Treasure Island | Page 5

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.
But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I was far less
afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who knew him. There were nights when
he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would
sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes
he would call for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories
or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and
a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining in for dear life, with the fear of death upon
them, and each singing louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the
most overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence
all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes because none
was put, and so he judged the company was not following his story. Nor would he allow

anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.
His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were--about
hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds
and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among
some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in
which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for
people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent
shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were
frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in
a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like names, and
saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.
In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week after week, and at
last month after month, so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still my father
never plucked up the heart to insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain
blew through his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father
out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am sure the
annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy
death.
All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy
some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down, he let it
hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the
appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before
the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke
with any but