were--as done me.
Ah, well, my son, you praise your stars he s dead, said Silver.
He were an ugly devil, cried a third pirate with a shudder; that blue
in the face too!
That was how the rum took him, added Merry. Blue! Well, I reckon he
was blue. That s a true word.
Ever since they had found the skeleton and got upon this train of
thought, they had spoken lower and lower, and they had almost got to
whispering by now, so that the sound of their talk hardly interrupted
the silence of the wood. All of a sudden, out of the middle of the trees
in front of us, a thin, high, trembling voice struck up the well-known
air and words:
Fifteen men on the dead man s chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
I never have seen men more dreadfully affected than the pirates. The
colour went from their six faces like enchantment; some leaped to their
feet, some clawed hold of others; Morgan grovelled on the ground.
It s Flint, by ----! cried Merry.
The song had stopped as suddenly as it began--broken off, you would have
said, in the middle of a note, as though someone had laid his hand upon
the singer s mouth. Coming through the clear, sunny atmosphere among the
green tree-tops, I thought it had sounded airily and sweetly; and the
effect on my companions was the stranger.
Come, said Silver, struggling with his ashen lips to get the word out;
this won t do. Stand by to go about. This is a rum start, and I can t
name the voice, but it s someone skylarking--someone that s flesh and
blood, and you may lay to that.
His courage had come back as he spoke, and some of the colour to his
face along with it. Already the others had begun to lend an ear to this
encouragement and were coming a little to themselves, when the same
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