as I've took
such a liking to; and we'll sit down, if you please, and talk square,
like old shipmates."

Well, then, you get on a horse, and go to--well, yes,
I will!--to that eternal doctor swab, and tell him to pipe all
hands--magistrates and sich--and he'll lay 'em aboard at the Admiral
Benbow--all old Flint's crew, man and boy, all on 'em that's left.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
insist on having more.

A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage--a smell of
sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks.

I could hear people
tumbling up from the cabin and the forecastle, and slipping in an
instant outside my barrel, I dived behind the fore-sail, made a double
towards the stern, and came out upon the open deck in time to join
Hunter and Dr. Livesey in the rush for the weather bow.

I could not
doubt that this was the BLACK SPOT; and taking it up, I found written
on the other side, in a very good, clear hand, this short message: "You
have till ten tonight."

"It will amount to this: If we have the
clue you talk about, I fit out a ship in Bristol dock, and take you and
Hawkins here along, and I'll have that treasure if I search a year."

I paused where I was, with my napkin in my
hand.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

Then it struck sharp on the inn door, and then we could hear the handle
being turned and the bolt rattling as the wretched being tried to enter;
and then there was a long time of silence both within and without.

Or rather, I suppose the
truth was this, that all hands were disaffected by the example of the
ringleaders--only some more, some less; and a few, being good fellows in
the main, could neither be led nor driven any further.

My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good.

While I was still in this delightful dream, we came suddenly in front
of a large inn and met Squire Trelawney, all dressed out like a
sea-officer, in stout blue cloth, coming out of the door with a smile on
his face and a capital imitation of a sailor's walk.

I was
first mate, I was, old Flint's first mate, and I'm the on'y one as knows
the place.

Now the leg
would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the
middle of his body.

"And now that's done," said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly
left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy and nimbleness,
skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood
motionless, I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance.

Dreadful stories
they were--about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and
the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main.

And altogether I paid pretty dear for
my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

"Come nearer here."

When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
(as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
was present.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

He was a tall man, over six
feet high, and broad in proportion, and he had a bluff, rough-and-ready
face, all roughened and reddened and lined in his long travels.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman wi...

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for
I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms.

"I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off.

The
workpeople, to be sure--riggers and what not--were
most annoyingly slow; but time cured that.

"Now, look here," said the captain; "you've run me down; here I am;
well, then, speak up; what is it?"

For it was
not only a piece of stout, seamanly, good feeling; it was good policy
besides and showed our enemies that we despised their cannonade.

He had found a longish fir-tree
lying felled and trimmed in the enclosure, and with the help of Hunter
he had set it up at the corner of the log-house where the trunks crossed
and made an angle.

And I began to run towards the anchorage, my terrors all forgotten,
while close at my side the marooned man in his goatskins trotted easily
and lightly.

But by this
time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it
was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it
did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite
angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on
a new cure for the rheumatics.

Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
up my chest.

If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through
his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor
father out of the room.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

First he recognized the doctor with
an unmistakable frown; then his glance fell upon me, and he looked
relieved.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

And the
coxswain, Israel Hands, was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman who
could be trusted at a pinch with almost anything.

And you never saw me
take snuff, the reason being that in my snuff-box I carry a piece of
Parmesan cheese--a cheese made in Italy, very nutritious.

The crews raced for the beach, but the boat I was in, having some start
and being at once the lighter and the better manned, shot far ahead of
her consort, and the bow had struck among the shore-side trees and I
had caught a branch and swung myself out and plunged into the nearest
thicket while Silver and the rest were still a hundred yards behind.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
insist on having more.

Obeying this order, we
found, or rather I found--for the gamekeeper was a poor hand at reading
anything but print--the following important news:

Old Anchor Inn, Bristol, March 1, 17--

Dear Livesey--As I do not know whether you
are at the hall or still in London, I send this in
double to both places.

Farther I could not move
her, for the bridge was too low to let me do more than crawl below it.

Dooty is dooty, messmates.

And here, sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a spy-glass under his arm,
bless his old 'art, to be sure.

Much company, mate?"

He
was a pale, tallowy creature, wanting two fingers of the left hand, and
though he wore a cutlass, he did not look much like a fighter.

It was a long, difficult business, for the coins were of all countries
and sizes--doubloons, and louis d'ors, and guineas, and pieces of eight,
and I know not what besides, all shaken together at random.

It weren't quite a chapel,
but it seemed more solemn like; and then, says you, Ben Gunn was
short-handed--no chapling, nor so much as a Bible and a flag, you says."

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but
the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.




2

Black Dog Appears and Disappears


IT was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the
mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you
will see, of his affairs.

Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
up my chest.

"Easy with that,
men--easy," he ran on, to the fellows who were shifting the powder; and
then suddenly observing me examining the swivel we carried amidships,
a long brass nine, "Here you, ship's boy," he cried, "out o' that!

"Aye, but you see," returned Ben Gunn, "I didn't mean giving me a gate
to keep, and a suit of livery clothes, and such; that's not my mark,
Jim. What I mean is, would he be likely to come down to the toon of, say
one thousand pounds out of money that's as good as a man's own already?"

The ebb has made a good while; our
stores should be uncovered.

I'll stay here a bit," he continued.

But there was no unusual sound--nothing but the low
wash of the ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood.

What with the
steepness of the incline, the thick tree stumps, and the soft sand, he
and his crutch were as helpless as a ship in stays.

It's
trying on a man, I know.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

But the worst of it was that with the
course I now held we turned our broadside instead of our stern to the
HISPANIOLA and offered a target like a barn door.

But my old
missis has it all by now.

While I was still casting about in my
thoughts to find some probable excuse, Dr. Livesey called me to his
side.

'Offe Caraccas,' now; you see, here was some unhappy vessel
boarded off that coast.

"Flint was cap'n; I was quartermaster, along
of my timber leg.

I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this.

It was a happy relief for us when the door opened and Doctor Livesey
came in, on his visit to my father.

It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated me--out of
college and all--Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged
like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle.

Over on the back the same hand had written this further information:

Tall tree, Spy-glass shoulder, bearing a point to
the N. of N.N.E.

Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E.

Ten feet.

Sometimes he fell and cut himself;
sometimes he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of the
companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be almost sober and
attend to his work at least passably.

So it was with the CASSANDRA, as brought us all safe
home from Malabar, after England took the viceroy of the Indies; so it
was with the old WALRUS, Flint's old ship, as I've seen amuck with the
red blood and fit to sink with gold."

Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
up my chest.

All well, I hope; all
shipshape and seaworthy?"

And
she began to count over the amount of the captain's score from the
sailor's bag into the one that I was holding.

When I was an
A B master mariner I'd have come up alongside of him, hand over hand,
and broached him to in a brace of old shakes, I would; but now--"

And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he
had remembered something.

On
stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and
the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a
thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions.

Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since
I lost them two talons," holding up his mutilated hand.

"We was a-talkin' of keel-hauling," answered Morgan.

The old fellow's fury was awful.

So far there was not a hitch.

As soon as I
was back again he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half
sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a good boy and he had
taken quite a fancy to me.

The fog was rapidly
dispersing; already the moon shone quite clear on the high ground on
either side; and it was only in the exact bottom of the dell and round
the tavern door that a thin veil still hung unbroken to conceal the
first steps of our escape.

I should have leaped out and run for
it if I had found the strength, but my limbs and heart alike misgave me.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

This is a tiff; he'd soon talk 'em out of it if he
had the chance, and what I propose to do is to give him the chance.

The whole schooner had been
overhauled; six berths had been made astern out of what had been the
after-part of the main hold; and this set of cabins was only joined to
the galley and forecastle by a sparred passage on the port side.

When I got back with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the
captain's sleeve and exposed his great sinewy arm.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the
other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was
in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his
appearance and whither he had presumably returned.

After reloading, we walked down the outside of the palisade to see to
the fallen enemy.

Between us, with much trouble, we managed to hoist him upstairs, and
laid him on his bed, where his head fell back on the pillow as if he
were almost fainting.

By his
own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told
these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

No lives were lost, and we could wade
ashore in safety.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence.

Here and there were flowering plants, unknown to me; here and
there I saw snakes, and one raised his head from a ledge of rock and
hissed at me with a noise not unlike the spinning of a top.

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

He clambered up
and down stairs, and went from the parlour to the bar and back again,
and sometimes put his nose out of doors to smell the sea, holding on to
the walls as he went for support and breathing hard and fast like a man
on a steep mountain.

What I want to know is this: Supposing that I have here in my pocket
some clue to where Flint buried his treasure, will that treasure amount
to much?"

In the meanwhile we had been making headway at a good pace for a boat so
overloaded, and we had shipped but little water in the process.

The thicket stretched down from the top of
one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until
it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest
of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage.

I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this.

For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

You and me'll just go back into the
parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we'll give Bill a little
surprise--bless his 'art, I say again."

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

The whole schooner had been
overhauled; six berths had been made astern out of what had been the
after-part of the main hold; and this set of cabins was only joined to
the galley and forecastle by a sparred passage on the port side.

