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 equalled; 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 Mizzenmast 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 pick-axes 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 pick-axe 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 north-east 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
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