s eyes at him in the
last agony, "George," said he, "I reckon I settled you."

At the same moment the doctor, Gray, and Ben Gunn joined us, with
smoking muskets, from among the nutmeg-trees.

"Forward!" cried the doctor. "Double quick, my lads. We must head 'em
off the boats."

And we set off at a great pace, sometimes plunging through the bushes to
the chest.

I tell you, but Silver was anxious to keep up with us. The work that man
went through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were
fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equaled; and so thinks the
doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us, and on the
verge of strangling, when we reached the brow of the slope.

"Doctor," he hailed, "see there! no hurry!"

Sure enough there was no hurry. In a more open part of the plateau we
could see the three survivors still running in the same direction as
they had started, right for Mizzen-mast Hill. We were already between
them and the boats, and so we four sat down to breathe, while Long John,
mopping his face, came slowly up with us.

"Thank ye kindly, doctor," says he. "You came in in about the nick, I
guess, for me and Hawkins. And so it's you, Ben Gunn!" he added. "Well,
you're a nice one, to be sure."

"I'm Ben Gunn, I am," replied the maroon, wriggling like an eel in his
embarrassment. "And," he added, after a long pause, "how do, Mr. Silver!
Pretty well, I thank ye, says you."

"Ben, Ben," murmured Silver, "to think as you've done me!"

The doctor sent back Gray for one of the pickaxes deserted, in their
flight, by the mutineers; and then as we proceeded leisurely downhill to
where the boats were lying, related, in a few words, what had taken
place. It was a story that profoundly interested Silver, and Ben Gunn,
the half-idiot maroon, was the hero from beginning to end.

Ben, in his long, lonely wanderings about the island, had found the
skeleton. It was he that had rifled it; he had found the treasure; he
had dug it up (it was the haft of his pickax that lay broken in the
excavation); he had carried it on his back, in many weary journeys, from
the foot of the tall pine to a cave he had on the two-pointed hill at
the northeast angle of the island, and there it had lain stored in
safety since two months before the arrival of the _Hispaniola_.

When the doctor had wormed this secret from him, on the afternoon of the
attack, and when, next morning, he saw the anchorage deserted,