"A week at least," said I.

"Thunder!" he cried.

At last, however,
we got alongside, and were met and saluted as we stepped aboard by the
mate, Mr. Arrow, a brown old sailor with earrings in his ears and a
squint.

No one took notice of me, only the bow oar saying, "Is that you, Jim?
Keep your head down."

I remember the appearance of his
coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before
the end, was nothing but patches.

In the meantime, we had no idea what to do to help the captain, nor any
other thought but that he had got his death-hurt in the scuffle with
the stranger.

I'll stay here a bit," he continued.

You and me'll just go back into the
parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we'll give Bill a little
surprise--bless his 'art, I say again."

I do not know what it rightly is to faint, but I do know that for the
next little while the whole world swam away from before me in a whirling
mist; Silver and the birds, and the tall Spy-glass hilltop, going
round and round and topsy-turvy before my eyes, and all manner of bells
ringing and distant voices shouting in my ear.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

I was not new to violent death--I have served his Royal Highness
the Duke of Cumberland, and got a wound myself at Fontenoy--but I know
my pulse went dot and carry one.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

And again, "If it
comes to swinging, swing all, say I."

Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and
other noises--the chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel
followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black
Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn
cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman wi...

And he turned his quid and spat.

Now, Mr. Bones--"

"That's not my name," he interrupted.

I
remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and
the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort
of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he
had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

It weren't quite a chapel,
but it seemed more solemn like; and then, says you, Ben Gunn was
short-handed--no chapling, nor so much as a Bible and a flag, you says."

The captain had been struck dead by thundering apoplexy.

"Here's luck," "A fair wind," and "Billy Bones his
fancy," were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up
near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from
it--done, as I thought, with great spirit.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

Every man on board seemed well content, and they must have
been hard to please if they had been otherwise, for it is my belief
there was never a ship's company so spoiled since Noah put to sea.

Between us we raised his head.

And with that he winked and pinched me hard.

From time to time the doctor came to the door for a little air and to
rest his eyes, which were almost smoked out of his head, and whenever he
did so, he had a word for me.

Every day when he came back
from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the
road.

Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but
the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.




2

Black Dog Appears and Disappears


IT was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the
mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you
will see, of his affairs.

But
you smelt powder--didn't you, cap'n?"

I could not
doubt that this was the BLACK SPOT; and taking it up, I found written
on the other side, in a very good, clear hand, this short message: "You
have till ten tonight."

He was tricked out in his best;
an immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons, hung as low as to his
knees, and a fine laced hat was set on the back of his head.

I'll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim."

He was growing more and more excited, and this alarmed me for my father,
who was very low that day and needed quiet; besides, I was reassured by
the doctor's words, now quoted to me, and rather offended by the offer
of a bribe.

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

When I'm in
Parlyment and riding in my coach, I don't want none of these sea-lawyers
in the cabin a-coming home, unlooked for, like the devil at prayers.

Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he
had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

"Take the
Georges, Pew, and don't stand here squalling."

Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since
I lost them two talons," holding up his mutilated hand.

These, in their turn, cursed back at the blind miscreant, threatened him
in horrid terms, and tried in vain to catch the stick and wrest it from
his grasp.

I'll fire a gun half an hour before sundown."

And the head popped back again; and we heard no more, for the time, of
these six very faint-hearted seamen.

It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would
not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and
listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen
words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended
upon me alone.




11

What I Heard in the Apple Barrel

"NO, not I," said Silver.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

Oh, I
see what you're at--there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces
on the threshold.

The record lasted over nearly twenty years, the amount of the separate
entries growing larger as time went on, and at the end a grand total
had been made out after five or six wrong additions, and these words
appended, "Bones, his pile."

But at my last words he perked up into a kind of startled
slyness.

He was breathing
very loud and hard, but his eyes were closed and his face a horrible
colour.

Ah, he was
the man to have a headpiece, was Flint!

Once I stepped out myself into
the road, but he immediately called me back, and as I did not obey quick
enough for his fancy, a most horrible change came over his tallowy face,
and he ordered me in with an oath that made me jump.

When I returned with the rum, they were already seated on either side
of the captain's breakfast-table--Black Dog next to the door and
sitting sideways so as to have one eye on his old shipmate and one, as I
thought, on his retreat.

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

Rum wouldn't
bring me there, where you're going--not rum wouldn't, till I see your
born gen'leman and gets it on his word of honour.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would take rum; but
as I was going out of the room to fetch it, he sat down upon a table
and motioned me to draw near.

The bundle was sewn together, and the doctor had to get out his
instrument case and cut the stitches with his medical scissors.

They were a good deal taken aback, and after a little consultation one
and all tumbled down the fore companion, thinking no doubt to take us
on the rear.

This, when it was brought to him,
he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still
looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

Double grog was going on the least excuse; there was duff on odd days,
as, for instance, if the squire heard it was any man's birthday, and
always a barrel of apples standing broached in the waist for anyone to
help himself that had a fancy.

Tell us, squire, when you see the match, and we'll
hold water."

The HISPANIOLA still lay where she had anchored; but, sure enough, there
was the Jolly Roger--the black flag of piracy--flying from her peak.

My
mother pulled it up with impatience, and there lay before us, the last
things in the chest, a bundle tied up in oilcloth, and looking like
papers, and a canvas bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of
gold.

He was a tall man, over six
feet high, and broad in proportion, and he had a bluff, rough-and-ready
face, all roughened and reddened and lined in his long travels.

To me he was
unweariedly kind, and always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept
as clean as a new pin, the dishes hanging up burnished and his parrot in
a cage in one corner.

The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the
other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was
in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his
appearance and whither he had presumably returned.

The expression of his face as he said these words was not at all
pleasant, and I had my own reasons for thinking that the stranger was
mistaken, even supposing he meant what he said.

I've seen his top-sails with
these eyes, off Trinidad, and the cowardly son of a rum-puncheon that I
sailed with put back--put back, sir, into Port of Spain."

My
mother pulled it up with impatience, and there lay before us, the last
things in the chest, a bundle tied up in oilcloth, and looking like
papers, and a canvas bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of
gold.

I leaped to my feet and hailed the riders.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman wi...

All they would do was to give me a loaded pistol lest we were
attacked, and to promise to have horses ready saddled in case we were
pursued on our return, while one lad was to ride forward to the doctor's
in search of armed assistance.

I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as
plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, I'm a man that
has lived rough, and I'll raise Cain.

Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since
I lost them two talons," holding up his mutilated hand.

Some of the men who
had been to field-work on the far side of the Admiral Benbow remembered,
besides, to have seen several strangers on the road, and taking them to
be smugglers, to have bolted away; and one at least had seen a little
lugger in what we called Kitt's Hole.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

I have seen him wringing his hands after such a
rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have
greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

"Dear, deary me," cried my mother, "what a disgrace upon the house!

I was not new to violent death--I have served his Royal Highness
the Duke of Cumberland, and got a wound myself at Fontenoy--but I know
my pulse went dot and carry one.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing.

Add to this that Gray, the new man, had his face tied up in a bandage
for a cut he had got in breaking away from the mutineers and that poor
old Tom Redruth, still unburied, lay along the wall, stiff and stark,
under the Union Jack.

So it was with the CASSANDRA, as brought us all safe
home from Malabar, after England took the viceroy of the Indies; so it
was with the old WALRUS, Flint's old ship, as I've seen amuck with the
red blood and fit to sink with gold."

We had no ricochet to fear, and though one popped in through the
roof of the log-house and out again through the floor, we soon got used
to that sort of horse-play and minded it no more than cricket.

The HISPANIOLA was rolling scuppers under in the ocean swell.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

This lad Hawkins is a trump,
I perceive.

Every day when he came back
from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the
road.

Then I skirted among the woods until I had regained the rear, or
shoreward side, of the stockade, and was soon warmly welcomed by the
faithful party.

In the meantime, the captain gradually
brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon
the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence.

Dreadful stories
they were--about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and
the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main.

The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence.

I
remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and
the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort
of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

The servant led us down a matted passage and showed us at the end into a
great library, all lined with bookcases and busts upon the top of them,
where the squire and Dr. Livesey sat, pipe in hand, on either side of a
bright fire.

He got downstairs next morning, to be sure, and had his meals as usual,
though he ate little and had more, I am afraid, than his usual supply of
rum, for he helped himself out of the bar, scowling and blowing through
his nose, and no one dared to cross him.

He clambered up
and down stairs, and went from the parlour to the bar and back again,
and sometimes put his nose out of doors to smell the sea, holding on to
the walls as he went for support and breathing hard and fast like a man
on a steep mountain.

The
stranger kept hanging about just inside the inn door, peering round the
corner like a cat waiting for a mouse.

By his
own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told
these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described.

I tried and found by experiment that the tide kept sweeping us westward
until I had laid her head due east, or just about right angles to the
way we ought to go.

"Dick's square," said Silver.

You and me'll just go back into the
parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we'll give Bill a little
surprise--bless his 'art, I say again."

Now, Mr. Bones--"

"That's not my name," he interrupted.

