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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 with the sabre cut
first took up his lodging under our roof.
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. 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. 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.
"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a
pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?"
My father told him no, very little company, the more
was the pity.
"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me.
Here you, matey," he cried to the man who trundled the
barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest. I'll
stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up
there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me?
You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you're at--
there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on
the threshold. "You can tell me when I've worked
through that," says he, looking as fierce as a
commander.
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 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. And that was all we could learn of our guest.
He was a very silent man by custom. 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. 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. Every day when
he came back from his stroll he would ask if any
seafaring men had gone by along the road. 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 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. 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 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. 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."
How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely
tell you. 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. 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. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge
and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether
I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in
the shape of these abominable fancies.
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