Treasure Island

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

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. 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.

Doctors is all swabs,” he said; “and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? 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 do the doctor know of lands like that?⁠—and I lived on rum, I tell you.

Pieces of eight! pieces of eight! pieces of eight!” till you wondered that it was not out of breath or till John threw his handkerchief over the cage. “Now, that bird,” he would say, “is, may be, two hundred years old, Hawkins⁠—they live forever mostly, and if anybody’s seen more wickedness it must be the devil himself.

One more step, Mr. Hands,” said I, “and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,” I added, with a chuckle. He stopped instantly. I could see by the workings of his face that he was trying to think, and the process was so slow and laborious that, in my newfound security, I laughed aloud.

The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me.