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

A few small coins, a thimble,
and some thread and big needles, a piece of pigtail tobacco bitten away
at the end, his gully with the crooked handle, a pocket compass, and a
tinder box were all that they contained, and I began to despair.

Two little rivers, or rather two swamps, emptied out into this
pond, as you might call it; and the foliage round that part of the shore
had a kind of poisonous brightness.

All the time he was jerking out these phrases he was stumping up and
down the tavern on his crutch, slapping tables with his hand, and giving
such a show of excitement as would have convinced an Old Bailey judge
or a Bow Street runner.

Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
up my chest.

It was like any other seaman's chest on the outside, the initial "B"
burned on the top of it with a hot iron, and the corners somewhat
smashed and broken as by long, rough usage.

Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

I
remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and
the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort
of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

"Now, Morgan," said Long John very sternly, "you never clapped your eyes
on that Black--Black Dog before, did you, now?"

I forgot to tell you that Silver is a man of
substance; I know of my own knowledge that he has
a banker's account, which has never been
overdrawn.

He was breathing
very loud and hard, but his eyes were closed and his face a horrible
colour.

"Here's luck," "A fair wind," and "Billy Bones his
fancy," were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up
near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from
it--done, as I thought, with great spirit.

A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage--a smell of
sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks.

I observed the doctor sniffing
and sniffing, like someone tasting a bad egg.

For my part, I must do my best to save this fellow's trebly
worthless life; Jim, you get me a basin."

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

"I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off.

"Doctors is all swabs," he said; "and that doctor there, why, what do
he know about seafaring men?

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

I felt in his pockets, one after another.

There was a date at one end of the line and at the other a
sum of money, as in common account-books, but instead of explanatory
writing, only a varying number of crosses between the two.

Grey-coloured woods covered a large part of the surface.

As he was thus speaking, he had risen from bed with great difficulty,
holding to my shoulder with a grip that almost made me cry out, and
moving his legs like so much dead weight.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

"But you are so
confoundedly hot-headed and exclamatory that I cannot get a word in.

He spoke to him as before, over his
shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the
room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady: "If you do not put that
knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall
hang at the next assizes."

The expression of his face as he said these words was not at all
pleasant, and I had my own reasons for thinking that the stranger was
mistaken, even supposing he meant what he said.

And when I had pointed out the rock and told him how the captain was
likely to return, and how soon, and answered a few other questions,
"Ah," said he, "this'll be as good as drink to my mate Bill."

Finally he took a wrong turn and ran a few
steps past me, towards the hamlet, crying, "Johnny, Black Dog, Dirk,"
and other names, "you won't leave old Pew, mates--not old Pew!"

Just then the noise of horses topped the rise, and four or five riders
came in sight in the moonlight and swept at full gallop down the slope.

We'll put it, for argument
like, that your captain has a cut on one cheek--and we'll put it, if you
like, that that cheek's the right one.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him.

"Flag of truce!"

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good.

Men
were demolishing something with axes on the beach near the stockade--the
poor jolly-boat, I afterwards discovered.

The lubbers is going about to get the wind of me
this blessed moment; lubbers as couldn't keep what they got, and want to
nail what is another's.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

On
stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and
the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a
thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions.

If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through
his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor
father out of the room.

Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since
I lost them two talons," holding up his mutilated hand.

The HISPANIOLA rolled steadily, dipping her bowsprit now and then with
a whiff of spray.

All I ask is your word, Cap'n Smollett, to let me
safe and sound out of this here stockade, and one minute to get out o'
shot before a gun is fired."

"Ah, she's a handsome craft, she is," the cook would say, and give her
sugar from his pocket, and then the bird would peck at the bars and
swear straight on, passing belief for wickedness.

Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since
I lost them two talons," holding up his mutilated hand.

I was
wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the
swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from
the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale through
stage after stage, for when I was awakened at last it was by a punch
in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still
before a large building in a city street and that the day had already
broken a long time.

"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum,
the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

But
you're able to hear, I reckon; leastways, your ears is big enough.

People were frightened at the time, but on looking
back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and
such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
terrible at sea.

"None of your keyholes for
me, sonny," he said; and I left them together and retired into the bar.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

Now, here
it is: What could I do, with this old timber I hobble on?

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

But come now, stand by to go about.

"Search him, some of you shirking lubbers, and the rest of you aloft and
get the chest," he cried.

Silver, agile as a monkey even without
leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment and had twice buried
his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman wi...

One of the cocks of his
hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it
was a great annoyance when it blew.

The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out
the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of
hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed
to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores.

I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would take rum; but
as I was going out of the room to fetch it, he sat down upon a table
and motioned me to draw near.

The other three took complete headers, and came up again drenched and
bubbling.

And again, "If it
comes to swinging, swing all, say I."

Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and
other noises--the chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel
followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black
Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn
cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder.

John Trelawney

Postscript--I did not tell you that Blandly,
who, by the way, is to send a consort after us if
we don't turn up by the end of August, had found
an admirable fellow for sailing master--a stiff
man, which I regret, but in all other respects a
treasure.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

You've seen my snuff-box, haven't you?

I observed the doctor sniffing
and sniffing, like someone tasting a bad egg.

"I have
drawn blood enough to keep him quiet awhile; he should lie for a week
where he is--that is the best thing for him and you; but another stroke
would settle him."




3

The Black Spot

ABOUT noon I stopped at the captain's door with some cooling drinks
and medicines.

There was a porch at the door, and under this porch
the little spring welled up into an artificial basin of a rather odd
kind--no other than a great ship's kettle of iron, with the bottom
knocked out, and sunk "to her bearings," as the captain said, among the
sand.

At last the tapping recommenced, and, to our indescribable joy and
gratitude, died slowly away again until it ceased to be heard.

But by this
time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it
was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it
did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite
angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on
a new cure for the rheumatics.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

These fellows who attacked the
inn tonight--bold, desperate blades, for sure--and the rest who stayed
aboard that lugger, and more, I dare say, not far off, are, one and all,
through thick and thin, bound that they'll get that money.

This time, as the distance was short, I did not mount, but ran with
Dogger's stirrup-leather to the lodge gates and up the long, leafless,
moonlit avenue to where the white line of the hall buildings looked on
either hand on great old gardens.

On
stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and
the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a
thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions.

The sun had just set, the sea breeze was rustling and tumbling in the
woods and ruffling the grey surface of the anchorage; the tide, too, was
far out, and great tracts of sand lay uncovered; the air, after the heat
of the day, chilled me through my jacket.

Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark.

Farther I could not move
her, for the bridge was too low to let me do more than crawl below it.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

But he broke in cursing the doctor, in a feeble voice but heartily.

He was not sailorly, and yet he had a
smack of the sea about him too.

Silver, agile as a monkey even without
leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment and had twice buried
his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body.

With a cry John seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of
his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air.

The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the
beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat,
his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head.

The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the
beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat,
his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head.

He was a tall man, over six
feet high, and broad in proportion, and he had a bluff, rough-and-ready
face, all roughened and reddened and lined in his long travels.

Under
that, the miscellany began--a quadrant, a tin canikin, several sticks of
tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an
old Spanish watch and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of
foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six
curious West Indian shells.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

The cannon-shot was followed after a considerable interval by a volley
of small arms.

I never wasted good money of mine, nor lost it
neither; and I'll trick 'em again.

Then it struck sharp on the inn door, and then we could hear the handle
being turned and the bolt rattling as the wretched being tried to enter;
and then there was a long time of silence both within and without.

"You can tell me when I've worked through that," says
he, looking as fierce as a commander.

And at that, up I jumped, and rubbing my eyes, ran to a loophole in the
wall.




20

Silver's Embassy

SURE enough, there were two men just outside the stockade, one of them
waving a white cloth, the other, no less a person than Silver himself,
standing placidly by.

In the meantime the
supervisor rode on, as fast as he could, to Kitt's Hole; but his men
had to dismount and grope down the dingle, leading, and sometimes
supporting, their horses, and in continual fear of ambushes; so it was
no great matter for surprise that when they got down to the Hole the
lugger was already under way, though still close in.

When I was an
A B master mariner I'd have come up alongside of him, hand over hand,
and broached him to in a brace of old shakes, I would; but now--"

And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he
had remembered something.

"Now, that bird," he would say, "is, maybe, two hundred years
old, Hawkins--they live forever mostly; and if anybody's seen more
wickedness, it must be the devil himself.

He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would take rum; but
as I was going out of the room to fetch it, he sat down upon a table
and motioned me to draw near.

To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and
ditch was the worst of nightmares.

The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a
score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening
heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was
still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire, and
only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant
surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.

If you had the pluck of a weevil in a biscuit you would catch
them still."

So things passed until, the day after the funeral, and about three
o'clock of a bitter, foggy, frosty afternoon, I was standing at the door
for a moment, full of sad thoughts about my father, when I saw someone
drawing slowly near along the road.

Blackbeard was a child to Flint.

The mutineers were
bolder than we fancied or they put more trust in Israel's gunnery.

