rs, Ben Gunn!" roared Silver.

"Ay, and so it were," cried Morgan, springing on his knees. "Ben Gunn it
were!"

"It don't make much odds, do it, now?" asked Dick. "Ben Gunn's not here
in the body, any more'n Flint."

But the older hands greeted this remark with scorn.

"Why, nobody minds Ben Gunn," cried Merry; "dead or alive, nobody minds
him."

It was extraordinary how their spirits had returned, and how the natural
colour had revived in their faces. Soon they were chatting together, with
intervals of listening; and not long after, hearing no further sound,
they shouldered the tools and set forth again, Merry walking first with
Silver's compass to keep them on the right line with Skeleton Island. He
had said the truth; dead or alive, nobody minded Ben Gunn.

Dick alone still held his Bible, and looked around him as he went, with
fearful glances; but he found no sympathy, and Silver even joked him on
his precautions.

"I told you," said he--"I told you, you had sp'iled your Bible. If it
ain't no good to swear by, what do you suppose a sperrit would give for
it? Not that!" and he snapped his big fingers, halting a moment on his
crutch.

But Dick was not to be comforted; indeed, it was soon plain to me that
the lad was falling sick; hastened by heat, exhaustion, and the shock of
his alarm, the fever, predicted by Doctor Livesey, was evidently growing
swiftly higher.

It was fine open walking here, upon the summit; our way lay a little
down-hill, for, as I have said, the plateau tilted towards the west. The
pines, great and small, grew wide apart: and even between the clumps of
nutmeg and azalea, wide open spaces baked in the hot sunshine. Striking,
as we did, pretty near north-west across the island, we drew, on the one
hand, ever nearer under the shoulders of the Spy-glass, and on the other,
looked ever wider over that western bay where I had once tossed and
trembled in the coracle.

The first of the tall trees was reached, and, by the bearing, proved the
wrong one. So with the second. The third rose nearly two hundred feet
into the air above a clump of underwood; a giant of a vegetable, with a
red column as big as a cottage, and a wide shadow around in which a
company could have manoeuvred. It was conspicuous far to sea both on
the east and west, and might have been entered as a sailing mark upon the
chart.

But it was not its size that now impressed my companions; it was the
knowledge that seven hundred