When Ben Gunn saw the British flag, he stopped and held my arm.
“There are your friends,” he said. “If it was Silver, he would fly the pirate flag. There’s been a fight, and your friends are in the old stockade that Flint’s men built.”
“Then I must hurry and join them,” I said.
“You go,” said Ben. “But Ben Gunn won’t go there, not until your gentleman gives me his word of honor. When someone wants Ben Gunn, he must come alone to the place where you found me today, with something white in his hand. And you’ll tell them this: ‘Ben Gunn has reasons of his own.’” He still held my arm. “And Jim, if you see Silver, you won’t tell him about me? And if those pirates sleep on shore tonight, some of them may never wake up.”
Just then there was a loud bang, and a cannon ball crashed through the trees and landed in the sand near us. The next moment we were both running in different directions.
For an hour the cannon fired again and again, and I moved from one hiding place to another. When it was over at last, I crept down to the trees by the shore. The sun had just set. The Hispaniola still lay in the harbor, but now the black pirate flag was flying from her. Near the mouth of the river a great fire burned among the trees, and I could hear the pirates shouting like children, full of rum. On the beach near the stockade, men were breaking our small boat to pieces with axes.
On my way back, on the long strip of sand east of the harbor, I saw a tall rock among the bushes, strangely white. Perhaps this was the white rock where Ben Gunn kept his boat. One day we might need a boat, and then I would know where to look.
Then I went round through the woods to the back of the stockade, and my friends welcomed me warmly.
I told them my story and looked around. The log house was made of tree trunks, and under the porch the little spring came up into a big iron pot from a ship, sunk in the sand. The cold evening wind blew through every hole in the walls. There was sand in our eyes, sand in our teeth, sand in our supper. The smoke from the fire hardly found its way out of the hole in the roof, and it made us cough and cry. Gray had a bandage on his face, and poor old Redruth lay dead along the wall under the British flag.
But Captain Smollett did not let us sit and feel sad. He divided us into two groups to keep watch, sent two men for firewood and two to dig a grave for Redruth, made the doctor the cook and put me at the door as a guard. He went from one man to another, cheering us up and helping wherever he was needed.
From time to time the doctor came to the door to rest his eyes from the smoke.
“That man Smollett,” he said once, “is a better man than I am. And that means a lot, Jim.”
Another time he asked about Ben Gunn. “Was it cheese you said he wanted?”
“Yes, sir, cheese.”
“Well, Jim, you’ve seen my snuff-box, haven’t you? And you’ve never seen me take snuff from it. That’s because I carry a piece of Parmesan cheese in it, a cheese from Italy. Well, that’s for Ben Gunn!”
Before supper we buried old Redruth in the sand and stood around his grave with our hats off. After supper the captain, the squire and the doctor sat together in a corner and talked about our chances.
Our food was low, and we would starve long before help came. Our best hope was to kill pirates until they took down their flag or sailed away in the Hispaniola. From nineteen they were already down to fifteen, and two more were wounded. And we had two good friends: rum and fever. Half a mile away we could hear the pirates singing late into the night, and the doctor said that half of them, camped in the marsh without medicine, would be ill within a week.
“So if they don’t shoot us all first, they’ll be glad to leave in the ship,” he said.
“The first ship I ever lost,” said Captain Smollett.
I was dead tired, and I slept like a log. When I woke, the others were already up, and I heard voices outside.
“A white flag!” someone said. Then, with a cry of surprise: “Silver himself!”
I jumped up and ran to a loophole in the wall.