"You must bear up, sir, if you
please--bear up until you see you're gaining."

"It's the name of a buccaneer of my
acquaintance; and I call you by it for the sake of shortness, and what I
have to say to you is this; one glass of rum won't kill you, but if
you take one you'll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you
don't break off short, you'll die--do you understand that?--die, and go
to your own place, like the man in the Bible.

"I'll show these rogues that I'm an honest woman," said my mother.

He
was a pale, tallowy creature, wanting two fingers of the left hand, and
though he wore a cutlass, he did not look much like a fighter.

They were a good deal taken aback, and after a little consultation one
and all tumbled down the fore companion, thinking no doubt to take us
on the rear.

"Hands off!" cried Silver, leaping back a yard, as it seemed to me, with
the speed and security of a trained gymnast.

I've had
a'most enough o' Cap'n Smollett; he's hazed me long enough, by thunder!

He spoke to him as before, over his
shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the
room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady: "If you do not put that
knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall
hang at the next assizes."

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

"Perfectly right," he interrupted very cheerily, "perfectly right--a
gentleman and a magistrate.

All three made the first journey, heavily
laden, and tossed our stores over the palisade.

My suspicions had been thoroughly reawakened on
finding Black Dog at the Spy-glass, and I watched the cook narrowly.

At last in strode the captain, slammed the door behind him, without
looking to the right or left, and marched straight across the room to
where his breakfast awaited him.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

Then there followed a great to-do through all our old inn, heavy feet
pounding to and fro, furniture thrown over, doors kicked in, until the
very rocks re-echoed and the men came out again, one after another, on
the road and declared that we were nowhere to be found.

You're a lad, you are, but
you're as smart as paint.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

By his
own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told
these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described.

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

The man whom he called Morgan--an old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced
sailor--came forward pretty sheepishly, rolling his quid.

His left leg was cut off close by the hip,
and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with
wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird.

I've a gauge on the keg, mind.

How I cursed the
cowardice of the neighbours; how I blamed my poor mother for her honesty
and her greed, for her past foolhardiness and present weakness!

All the time he was jerking out these phrases he was stumping up and
down the tavern on his crutch, slapping tables with his hand, and giving
such a show of excitement as would have convinced an Old Bailey judge
or a Bow Street runner.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

She was at the boarding of the viceroy of the Indies out of
Goa, she was; and to look at her you would think she was a babby.

In the meantime the captain, whom I had observed to be wonderfully
swollen about the chest and pockets, had turned out a great many various
stores--the British colours, a Bible, a coil of stoutish rope, pen, ink,
the log-book, and pounds of tobacco.

We had no ricochet to fear, and though one popped in through the
roof of the log-house and out again through the floor, we soon got used
to that sort of horse-play and minded it no more than cricket.

"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum,
the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

The place was entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the trees coming
right down to high-water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hilltops
standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one
there.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story.

And altogether I paid pretty dear for
my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

"My friend should, perhaps,
have taken you along with him; but the slight, if there be one, was
unintentional.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

The pitch was
bubbling in the seams; the nasty stench of the place turned me sick;
if ever a man smelt fever and dysentery, it was in that abominable
anchorage.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon
knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like
a beaten dog.

But he was on his feet again in a
second and made another dash, now utterly bewildered, right under the
nearest of the coming horses.

He stopped a little from the inn, and raising his voice in an odd
sing-song, addressed the air in front of him, "Will any kind friend
inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in
the gracious defence of his native country, England--and God bless King
George!--where or in what part of this country he may now be?"

"No, sir; not money, I think," replied I. "In fact, sir, I believe I
have the thing in my breast pocket; and to tell you the truth, I should
like to get it put in safety."

Jim and I shall stick together in the
meanwhile; you'll take Joyce and Hunter when you ride to Bristol, and
from first to last, not one of us must breathe a word of what we've
found."

When I got back with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the
captain's sleeve and exposed his great sinewy arm.

The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the rum went out of
him and left him staring sober.

Don't you get sucking of
that bilge, John.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

We struck the enclosure about the middle of the south
side, and almost at the same time, seven mutineers--Job Anderson, the
boatswain, at their head--appeared in full cry at the southwestern
corner.

As soon as I
was back again he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half
sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a good boy and he had
taken quite a fancy to me.

In a jiffy I had slipped over the side and curled up in the
fore-sheets of the nearest boat, and almost at the same moment she
shoved off.

"Marooned three years agone," he continued, "and lived on goats since
then, and berries, and oysters.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

He was lying very much as we had left him, only a little
higher, and he seemed both weak and excited.

She would not, she declared, lose money that
belonged to her fatherless boy; "If none of the rest of you dare,"
she said, "Jim and I dare.

"Blaze away!

Rum! Rum!"

I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen
out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still
getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running
in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor.

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing.

Well, on the knoll, and enclosing the spring, they had clapped a
stout loghouse fit to hold two score of people on a pinch and loopholed
for musketry on either side.

Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing.

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing.

Rum! Rum!"

I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen
out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still
getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running
in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor.

"I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off.

"No more wounded than
you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him.

In other
words, you fear a mutiny."

I have my watch here in my hand; I give you thirty seconds to join
me in."

Three men ran
together, hand in hand; and I made out, even through the mist, that the
middle man of this trio was the blind beggar.

Redruth retreated from his place in the gallery and dropped into the
boat, which we then brought round to the ship's counter, to be handier
for Captain Smollett.

We'll have favourable
winds, a quick passage, and not the least difficulty in finding the
spot, and money to eat, to roll in, to play duck and drake with ever
after."

I
was very uneasy and alarmed, as you may fancy, and it rather added to my
fears to observe that the stranger was certainly frightened himself.

The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence.

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

"If he were Admiral Hawke he shall pay his score," cried Silver; and
then, relinquishing my hand, "Who did you say he was?" he asked.

The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the
beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat,
his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head.

Well, he's dead now
and under hatches; but for two year before that, shiver my timbers,
the man was starving!

Under
that, the miscellany began--a quadrant, a tin canikin, several sticks of
tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an
old Spanish watch and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of
foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six
curious West Indian shells.

It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard
frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first that my poor
father was little likely to see the spring.

We were
just at the little bridge, by good fortune; and I helped her, tottering
as she was, to the edge of the bank, where, sure enough, she gave a sigh
and fell on my shoulder.

All they would do was to give me a loaded pistol lest we were
attacked, and to promise to have horses ready saddled in case we were
pursued on our return, while one lad was to ride forward to the doctor's
in search of armed assistance.

The next morning he and I set out on foot for the Admiral Benbow, and
there I found my mother in good health and spirits.

It's been meat and drink, and man and wife,
to me; and if I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee
shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab"; and he ran on
again for a while with curses.

The cook came up the side like a monkey for cleverness, and as soon as
he saw what was doing, "So ho, mates!" says he.

"We must keep upstream.

"That is all clear, and, I dare say, true enough," replied Dr. Livesey.

And when I had pointed out the rock and told him how the captain was
likely to return, and how soon, and answered a few other questions,
"Ah," said he, "this'll be as good as drink to my mate Bill."

Had they gone and told Silver, all might have turned
out differently; but they had their orders, I suppose, and decided to
sit quietly where they were and hark back again to "Lillibullero."

We slipped along the hedges, noiseless and swift, nor did we see or hear
anything to increase our terrors, till, to our relief, the door of the
Admiral Benbow had closed behind us.

"Budge, you skulk!" cried Pew. "Dirk was a fool and a coward from the
first--you wouldn't mind him.

The paper had been sealed in several places with a thimble by way of
seal; the very thimble, perhaps, that I had found in the captain's
pocket.

We had run up the trades to get the wind of the island we were after--I
am not allowed to be more plain--and now we were running down for it
with a bright lookout day and night.

I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd,
outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an
open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with
a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak
in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

Add to this that Gray, the new man, had his face tied up in a bandage
for a cut he had got in breaking away from the mutineers and that poor
old Tom Redruth, still unburied, lay along the wall, stiff and stark,
under the Union Jack.

I was so much startled that I
struggled to withdraw, but the blind man pulled me close up to him with
a single action of his arm.

Oh, I
see what you're at--there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces
on the threshold.

I believe the silly fellows must have thought they would break their
shins over treasure as soon as they were landed, for they all came out
of their sulks in a moment and gave a cheer that started the echo in a
faraway hill and sent the birds once more flying and squalling round the
anchorage.

Once out upon the road, Black
Dog, in spite of his wound, showed a wonderful clean pair of heels and
disappeared over the edge of the hill in half a minute.

Scatter, lads, and find 'em."

If I had my way, I'd have Cap'n Smollett work us back
into the trades at least; then we'd have no blessed miscalculations and
a spoonful of water a day.

He never particularly addressed me, and it is my
belief he had as good as forgotten his confidences; but his temper was
more flighty, and allowing for his bodily weakness, more violent than
ever.

If we run down this Black Dog,
now, there'll be news for Cap'n Trelawney!

"My ears is singing.

