One

THE OLD SEA-DOG AT THE INN

Mr. Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen have asked me to write down the whole story of Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back. I therefore take up my pen in the year 1760, and go back to the time when my father kept the "Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sword-cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-cart; a tall, strong, heavy, brown man; his knot of hair falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands hard and torn, with black, broken nails; and the sword-cut across one cheek, a dirty, blue-white mark. I remember him looking round the bay and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterward:

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

in the high, old shaking voice. Then he knocked on the door with a bit of stick, and, when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. He drank the rum slowly, dwelling upon the taste of it, and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our sign-board.

"This is a nice bay," said he at last; "and a pleasantly placed inn. Do you have much company?"

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

"Well, then," said he, "this is the place for me. Here you, young fellow," he cried to the man who pushed the hand-cart, "come over here and help up my chest. I'll stay here a bit. What may you call me? You may call me 'captain.' Oh, I see what you're at—there!" and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the floor. "You can tell me when I've worked through that," said he, looking very fierce.

He was a very silent man by custom. All day he walked round the bay or upon the cliffs, with a brass spy-glass; all the evening he sat in a corner of the sitting-room next the fire, and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would not speak when spoken to; only look up sudden and fierce, and blow through his nose like a horn; and we and the people who came about our house soon learned to let him be. Every day, when he came back from his walk, he would ask if any seaman had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the lack of company of his own kind that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he did not desire to meet them. When a seaman stayed at the "Benbow," he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the sitting-room; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter; for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me to one side one day, and promised me a silver fourpenny (["fC:p(G)ni]) piece on the first day of every month if I would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seaman with one leg," and let him know the moment he appeared.

How that person—the seaman with one leg—came into my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. But of the captain himself, I was far less frightened than anybody else. There he would sit at nights drinking rum, and singing his bad old wild sea-songs, caring for nobody. Sometimes he would order me to serve glasses of rum to all the persons present, and he would force all the company to listen to his stories or to join in with his singing. 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, lest he should be noticed.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and murder, and storms at sea, and wild deeds. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it, it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life.

In one way, indeed, it did seem that he might ruin us; for he kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long used up; and still my father never had the courage to demand more.

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change in his dress. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only when he had drunk more rum than was good for him. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.

He was only once disobeyed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in the illness which ended in his death. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see my father, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the sitting-room to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the village. I followed him in, and I remember observing the great difference in appearance between the doctor with his powdered hair as white as snow, and his bright black eyes, and pleasant manners, and the rough country folk—and above all, with that dirty, heavy, red-eyed pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

Suddenly the captain began his usual song:

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Drink and the devil had done for the rest—

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that big box of his upstairs in the front room. 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 a pleasant effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener. The captain looked at him for a time, knocked on the table for silence, looked still harder, and at last broke out with a foul word: "Silence, there, you ... !"

"Were you addressing me, sir?" said the doctor; and when the fellow had told him, with another foul word, that this was so, "I have only one thing to say to you, sir," replied the doctor, "—that, if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be free of a very dirty and base fellow!"

The old fellow's anger was terrible. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a great knife, and laying it open on his hand, looked as if he would pin the doctor to the wall.

The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him, as before, over his shoulder, and in the same 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 a very early date."

Then followed a battle of looks between them; but the captain soon yielded, put up his weapon, and sat down again making low noises in his throat, like a beaten dog.

"And now, sir," continued the doctor, "since I now know there's such a fellow in my part of the country, you may be sure I'll have an eye upon you day and night. I'm not a doctor only; I'm an officer of the law; and if I catch a breath of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of rudeness like to-night's, I'll have you hunted down and driven out of this."

Soon after this Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door, and he rode away; but the captain was silent that evening, and for many evenings to come.