I found them all three seated round the table, a bottle of Spanish wine
and some raisins before them, and the doctor smoking away, with his wig
on his lap, and that, I knew, was a sign that he was agitated.

I been in places hot as pitch, and mates
dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the
sea with earthquakes--what to the doctor know of lands like that?--and I
lived on rum, I tell you.

I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him.

"I don't rightly know, sir," answered Morgan.

Now, just after sundown, when all my work was over and I was on my way
to my berth, it occurred to me that I should like an apple.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

But it was no affair of
mine, I thought; and besides, it was difficult to know what to do.

Nor was I deceived, for soon
I heard the very distant and low tones of a human voice, which, as I
continued to give ear, grew steadily louder and nearer.

Tomorrow I start for Bristol.

And as for
riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I regard it as an act of
virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach.

For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story.

For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story.

The man whom he called Morgan--an old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced
sailor--came forward pretty sheepishly, rolling his quid.

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

But now John put his hand into his pocket, brought out a whistle, and
blew upon it several modulated blasts that rang far across the heated
air.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing.

The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all the brown had
gone out of his face, and even his nose was blue; he had the look of a
man who sees a ghost, or the evil one, or something worse, if anything
can be; and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a moment turn
so old and sick.

Next moment we were both groping downstairs, leaving the candle by
the empty chest; and the next we had opened the door and were in full
retreat.

Mr. Dance must have some
ale."

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
insist on having more.

Now, treasure is ticklish work; I don't
like treasure voyages on any account, and I don't like them, above all,
when they are secret and when (begging your pardon, Mr. Trelawney) the
secret has been told to the parrot."

As he was thus speaking, he had risen from bed with great difficulty,
holding to my shoulder with a grip that almost made me cry out, and
moving his legs like so much dead weight.

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing.

He
cleared the hilt of his cutlass and loosened the blade in the sheath;
and all the time we were waiting there he kept swallowing as if he felt
what we used to call a lump in the throat.

In a few cases, to be sure, the name of a place would be added,
as "Offe Caraccas," or a mere entry of latitude and longitude, as "62o
17' 20", 19o 2' 40"."

In the meantime the
supervisor rode on, as fast as he could, to Kitt's Hole; but his men
had to dismount and grope down the dingle, leading, and sometimes
supporting, their horses, and in continual fear of ambushes; so it was
no great matter for surprise that when they got down to the Hole the
lugger was already under way, though still close in.

He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

I was
wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the
swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from
the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale through
stage after stage, for when I was awakened at last it was by a punch
in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still
before a large building in a city street and that the day had already
broken a long time.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for
I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms.

Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum.

The isle was
uninhabited; my shipmates I had left behind, and nothing lived in front
of me but dumb brutes and fowls.

It was tattooed
in several places.

All they would do was to give me a loaded pistol lest we were
attacked, and to promise to have horses ready saddled in case we were
pursued on our return, while one lad was to ride forward to the doctor's
in search of armed assistance.

On
stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and
the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a
thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions.

The booms
were tearing at the blocks, the rudder was banging to and fro, and the
whole ship creaking, groaning, and jumping like a manufactory.

Thither we had now to walk, and
our way, to my great delight, lay along the quays and beside the great
multitude of ships of all sizes and rigs and nations.

"You're a good lad, Jim," he said; "and you're all in a clove hitch,
ain't you?

"Give me the key," said my mother; and though the lock was very stiff,
she had turned it and thrown back the lid in a twinkling.

Most of the soil had
been washed away or buried in drift after the removal of the trees; only
where the streamlet ran down from the kettle a thick bed of moss and
some ferns and little creeping bushes were still green among the sand.

He gave it me at Savannah, when he lay a-dying, like as if I
was to now, you see.

It's been meat and drink, and man and wife,
to me; and if I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee
shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab"; and he ran on
again for a while with curses.

The guineas,
too, were about the scarcest, and it was with these only that my mother
knew how to make her count.

The boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest
man aboard, and though he kept his old title, he served in a way as
mate.

Under
that, the miscellany began--a quadrant, a tin canikin, several sticks of
tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an
old Spanish watch and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of
foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six
curious West Indian shells.

Reasons of his own; that's the mainstay; as
between man and man.

I do not know what it rightly is to faint, but I do know that for the
next little while the whole world swam away from before me in a whirling
mist; Silver and the birds, and the tall Spy-glass hilltop, going
round and round and topsy-turvy before my eyes, and all manner of bells
ringing and distant voices shouting in my ear.

This sudden noise startled us shockingly; but the news
was good, for it was only six.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
insist on having more.

With a cry John seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of
his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air.

I'll stay here a bit," he continued.

And then you'll give him a nip, like I do."

"And I'll take this to square the count," said I, picking up the oilskin
packet.

"It were," said the cook; "it were when we weighed anchor.

Tired
though we all were, two were sent out for firewood; two more were set to
dig a grave for Redruth; the doctor was named cook; I was put sentry at
the door; and the captain himself went from one to another, keeping up
our spirits and lending a hand wherever it was wanted.

Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling
as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or a slap on the
shoulder for the more favoured of his guests.

For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

The heat was sweltering,
and the men grumbled fiercely over their work.

"I'll
have my dues, and not a farthing over.

A few small coins, a thimble,
and some thread and big needles, a piece of pigtail tobacco bitten away
at the end, his gully with the crooked handle, a pocket compass, and a
tinder box were all that they contained, and I began to despair.

He had a line or two rigged up to help him across the
widest spaces--Long John's earrings, they were called; and he would hand
himself from one place to another, now using the crutch, now trailing it
alongside by the lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk.

I was not new to violent death--I have served his Royal Highness
the Duke of Cumberland, and got a wound myself at Fontenoy--but I know
my pulse went dot and carry one.

The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a
score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening
heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was
still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire, and
only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant
surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.

When they heard how my mother went back to the inn, Dr.
Livesey fairly slapped his thigh, and the squire cried "Bravo!" and
broke his long pipe against the grate.

But when they saw Redruth waiting for them in the sparred
galley, they went about ship at once, and a head popped out again on
deck.

Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon
knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like
a beaten dog.

I wished a round score of men--in case of
natives, buccaneers, or the odious French--and I
had the worry of the deuce itself to find so much
as half a dozen, till the most remarkable stroke
of fortune brought me the very man that I
required.

And I'll thank you for that bag, Mrs. Crossley,
to bring back our lawful money in."

For what
would they risk their rascal carcasses but money?"

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all the brown had
gone out of his face, and even his nose was blue; he had the look of a
man who sees a ghost, or the evil one, or something worse, if anything
can be; and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a moment turn
so old and sick.

As soon as I
was back again he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half
sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a good boy and he had
taken quite a fancy to me.

Mr. Dance told me to jump down and knock, and Dogger gave me a stirrup
to descend by.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

I held out my hand, and the horrible, soft-spoken, eyeless creature
gripped it in a moment like a vise.

The doctor had to go
to London for a physician to take charge of his practice; the squire was
hard at work at Bristol; and I lived on at the hall under the charge of
old Redruth, the gamekeeper, almost a prisoner, but full of sea-dreams
and the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures.

Next moment we were both groping downstairs, leaving the candle by
the empty chest; and the next we had opened the door and were in full
retreat.

The admirable fellow literally slaved in
my interest, and so, I may say, did everyone in
Bristol, as soon as they got wind of the port we
sailed for--treasure, I mean.

Six fellows were to stay on
board, and the remaining thirteen, including Silver, began to embark.

But where Silver stood with his lieutenant, all was still in
shadow, and they waded knee-deep in a low white vapour that had crawled
during the night out of the morass.

Once, for instance, to our extreme wonder, he piped up to a
different air, a king of country love-song that he must have learned in
his youth before he had begun to follow the sea.

"Why, where might you suppose it was?" asked Silver derisively.

"You can tell me when I've worked through that," says
he, looking as fierce as a commander.

There all hands were already congregated.

My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good.

Crawling on all fours, I made steadily but slowly towards them, till at
last, raising my head to an aperture among the leaves, I could see clear
down into a little green dell beside the marsh, and closely set about
with trees, where Long John Silver and another of the crew stood face to
face in conversation.

Now the leg
would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the
middle of his body.

Suddenly he--the captain,
that is--began to pipe up his eternal song:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

"And now, Livesey," said the squire in the same breath.

And now I began to feel that I was neglecting my business, that since
I had been so foolhardy as to come ashore with these desperadoes, the
least I could do was to overhear them at their councils, and that my
plain and obvious duty was to draw as close as I could manage, under the
favourable ambush of the crouching trees.

At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them.

"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum,
the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

"I'll show these rogues that I'm an honest woman," said my mother.

Nor was this all, for the sound of several footsteps running
came already to our ears, and as we looked back in their direction, a
light tossing to and fro and still rapidly advancing showed that one of
the newcomers carried a lantern.

The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out
the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of
hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed
to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

Kidd's Anchorage'--just
the name my shipmate called it.

But our best hope, it was decided, was to kill off the buccaneers until
they either hauled down their flag or ran away with the HISPANIOLA.

First he recognized the doctor with
an unmistakable frown; then his glance fell upon me, and he looked
relieved.

Once, for instance, to our extreme wonder, he piped up to a
different air, a king of country love-song that he must have learned in
his youth before he had begun to follow the sea.

"Bill's been overhauled
a'ready," said he; "nothin' left."

The thicket stretched down from the top of
one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until
it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest
of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage.

I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this.

If you had the pluck of a weevil in a biscuit you would catch
them still."

The pitch was
bubbling in the seams; the nasty stench of the place turned me sick;
if ever a man smelt fever and dysentery, it was in that abominable
anchorage.

I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd,
outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an
open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with
a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak
in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.

I'll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim."

He was growing more and more excited, and this alarmed me for my father,
who was very low that day and needed quiet; besides, I was reassured by
the doctor's words, now quoted to me, and rather offended by the offer
of a bribe.

If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through
his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor
father out of the room.

"Why, by the powers," cried Long John, "if we do, we'll miss the morning
tide!"

Just
at the door the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous
cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been
intercepted by our big signboard of Admiral Benbow.

Now, if I can't get away nohow, and they tip me the black spot, mind
you, it's my old sea-chest they're after; you get on a horse--you can,
can't you?

Well now, I tell you, I'm not a boasting man, and you
seen yourself how easy I keep company, but when I was quartermaster,
LAMBS wasn't the word for Flint's old buccaneers.

You'll bathe, and you'll climb trees, and you'll
hunt goats, you will; and you'll get aloft on them hills like a goat
yourself.

"If I durst," said the captain, "I'd stop and pick off another man."

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing.

The expression of his face as he said these words was not at all
pleasant, and I had my own reasons for thinking that the stranger was
mistaken, even supposing he meant what he said.

He was a very silent man by custom.

Far less than half-way to the hamlet, very
little beyond the bottom of the hill, we must come forth into the
moonlight.

The four shots came in rather a scattering volley, but they did
the business: one of the enemy actually fell, and the rest, without
hesitation, turned and plunged into the trees.

One of the cocks of his
hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it
was a great annoyance when it blew.

"I'll take what I have," she said, jumping to her feet.

It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard
frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first that my poor
father was little likely to see the spring.

"And now, men," said the captain, when all was sheeted home, "has any
one of you ever seen that land ahead?"

One of the cocks of his
hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it
was a great annoyance when it blew.

I
remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and
the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort
of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

But suddenly his colour changed, and he tried to raise
himself, crying, "Where's Black Dog?"

"There is no Black Dog here," said the doctor, "except what you have
on your own back.

They
spoke together for a little, and though none of them started, or raised
his voice, or so much as whistled, it was plain enough that Dr. Livesey
had communicated my request, for the next thing that I heard was the
captain giving an order to Job Anderson, and all hands were piped on
deck.

We were not many
minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each
other and hearken.

The boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest
man aboard, and though he kept his old title, he served in a way as
mate.

When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
(as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
was present.

"No more wounded than
you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him.

The marsh was
steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled
through the haze.

I held out my hand, and the horrible, soft-spoken, eyeless creature
gripped it in a moment like a vise.

A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage--a smell of
sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks.

Back we will go, the way we came, and small
thanks to you big, hulking, chicken-hearted men.

Every day when he came back
from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the
road.

"That was how it were, now, weren't it,
Hawkins?" he would say, now and again, and I could always bear him
entirely out.

I told my plan to the captain, and between us we settled on the details
of its accomplishment.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

I was
wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the
swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from
the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale through
stage after stage, for when I was awakened at last it was by a punch
in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still
before a large building in a city street and that the day had already
broken a long time.

The same broadside I lost my leg, old Pew lost his
deadlights.

Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark.

The fog was rapidly
dispersing; already the moon shone quite clear on the high ground on
either side; and it was only in the exact bottom of the dell and round
the tavern door that a thin veil still hung unbroken to conceal the
first steps of our escape.

To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and
ditch was the worst of nightmares.

The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out
the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of
hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed
to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores.

When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
(as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
was present.

Although the breeze had now utterly ceased, we had
made a great deal of way during the night and were now lying becalmed
about half a mile to the south-east of the low eastern coast.

But with all that,
he minded people less and seemed shut up in his own thoughts and rather
wandering.

The man whom he called Morgan--an old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced
sailor--came forward pretty sheepishly, rolling his quid.

By
this time we had got so far out of the run of the current that we kept
steerage way even at our necessarily gentle rate of rowing, and I could
keep her steady for the goal.

He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor
father was far gone in a decline that took him off.

But he broke in cursing the doctor, in a feeble voice but heartily.

I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd,
outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an
open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with
a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak
in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.

He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

The fog was rapidly
dispersing; already the moon shone quite clear on the high ground on
either side; and it was only in the exact bottom of the dell and round
the tavern door that a thin veil still hung unbroken to conceal the
first steps of our escape.

He was plainly blind, for he tapped
before him with a stick and wore a great green shade over his eyes and
nose; and he was hunched, as if with age or weakness, and wore a huge
old tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him appear positively
deformed.

Oh, I
see what you're at--there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces
on the threshold.

"In, in, in!" he shouted, and cursed them for their delay.

I had thought up to that moment of the adventures before me,
not at all of the home that I was leaving; and now, at sight of this
clumsy stranger, who was to stay here in my place beside my mother, I
had my first attack of tears.

Under
that, the miscellany began--a quadrant, a tin canikin, several sticks of
tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an
old Spanish watch and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of
foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six
curious West Indian shells.

Now, for instance, you
wouldn't think I had had a pious mother--to look at me?" he asked.

There was a pause, then a cry of surprise, and then a
voice shouting from the house, "Bill's dead."

Now the leg
would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the
middle of his body.

The HISPANIOLA rolled steadily, dipping her bowsprit now and then with
a whiff of spray.

People were frightened at the time, but on looking
back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and
such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
terrible at sea.

I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this.

I seen him grapple
four and knock their heads together--him unarmed."

I jumped out and came as near running as I durst, with a big silk
handkerchief under my hat for coolness' sake and a brace of pistols
ready primed for safety.

I been in places hot as pitch, and mates
dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the
sea with earthquakes--what to the doctor know of lands like that?--and I
lived on rum, I tell you.

Dr. Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow.

I seen him grapple
four and knock their heads together--him unarmed."

I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would take rum; but
as I was going out of the room to fetch it, he sat down upon a table
and motioned me to draw near.

Although the breeze had now utterly ceased, we had
made a great deal of way during the night and were now lying becalmed
about half a mile to the south-east of the low eastern coast.

Two little rivers, or rather two swamps, emptied out into this
pond, as you might call it; and the foliage round that part of the shore
had a kind of poisonous brightness.

At the same
instant my mother, alarmed by the cries and fighting, came running
downstairs to help me.

And at this there came suddenly a lowering shadow over his face, and he
tightened his grasp upon my hand and raised a forefinger threateningly
before my eyes.

Between
Silver and myself we got together in a few days a
company of the toughest old salts imaginable--not
pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of
the most indomitable spirit.

All three made the first journey, heavily
laden, and tossed our stores over the palisade.

"Bill," said the stranger in a voice that I thought he had tried to make
bold and big.

All at once there began to go a sort of bustle among the bulrushes;
a wild duck flew up with a quack, another followed, and soon over the
whole surface of the marsh a great cloud of birds hung screaming and
circling in the air.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

I have seen him wringing his hands after such a
rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have
greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

"And that," said he,
"is just about as good as nothing.

You'd
be as rich as kings if you could find it, and you know it's here, and
you stand there skulking.

Now the leg
would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the
middle of his body.

"I have thought of that," said I, for I made sure he was thinking of a
bombardment of the fort.

Now, treasure is ticklish work; I don't
like treasure voyages on any account, and I don't like them, above all,
when they are secret and when (begging your pardon, Mr. Trelawney) the
secret has been told to the parrot."

"It's the name of a buccaneer of my
acquaintance; and I call you by it for the sake of shortness, and what I
have to say to you is this; one glass of rum won't kill you, but if
you take one you'll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you
don't break off short, you'll die--do you understand that?--die, and go
to your own place, like the man in the Bible.

In the meantime the
supervisor rode on, as fast as he could, to Kitt's Hole; but his men
had to dismount and grope down the dingle, leading, and sometimes
supporting, their horses, and in continual fear of ambushes; so it was
no great matter for surprise that when they got down to the Hole the
lugger was already under way, though still close in.

The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the
beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat,
his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head.

At this triumph we were filled with
hope and hurried upstairs without delay to the little room where he had
slept so long and where his box had stood since the day of his arrival.

The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
"Silence, there, between decks!"

You are our
new cabin-boy; pleased I am to see you."

So things passed until, the day after the funeral, and about three
o'clock of a bitter, foggy, frosty afternoon, I was standing at the door
for a moment, full of sad thoughts about my father, when I saw someone
drawing slowly near along the road.

Crawling on all fours, I made steadily but slowly towards them, till at
last, raising my head to an aperture among the leaves, I could see clear
down into a little green dell beside the marsh, and closely set about
with trees, where Long John Silver and another of the crew stood face to
face in conversation.

All were strangely shaped, and the Spy-glass, which was by three or four
hundred feet the tallest on the island, was likewise the strangest in
configuration, running up sheer from almost every side and then suddenly
cut off at the top like a pedestal to put a statue on.

We put old Redruth in the gallery between the cabin and the forecastle,
with three or four loaded muskets and a mattress for protection.

"Easy with that,
men--easy," he ran on, to the fellows who were shifting the powder; and
then suddenly observing me examining the swivel we carried amidships,
a long brass nine, "Here you, ship's boy," he cried, "out o' that!

It was the second death I had known, and
the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart.




4

The Sea-chest

I LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and
perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once
in a difficult and dangerous position.

The bar silver is in the north cache; you can find
it by the trend of the east hummock, ten fathoms
south of the black crag with the face on it.

We were heading S.S.W. and had a steady breeze abeam and a quiet sea.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

"Silver, if you like," cried the squire; "but as for that intolerable
humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright
un-English."

About his waist he wore an old brass-buckled leather belt, which was the
one thing solid in his whole accoutrement.

Split my sides, I've a sick heart
to sail with the likes of you!"

My
mother pulled it up with impatience, and there lay before us, the last
things in the chest, a bundle tied up in oilcloth, and looking like
papers, and a canvas bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of
gold.

On the first page there were only some scraps of writing, such as a man
with a pen in his hand might make for idleness or practice.

"Silver, if you like," cried the squire; "but as for that intolerable
humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright
un-English."

All the way in, Long John stood by the steersman and conned the ship.

"All's
well with him; no fear for a hand that's been shot down in his duty to
captain and owner.

These poor lads have chosen me
cap'n, after your desertion, sir"--laying a particular emphasis upon the
word "desertion."

The heat was sweltering,
and the men grumbled fiercely over their work.

I was
wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the
swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from
the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale through
stage after stage, for when I was awakened at last it was by a punch
in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still
before a large building in a city street and that the day had already
broken a long time.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

The next ten or twelve pages were filled with a curious series of
entries.

But there was no unusual sound--nothing but the low
wash of the ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood.

I'll wring his calf's head off his body with
these hands, Dick!" he added, breaking off.

It was one January morning, very early--a pinching, frosty morning--the
cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones,
the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to
seaward.

I'm to be a
poor, crawling beggar, sponging for rum, when I might be rolling in a
coach!

Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he
had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all the brown had
gone out of his face, and even his nose was blue; he had the look of a
man who sees a ghost, or the evil one, or something worse, if anything
can be; and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a moment turn
so old and sick.

He spoke to him as before, over his
shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the
room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady: "If you do not put that
knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall
hang at the next assizes."

The servant led us down a matted passage and showed us at the end into a
great library, all lined with bookcases and busts upon the top of them,
where the squire and Dr. Livesey sat, pipe in hand, on either side of a
bright fire.

The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence.

You and me'll just go back into the
parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we'll give Bill a little
surprise--bless his 'art, I say again."

Hunter
brought the boat round under the stern-port, and Joyce and I set to work
loading her with powder tins, muskets, bags of biscuits, kegs of pork, a
cask of cognac, and my invaluable medicine chest.

Wild horses wouldn't draw it from you?

My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good.

I was half
beside myself with glee; and if ever I despised a man, it was old
Tom Redruth, who could do nothing but grumble and lament.

He never particularly addressed me, and it is my
belief he had as good as forgotten his confidences; but his temper was
more flighty, and allowing for his bodily weakness, more violent than
ever.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two.

So there we had to stay--my mother almost entirely exposed and both of
us within earshot of the inn.




5

The Last of the Blind Man

MY curiosity, in a sense, was stronger than my fear, for I could not
remain where I was, but crept back to the bank again, whence, sheltering
my head behind a bush of broom, I might command the road before our
door.

When I got back with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the
captain's sleeve and exposed his great sinewy arm.

All the time he was jerking out these phrases he was stumping up and
down the tavern on his crutch, slapping tables with his hand, and giving
such a show of excitement as would have convinced an Old Bailey judge
or a Bow Street runner.

One of my last
thoughts was of the captain, who had so often strode along the beach
with his cocked hat, his sabre-cut cheek, and his old brass telescope.

And you never saw me
take snuff, the reason being that in my snuff-box I carry a piece of
Parmesan cheese--a cheese made in Italy, very nutritious.

But where Silver stood with his lieutenant, all was still in
shadow, and they waded knee-deep in a low white vapour that had crawled
during the night out of the morass.

Every day when he came back
from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the
road.

Mr. Trelawney had taken up his residence at an inn far down the docks to
superintend the work upon the schooner.

Thither we had now to walk, and
our way, to my great delight, lay along the quays and beside the great
multitude of ships of all sizes and rigs and nations.

So
we proceeded without pausing to take breath, till the whole cargo was
bestowed, when the two servants took up their position in the block
house, and I, with all my power, sculled back to the HISPANIOLA.

He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

Let young Hawkins go at once to see his
mother, with Redruth for a guard; and then both
come full speed to Bristol.

Leastways, if such was your intention as to enter and careen, and there
ain't no better place for that in these waters."

The captain had been struck dead by thundering apoplexy.

I was now, it seemed, cut off upon both sides; behind me the murderers,
before me this lurking nondescript.

The Spaniards were so prodigiously afraid of him that, I tell you, sir,
I was sometimes proud he was an Englishman.

For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story.

He re-entered the log-house and set
about counting up the stores as if nothing else existed.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.

I was half
beside myself with glee; and if ever I despised a man, it was old
Tom Redruth, who could do nothing but grumble and lament.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all.

I'm to be a
poor, crawling beggar, sponging for rum, when I might be rolling in a
coach!

However, we had no luck, for just as Trelawney fired, down he
stooped, the ball whistled over him, and it was one of the other four
who fell.

To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and
ditch was the worst of nightmares.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a
tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white.

Often enough when the first
of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only
blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was
out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and
repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

The plunge of our anchor sent up
clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods, but in less than a
minute they were down again and all was once more silent.

He had been
growing nettled before, but now he pulled himself together.

Three men ran
together, hand in hand; and I made out, even through the mist, that the
middle man of this trio was the blind beggar.

"Not I, sir," said Morgan with a salute.

The bar silver is in the north cache; you can find
it by the trend of the east hummock, ten fathoms
south of the black crag with the face on it.

By his
own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told
these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described.

She would not, she declared, lose money that
belonged to her fatherless boy; "If none of the rest of you dare,"
she said, "Jim and I dare.

I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd,
outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an
open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with
a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak
in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.

Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be.

He was plainly blind, for he tapped
before him with a stick and wore a great green shade over his eyes and
nose; and he was hunched, as if with age or weakness, and wore a huge
old tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him appear positively
deformed.

Then he
passed his hand over his eyes several times and at last turned back into
the house.

The squire has been talking, after all."

Dr. Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow.

The squire was waiting for me at the stern window, all his faintness
gone from him.

At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big
box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled
in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man.

I was half
beside myself with glee; and if ever I despised a man, it was old
Tom Redruth, who could do nothing but grumble and lament.

I
remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and
the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort
of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him.

There is no time to dilly-dally in our work.

By
this time we had got so far out of the run of the current that we kept
steerage way even at our necessarily gentle rate of rowing, and I could
keep her steady for the goal.

I had thought it to be the blind man's
trumpet, so to speak, summoning his crew to the assault, but I now found
that it was a signal from the hillside towards the hamlet, and from its
effect upon the buccaneers, a signal to warn them of approaching danger.

When I returned with the rum, they were already seated on either side
of the captain's breakfast-table--Black Dog next to the door and
sitting sideways so as to have one eye on his old shipmate and one, as I
thought, on his retreat.

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his
dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker.

And again, "If it
comes to swinging, swing all, say I."

Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and
other noises--the chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel
followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black
Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn
cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder.

For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story.

Kidd's Anchorage'--just
the name my shipmate called it.

It
contained two things--a book and a sealed paper.

We struck the enclosure about the middle of the south
side, and almost at the same time, seven mutineers--Job Anderson, the
boatswain, at their head--appeared in full cry at the southwestern
corner.

Then, climbing on the roof, he had with his own hand
bent and run up the colours.

The man whom he called Morgan--an old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced
sailor--came forward pretty sheepishly, rolling his quid.

Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but
the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.




2

Black Dog Appears and Disappears


IT was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the
mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you
will see, of his affairs.

I got the rum, to be sure, and tried to put it down his
throat, but his teeth were tightly shut and his jaws as strong as iron.

Then there followed a great to-do through all our old inn, heavy feet
pounding to and fro, furniture thrown over, doors kicked in, until the
very rocks re-echoed and the men came out again, one after another, on
the road and declared that we were nowhere to be found.

"By the powers, Tom Morgan, it's as good for you!" exclaimed the
landlord.

"He's no common man, Barbecue," said the coxswain to me.

But by this
time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it
was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it
did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite
angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on
a new cure for the rheumatics.

People were frightened at the time, but on looking
back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and
such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
terrible at sea.

He stopped a little from the inn, and raising his voice in an odd
sing-song, addressed the air in front of him, "Will any kind friend
inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in
the gracious defence of his native country, England--and God bless King
George!--where or in what part of this country he may now be?"

The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the
other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was
in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his
appearance and whither he had presumably returned.

Down went Pew with a cry that
rang high into the night; and the four hoofs trampled and spurned him
and passed by.

This time, as the distance was short, I did not mount, but ran with
Dogger's stirrup-leather to the lodge gates and up the long, leafless,
moonlit avenue to where the white line of the hall buildings looked on
either hand on great old gardens.

"No, sir," said I.

"Well, then," said he, "you hold the basin"; and with that he took his
lancet and opened a vein.

Often enough when the first
of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only
blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was
out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and
repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

He stopped a little from the inn, and raising his voice in an odd
sing-song, addressed the air in front of him, "Will any kind friend
inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in
the gracious defence of his native country, England--and God bless King
George!--where or in what part of this country he may now be?"

There were several additions of a
later date, but above all, three crosses of red ink--two on the north
part of the island, one in the southwest--and beside this last, in
the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the
captain's tottery characters, these words: "Bulk of treasure here."

At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big
box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled
in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man.

This sudden noise startled us shockingly; but the news
was good, for it was only six.

This even tint
was indeed broken up by streaks of yellow sand-break in the lower lands,
and by many tall trees of the pine family, out-topping the others--some
singly, some in clumps; but the general colouring was uniform and sad.

The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by
approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain
on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar
hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as
the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror.

Indeed, it seemed
impossible for either of us to remain much longer in the house; the fall
of coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the clock, filled
us with alarms.

Rum! Rum!"

I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen
out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still
getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running
in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor.

These, in their turn, cursed back at the blind miscreant, threatened him
in horrid terms, and tried in vain to catch the stick and wrest it from
his grasp.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all.

The pitch was
bubbling in the seams; the nasty stench of the place turned me sick;
if ever a man smelt fever and dysentery, it was in that abominable
anchorage.

It was the second death I had known, and
the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart.




4

The Sea-chest

I LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and
perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once
in a difficult and dangerous position.

But you may suppose I paid no heed; jumping, ducking, and breaking
through, I ran straight before my nose till I could run no longer.




14

The First Blow

I WAS so pleased at having given the slip to Long John that I began to
enjoy myself and look around me with some interest on the strange land
that I was in.

The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a
score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening
heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was
still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire, and
only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant
surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.

He was clothed with tatters
of old ship's canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork
was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous
fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin.

I believe the readiness of our return volley had scattered the mutineers
once more, for we were suffered without further molestation to get the
poor old gamekeeper hoisted over the stockade and carried, groaning and
bleeding, into the log-house.

It was something to see him wedge the
foot of the crutch against a bulkhead, and propped against it, yielding
to every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking like someone safe
ashore.

A full moon was beginning to rise and peered
redly through the upper edges of the fog, and this increased our haste,
for it was plain, before we came forth again, that all would be as
bright as day, and our departure exposed to the eyes of any watchers.

I been in places hot as pitch, and mates
dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the
sea with earthquakes--what to the doctor know of lands like that?--and I
lived on rum, I tell you.

On the far side of
the open stood one of the hills, with two quaint, craggy peaks shining
vividly in the sun.

For a long time, though I certainly did my best to listen, I could hear
nothing but a low gattling; but at last the voices began to grow higher,
and I could pick up a word or two, mostly oaths, from the captain.

I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this.

And just
the same whistle that had alarmed my mother and myself over the dead
captain's money was once more clearly audible through the night,
but this time twice repeated.

And here a fresh alarm brought me to a standstill with a thumping heart.




15

The Man of the Island

FROM the side of the hill, which was here steep and stony, a spout of
gravel was dislodged and fell rattling and bounding through the trees.

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer




1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old se...

At this triumph we were filled with
hope and hurried upstairs without delay to the little room where he had
slept so long and where his box had stood since the day of his arrival.

The bundle was sewn together, and the doctor had to get out his
instrument case and cut the stitches with his medical scissors.

I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars.

There's a strong current runs along the
south, and then away nor'ard up the west coast.

My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good.

Now the leg
would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the
middle of his body.

Mine I had snatched from my knees and held over my head, by
a sort of instinct.

Here he was interrupted by a loud report, and a cannonball came tearing
through the trees and pitched in the sand not a hundred yards from where
we two were talking.

He spoke to him as before, over his
shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the
room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady: "If you do not put that
knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall
hang at the next assizes."

The doctor looked it all over, as if his fingers were itching to open
it; but instead of doing that, he put it quietly in the pocket of his
coat.

He never particularly addressed me, and it is my
belief he had as good as forgotten his confidences; but his temper was
more flighty, and allowing for his bodily weakness, more violent than
ever.

I
remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and
the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort
of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

I saw, besides, many old sailors, with rings in their ears, and
whiskers curled in ringlets, and tarry pigtails, and their swaggering,
clumsy sea-walk; and if I had seen as many kings or archbishops I could
not have been more delighted.

The arms are easy found, in the sand-hill, N.
point of north inlet cape, bearing E. and a
quarter N.
J.F.

That was all; but brief as it was, and to me incomprehensible, it filled
the squire and Dr. Livesey with delight.

"Trelawney," said the doctor, "I'll go with you; and I'll go bail for
it, so will Jim, and be a credit to the undertaking.

"No, sir; not money, I think," replied I. "In fact, sir, I believe I
have the thing in my breast pocket; and to tell you the truth, I should
like to get it put in safety."

Very close around the stockade--too close for defence, they said--the
wood still flourished high and dense, all of fir on the land side, but
towards the sea with a large admixture of live-oaks.

I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this.

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other
hand, a great emboldener; and so when each had said his say, my mother
made them a speech.

Boy, take his left hand by the wrist and bring it near to my right."

Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but
the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.




2

Black Dog Appears and Disappears


IT was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the
mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you
will see, of his affairs.

Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark.

Nor was this all, for the sound of several footsteps running
came already to our ears, and as we looked back in their direction, a
light tossing to and fro and still rapidly advancing showed that one of
the newcomers carried a lantern.

Between us, with much trouble, we managed to hoist him upstairs, and
laid him on his bed, where his head fell back on the pillow as if he
were almost fainting.

My
mother pulled it up with impatience, and there lay before us, the last
things in the chest, a bundle tied up in oilcloth, and looking like
papers, and a canvas bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of
gold.

Then there followed a great to-do through all our old inn, heavy feet
pounding to and fro, furniture thrown over, doors kicked in, until the
very rocks re-echoed and the men came out again, one after another, on
the road and declared that we were nowhere to be found.

And now I began to feel that I was neglecting my business, that since
I had been so foolhardy as to come ashore with these desperadoes, the
least I could do was to overhear them at their councils, and that my
plain and obvious duty was to draw as close as I could manage, under the
favourable ambush of the crouching trees.

But that was by no means the worst of it, for after a
day or two at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red cheeks,
stuttering tongue, and other marks of drunkenness.

And again, "If it
comes to swinging, swing all, say I."

Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and
other noises--the chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel
followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black
Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn
cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder.

Often enough when the first
of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only
blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was
out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and
repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

Dr. Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow.

I had thought it to be the blind man's
trumpet, so to speak, summoning his crew to the assault, but I now found
that it was a signal from the hillside towards the hamlet, and from its
effect upon the buccaneers, a signal to warn them of approaching danger.

The hills ran up clear above the vegetation in spires of naked rock.

All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong.

Wait is what I say; but when the time comes, why, let her rip!"

"There's a strong scour with the ebb," he said, "and this here passage
has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade."

He never particularly addressed me, and it is my
belief he had as good as forgotten his confidences; but his temper was
more flighty, and allowing for his bodily weakness, more violent than
ever.

"I do not know, sir," said I. "I am not very sure whether he's sane."

A great deal of blood was taken before the captain opened his eyes
and looked mistily about him.

"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated
grog-shop.

"You can tell me when I've worked through that," says
he, looking as fierce as a commander.

He had taken me aside one day
and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
and let him know the moment he appeared.

"We can steer
a course, but who's to set one?

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
insist on having more.

It struck poor Tom, point foremost, and with stunning violence, right
between the shoulders in the middle of his back.

"Squire," said he, "when Dance has had his ale he must, of course, be
off on his Majesty's service; but I mean to keep Jim Hawkins here to
sleep at my house, and with your permission, I propose we should have up
the cold pie and let him sup."

It's been meat and drink, and man and wife,
to me; and if I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee
shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab"; and he ran on
again for a while with curses.

The blind man clung close to me, holding me in one iron fist
and leaning almost more of his weight on me than I could carry.

A great deal of blood was taken before the captain opened his eyes
and looked mistily about him.

I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.